Sermon — March 19, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Page

Last week, a thirty-five-year-old man was released from the prison where he had spent the last eighteen years after being convicted for a murder he did not commit. In 2004, Sheldon Thomas was arrested after a witness recognized Sheldon Thomas’s picture in a photo array provided by police officers, and identified him as one of the men who’d been in the car at a drive-by shooting. But there was one problem. The Sheldon Thomas in the photo wasn’t the Sheldon Thomas who was arrested. In fact, there were two different Black men named Sheldon Thomas living in the precinct at different addresses, and the one in the photo was not the one the police picked up. What’s worse, as the district attorney’s office reported this year, the detectives, prosecutors, and judge in the original trial knew that the Sheldon in the photo array was the wrong Sheldon Thomas. The one who was arrested had been involved in a confrontation with the police earlier that year, and when the shooting occurred, they leapt into action, prompting a witness to identify the photo of one Sheldon Thomas and arresting the other.

The defense commissioned a study in which 85% of law students of color who examined the photo array accurately reported that the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested wasn’t in it. The lead detective admitted on cross-examination that he had provided false testimony about the photo array. But the witness who’d identified one Sheldon Thomas in a photo array then identified the other in three in-person line-ups, and despite his claims of innocence, the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested—who does not look very much like the Sheldon Thomas whose photo had been used, apart from his age and the color of his skin—was sentenced to 25 to life, and the years that I spent, aged 14 to 32, going to high school and college and getting married and going to seminary, he spent aged 17 to 35, in jail.[1]

Now, it’s possible the witness was entirely unaware of what was happening. The FBI itself recognizes that even law enforcement officers’ unintentional actions can actually distort eyewitnesses’ memories. For example, if an officer says, “I know that was hard for you, but you did a good job” at the end of the session, the witness actually becomes more likely to identify the same person again in the future.[2] Human eyes, it turns out, are not cameras, objectively capturing a scene: our vision is shaped as much by what we expect to see as it is by what’s actually in front of us. The stories we tell about someone shape our memories of the past and even our perception of reality in the present.

Just ask the man born blind.

The characters in this story think they see the blind man for who he is. Both the disciples and the crowd treat the man as though his blindness is a judgment from God, a punishment for sin. The disciples ask Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) But Jesus says, “Neither.” The underlying premise of their question is completely false. The man’s impaired vision is not a punishment for sin. No disability or impairment or illness, in fact, is a punishment from God. Later, the crowd repeat the same idea, in less polite tones. After the man points out that surely, Jesus must come from God, or he couldn’t have done this miraculous healing, they dismiss him. “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34) They think they know the man’s story. They take their own prejudices for granted, and use them to tune him out. “You were born blind, and therefore you must be a sinner”–what? he was sinning in the womb?—“and therefore we don’t have to listen to a word you say.” The story is settled. The case is closed. Ironically, the people who’ve been able to see their whole lives fail to see what’s happening right in front of them. If the man’s blindness was a judgment from God, then surely his healing must be a blessing. But the people refuse to consider the evidence of their own eyes. The ones who can see become, metaphorically, the ones who are blind.

In fact, some of them become almost literally blind. After the man washes his eyes and is healed, John writes, “the neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’” And some of them said, “Yeah, it’s him!” But others said, “No, it’s just someone who looks like him.” And he kept saying, “I am.” “I am.” “It’s me!” (John John 9:8-9) But some of them just won’t believe him. They are so convinced that this man’s story is already set in stone that they literally can’t see that it’s the same man. It’s the neighbors who’ve always been able to see who have never seen him for who he is, who literally can’t recognize his face or his body because they only recognize him as “that blind beggar.”

Their vision is so warped by their preconceptions that they can’t even see their own blindness. Jesus says that he’s come into the world “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (9:39)Some of the Pharisees hear Jesus’ say this and ask, “We’re not blind, are we?” (9:40) Look at this man, Jesus says, and look how you’re treating him. If you admitted you were blind, it would be okay. But if you tell me that you’re seeing him as you dismiss him as one was born in sin, it’s clear that your sin remains: you are still deceiving yourself. (9:41)

The stories we tell are powerful. They shape how we see one another. They shape how we see ourselves. They can put a man in jail for half his life. They can convince us that a man we’ve seen every day in the street asking for change must be a different man from the one we see now, healed of his impairment. They can convince us that people can’t ever change, that we can’t ever change, that we are trapped in our circumstances or our situations and there’s nothing that we can do about them. We look at one another through eyes of judgment, or distrust, or fear, and our minds warp our vision.

But as God says to Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) And this goes deeper than “don’t judge a book by its cover,” “don’t treat people different even if they look different.” Those are the negative commands, the things that the disciples and the crowd do that we should not do. But there’s a positive command, an invitation, something that we really ought to do. And that’s what modeled for us by the man who was born blind himself: a humble recognition of our own ignorance, and the integrity to admit it. The Pharisees call the man back to testify before them that Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, and they ask him—actually they tell him—“We know that this man [Jesus] is a sinner.” (9:24) And the man simply says, “I do not know whether he is a sinner.” Maybe he is, maybe he’s not. “One thing I do know: that though I once was blind, now I see.” (9:25)

So what are the stories you tell that shape the way you see things? What are the stories you tell about people from __________—from this side of the neighborhood or that one, from Texas or Nebraska or San Francisco or DC or wherever, that stop you from seeing them as your siblings in Christ? What are you the stories you tell about someone who wronged you ten years ago that stop you from seeing how they’ve changed? What are the stories you tell about yourself that stop you from being able to change? What are the things you know for certain that simply aren’t true? What are the places in your life, in your own mind, where God is inviting you into the humility of the man born blind, to say aloud in public, “I do not know.”

These are hard, hard questions to ask and to answer. Almost by definition, we can’t answer them for ourselves. We don’t know the things we don’t know. We can’t see the things we can’t see. We need somebody to spit in the mud and rub it in our eyes, and tell us to go and wash it off. And if that seems gross—that’s about as uncomfortable as it can be, to have to break apart those preconceptions that we have. It’s an unpleasant thing. But it’s an incredibly important thing.

So may God rub the mud in all our eyes, so that we may see things as they truly are; may God give us the wisdom to recognize the places where our own assumptions divide us from the truth; and may God give us the courage to admit our own ignorance, and trust in God’s guidance, all our lives. Amen.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/nyregion/brooklyn-exoneration-sheldon-thomas.html

[2] https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/perspective/perspective-the-photo-lineup-an-important-investigatory-tool

Sermon — March 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

This year I’m serving as a chaplain to the Episcopal Service Corps program in Boston. Every two weeks, I drive down to St Mark’s in Dorchester and spend the morning with a community of six young adults who live in a house there together, who’ve given a year of their lives to work in churches and non-profit organizations around greater Boston. And they’re wonderful people, and they’re very hospitable people, but they’re not always all on time for our 9:00 am meetings in their living room, and I’m usually there a little early, so I often arrive when people are still shuffling around, and making breakfast, and so on, and they kind of trickle in. And so it’s very common for me to have the experience I had on Friday—three separate times over the course of ten minutes or so, one of the six walked into the room, and said, “Hi, Greg! Do you want anything? Some tea? Coffee? Water?” And I said, each time, “No, no thanks, I’m all set.”

These offers of hospitality are common for us. You probably have the same interaction pretty often. And they’re easy offers to make or accept. If I said, “Yeah, actually, I’d love a glass of water,” someone would go to the sink and fill one up. But imagine how different it would be if you went to visit someone, and they said, “Can I get you a glass of water?” And you said, “Yes.” And they said, “Great. Let’s go down to the well. It’s only a couple blocks away.”

This has been the way life works for most people, for most of history. Maybe you wouldn’t literally have to walk down to the well together to get a drink, but to offer someone a drink isn’t a matter of turning a faucet. It’s to offer something you hauled out of the earth and carried home. This is the world in which Jesus finds himself today. This Gospel is a strange story. It’s a long story. In fact, it’s the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the gospels. But it’s not just the length that’s strange, and it’s not just this unfamiliar scene of a woman drawing water at a well. What makes it surprising to me is the sheer number of things about which Jesus seems simply not to care.

Some of them are things we also aspire not to care about, and so we applaud Jesus for them. Jesus doesn’t care, for example, who you are, your ethnicity or nationality or ancestry. “‘How is it that you, a Jew,’” the woman asks, “‘ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)” (John 4:9) Jesus doesn’t really answer the question. He deflects. But even simply ignoring the question is remarkable. Samaritans and Jews really were unhappy neighbors. There really was ethnic tension. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality or race; he reaches out across those divides, and we can and we should applaud him for it.

It may be more surprising that Jesus doesn’t care what your religion is, or where you worship. This is, after all, the primary thing that distinguishes Samaritans from Jews, and I say in this in the present tense because a small community of Samaritans does still exist: Samaritans and Jews live in neighboring regions, worship the same God, read the same Torah, but while Jews believe that the Temple in which God needed to be worshiped was on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Samaritans believe this was incorrect and that the Temple God had chosen was actually the one on Mount Gerizim, just to the north. So the Samaritan woman tries to draw him out: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain”—until the armies of the Jewish high priest destroyed it, a century or two before—“but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” (John 4:20) Now, Jesus is a good Jew. He acknowledges that his people, not hers, are right. But then he says that it’s irrelevant: “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (4:21, 23) It’s not where you worship that matters, Jesus says. (And the Vestries and the welcoming committees of a thousand parishes recoil in horror.) It’s in what Spirit you worship.

But what may be the most surprising is that Jesus doesn’t care what you have done. He says to the woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” And she answers him, “I have no husband.” “You’re right,” Jesus says, “for you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband at all!” (4:17-18) But Jesus simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t condemn her serial monogamy, he doesn’t wag his finger at her extramarital cohabitation. Even though this is Lent, there’s no call to repentance or offer of forgiveness. Jesus offers no moral judgment at all, simply an observation, and the only role this seems to play in the story is that it convinces the woman that Jesus is a prophet, and sends her back to the city to tell other people what he’s said. This is not like the stories of the repentant tax collectors in the Gospels who promise to amend their ways. it’s simply a surprising and most-likely not-so-public fact, which Jesus seems miraculously to know. But Jesus doesn’t respond in a moralizing tone. What’s surprising is not just that Jesus doesn’t care about her nationality or her religiosity; he doesn’t even seem to care about her personal morality.

He’s there for something else. Not to avoid her because she’s a Samaritan, not to warn her that she’d better start worshiping at the right Temple, not to condemn her for having a man who is not her husband hanging around the house. No, he’s there to ask for a drink from the well, and to offer her something in return: a “gift of God,” something better than any water she could draw, “living water,” a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” so refreshing that those who drink from it “will never be thirty.” (4:10, 14) That’s the only reason Jesus is there: to offer something that can quench her thirst.

And the woman responds in the only way you could imagine, if you had to draw your own water out of the well and carry it back home with you: “Sir, give me this water.” (4:15) She goes back to the city, and tells her neighbors and her friends, and many of them believe her, and they go out to Jesus too, and ask him to come for a visit; and he stays with them for two days. (4:39-40) And when they encounter Jesus face to face, they say to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” (John 4:42)

It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter where you worship, or what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it doesn’t even matter that much what you do. And it certainly doesn’t matter what anyone else has told you about God. It matters whether your thirst has been quenched, whether you yourself drunk from the living water that gushes up to eternal life; whether you have invited Jesus to come, and stay with you for a while.

And this can be good news, or bad news, or sometimes both.

It can be especially good news if you sometimes feel like the Samaritan woman. “I don’t have right background.” “I didn’t grow up in the church.” “I’m fumbling with the prayer book.” “I don’t like these hymns.” “I’m not sure I believe.” “I’m not sure I’m really that good.” If you ever feel this way, then I’m happy to say that Jesus doesn’t care. Not about you—God cares about you very much—but God doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t bother him a bit. And that is pure good news.

But for some of us on the other end of it, it can be tempting to lean on the very things that Jesus doesn’t seem to be so worried about. “I’ve been an Episcopalian all my life,” or “my family have lived here for eighty years.” “I go to church twice a month,” or maybe twice a year. I’m a good, upstanding, respectable person. I’ve put in hard work. I’ve given back to the world. And I’ve held onto the faith my family taught me, and I’ve passed it on. I’m a priest, for heaven’s sake! (I’m on the Vestry! I’m in the choir!) Isn’t that enough?

And all of this is good. Don’t get me wrong.

But there’s something more at stake—or maybe something less, or simply something else.

We come before Jesus without any of the labels and stories that define us, as thirsty people in a dry place. We come before Jesus, as the Psalmist says, “athirst for the living God,” (Psalm 42:2) and he offers us a drink. We come with souls that are heavy-laden, bearing great burdens, and he offers us rest. We come before him, feelings like there’s also more work to be done, and he sends us out to “reap that for which we did not labor.” (John 4:38) When we come before God we don’t do it as cradle Episcopalians or half-traumatized Catholics, as skilled musicians or as silent hymn-mumblers, as perfect people or notorious sinners. We come as people who are too worn down to imagine drawing that bucket full of water up from the well and carrying it all the way home, and he gives us something to drink.

So “Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
    let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
    and raise a loud shout to him with psalms…
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” (Psalm 95:1-2)