been in this country.  When I told him only two weeks he responded:

“You sure did learn the language fast!”

In case you are wondering what I am doing up here, one Sunday morning in Swarthmore, some years ago now, a most formidable lady, Elizabeth Andrews, mother of Susan, our out-going Moderator, (who selected this week's preachers, by the way) Susan's mom hijacked my entire morning service with a twenty-five minute "Minute For Mission" about the work of our Women's Association.  So, you see, today is payback time!  Thank you, Susan, and your Mom.

Perhaps we'd better pray:

Let these words that I speak, and the thoughts we all think, bring us closer to you, O God, nearer to one another.  AMEN.

 John, the ninth chapter and the second verse:

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

"Father!  Mother!  I can see!"  Words once memorized, never forgotten. The very first words, in fact, that I ever spoke in church, at age ten or eleven (was it?), playing the part, in a Sunday School drama, of that same blind man in John's gospel.

“Father!  Mother!  I can see!”

Maybe it's all about seeing.

So they meet a man, blind from birth, and the disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is. They don't ask him to heal the man, they're just curious, they want to know who is responsible for this unfortunate condition.  And, as he heals him anyway, Jesus tells them they are asking entirely the wrong question:

“He was not born blind because of his own sin or that of his parents, but to provide an opportunity to show the power of God.”

Those disciples, don't you see? — were playing the old blame game.  They wanted to know whose fault it was.  They needed some kind of reasonable allocation of guilt — so they could say he's blind because of this or that, this harmful action, that sinful person.  But Jesus said it was all about manifesting God's glory, and just went ahead and healed the man.

We too persist in looking for someone to blame.  We too would rather call a thing a curse of God, a fitting punishment for some previous fault or crime, than ever admit that such things just happen, might even happen to us.  We too insist on seeking out the guilty party, the one in the wrong, that individual, community or nation that is different from us, that sees things from an opposite perspective, and thus can be blamed for whatever currently troubles us.

But what Jesus seems to suggest is that instead of asking who to blame, those disciples should have been asking who to praise, who to glorify, "Just who's is the glory involved?"  Perhaps, in other words, the appropriate approach to this world, its mysteries, quandaries — tragedies and comedies too — the correct, even the Christian approach, is not so much that of guilt, as that of glory.  Let me try to explain.

Two weeks ago I was discharged after eight long days in Portland's Maine Medical Center fighting a tenacious infection.  While confined I escaped the weariest moments, via a series of paperback mysteries — those British "police procedurals" — in which Inspector Morse, or Rebus or whoever, engages in the relentless investigation of a crime, invariably murder, so that every moment, event, conversation, even every piece of local landscape, becomes a potential clue, and the whole world becomes a crime scene.

At the very same time, beyond my hospital window, there spread the lakes and woods of Maine stretching as far as the White Mountains, with Mount Washington outlined against the sunset.  And there I lay; my head, when it was clear enough, caught up in a fascinating, fantasy world of pursuit, prosecution and punishment: my eyes, when they were clear enough, delighting in the God-given splendor of creation.  But, you know, when it came right down to healing … the eyes had it!  That radiant vista fed my soul, lifted me beyond all the IV tubes, pills, probes and catheters, into the reality of a God of majesty, mystery and grace.

What if seeing really was believing?  What if we could learn to look at life, and even faith that way?  Not as a crime scene where we are forever asking what is wrong, what's missing, what doesn't add up, and who is to blame, but as a scene of wonder, a transformation scene in which, by careful, prayerful looking, we discern signs of God's presence, God's healing power, God's astonishing, even terrifying beauty?

In other words, suppose that Jesus came to teach us how to see?   So often in the gospels - especially in John - from his earliest invitation, "Come and see," to his opening the eyes of the blind, his naming himself as "The Light of the World," all those parables, so many of which were simple exercises in seeing, in perceiving the reality of God concealed in everyday events and objects - something lost, a coin, a sheep, a son, a farmer sowing seed, a traveler needing help - in all this Jesus seems to be inviting people to a new way of seeing, a new way of discerning, of recognizing God, and God's realm at the core of everything that is.

To approach this world, this life, then, no longer as a problem to be solved, but as a possibility to be explored.  To approach and appreciate our own selves, no longer as defined exclusively between those two opposing poles of sin and salvation, but as those who, being redeemed in Christ, can now seek out, recognize, and reveal to others the living splendor of that redemption, its passion, its surpassing glory, reflected in the world about us, at work in the events that shape our time.

In my retirement, and it's a splendidly liberating thing this retirement — particularly if your pension is fully vested — but in reflecting upon thirty-eight plus years of ordained ministry, I am becoming more and more convinced that western Christianity, at least, has become obsessed with sin and guilt.  This is an obsession which has led to the neglect, at times the denial, of other equally biblical areas of theology: the theology of creation, of the Spirit, of the church, of history, justice, community, to name a few.  And this obsession, it seems to me, is rooted in a deeply ambivalent attitude toward sexuality.  So many of us, after all, came to the faith as teenagers, while wrestling with the explosive emergence of our own selves as sexual beings.

Something's wrong somewhere, something … someone is shameful.  And since that shameful person cannot finally be me, it must be someone else, the alien, the minority person, the woman, the Muslim or Jew, the gay person; the fault has to lie somewhere.  So, as with Inspector Morse, the world becomes one vast crime scene, and our task is to locate the guilty party.  And as long as folk see the world that way, then someone, somewhere, has to take the blame.

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, in his later works, expressed a growing concern over what he called the "Christomonism" of the West.  By this he meant our tendency to narrow the faith down to a single, simplistic, and quite unbiblical focus on the second person of the Trinity alone, to the exclusion of the richness, depth and comprehensive breadth of Christian thought across the ages.

It seems to me that today we face an even further narrowing, a narrowing down to something we might call "sin-omonism:, "guilt-omonism." maybe even "forgiveness-omonism."; a narrowing in which the focus is so exclusively upon the cross — just look at Mel Gibson's "Passion" — and the most rigid transactional interpretation of what happened on that cross, that once again the full spectrum, that radiant rainbow range by which our faith has been able to encompass and embrace the entirety of creation and the cosmos, all this has been almost completely forfeited.

I said "unbiblical" just now fully realizing that there is much in scripture to support this view of God as the fearsome Judge in whose presence our only possible act must be to grovel in confession.  Yet a fully biblical view, a view which encompasses Abraham, for one, the exemplar of our faith, who argues with God over the fate of Sodom, Jacob, who wrestles with the mystery which is and is not God, and then limps into the sunrise, Koheleth the preacher, David, the psalmist too, and then Job, surely the whole point of Job is his sinlessness, and when he finally does submit it is not the result of guilt, but of God's sheer mystery and splendor, yes, a fully biblical view would lend support to my suggestion of a far richer and fuller range of relationship with the divine than can ever be defined solely by that first verse of John Newton's "Amazing Grace."

Those crowds who flocked to Jesus, and the winsome, winning message Jesus fed to them.  Oh yes, there was repentance there, but repentance in the fullest sense of the Hebrew Scriptures, a transformation of one's entire being, a turning full around (shub is the Hebrew word), a realization and recognition that this truly is "our Father's world" and that everything in it, from bushel baskets to pearls of great price, speaks and even sings to us of glory if we would only stop and look and listen.

Do you remember how they asked Jesus why his followers behaved so differently from those of the Baptist with his austere warnings to "Flee from the wrath to come”? What happened to us, that so much of his church, even today, is still hanging with John the Baptist rather than rejoicing with the risen Lord of the Dance?

“You Christians should look more redeemed,” said Nietzsche, in one of his most telling criticisms of our church.

Now don't let anyone claim that I am denying the reality of sin, questioning the necessity of the cross.  What I am saying is that there is even more to our faith than this; that we have other, further songs to sing, that we are heirs of a glorious heritage, of sin and grace, yes, but also of gratitude and glory, of mystery and wonder, of a God whose majesty transcends even that revealed by the Hubbell telescope, yet who is also, in the poet's words, “Nearer to us than breathing, closer than hands and feet.”

Several Novembers ago I found myself, just before midnight, in the deep silence of London's Westminster Abbey.  I had been attending a dinner in the Jerusalem Chamber adjoining the Abbey, the room where Henry IV was taken to die, and where our Westminster Confession was born.  As the evening wore on I slipped from the table and entering by a narrow doorway found myself alone in that soaring nave, the tallest nave in all of Europe.  All around me were the emblems of mortality, the tombs of the great and the good, poets and generals, statesmen, explorers, inventors, healers, reformers, with their fascinating inscriptions, their glowing tributes.

I walked the length of that long aisle, along which kings and queens had made their way to coronation, to marriage, to interment.  I stood a while before the great high altar.  And it seemed to me that all that I had seen there, yes the deaths and lives, the achievement and insight, sheer courage, true faith, that all of this was brought together here, embraced and lifted up to God, lifted up in one great hymn of thanks and praise and glory. And I saw that that's what we are called to do.

“Father, Mother, I can see!”

To perceive - don't you get it? — to recognize, and then reach out toward, the very best that is in all of us, and all creation too; to welcome it, rejoice in it, and claim it, own it — yes, in Christ's name — recognize it for what it truly is, the love and grace of our God at work.  And then lift it up, yes raise it high in praise to God the Source and God the Goal.

Guilt, then, or Glory?  A church of separation — sorting out the guilty from the good, the chosen from the frozen, poring over these Scriptures to discern who's in and who's out?  Or a church of celebration — seeking out God's realm in every moment of our living, yes, the sad every bit as much as the glad; looking for, believing in, seeking ever to bring to light and nurture that image of God that still lies deep in the human heart, that makes every single one of us worth Christ's dying for.  Oh, we are flawed and fragile creatures, to be sure, and yet by means of these very flaws we can be shaped, shaped to the life of Christ.  The poet Leonard Cohen puts it this way:

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything.

That's where the light gets in.

That's where the light gets in…

Amen.