Sunday 15th March – Truly Seeing – Dr Noel Due

Transcript of Dr Noel Due’s sermon for St Petri Lutheran Church – Sunday 15th March

Good morning everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Noel. My wife Kirsten is with me this morning. We’ve been living and working in Darwin for the last three years or so. And before that I was serving in what is now called the churchwide office of the Lutheran Church as pastor for New and Renewing Churches.

We are now back in South Australia, albeit living in Adelaide at the moment.  We had an adventurous drive up this morning. As we were coming along Magill Road, a huge huntsman spider dropped from the roof of the car and landed on my arm and started crawling over the speedo. So that gave us just a moment of perplexity. How does one handle such a thing? Obviously, absolutely calm and no panic. If you believe that, you’d believe anything.

Not far from where we live, there are some churches which have signs out the front.  Some of them are a little bit more adventurous than others. Some of them say, “worship, 10.30, all welcome”. Doesn’t seem too appealing, particularly when it’s written in Gothic letters in Elizabethan English. But there are a few others that have a little message, some of them are pretty moralistic and a bit twee and you think, oh goodness, really? Is that what we’re trying to tell the world? But the best one we’ve driven past this week is on Glenburn Road, not a Lutheran church, I have to say, it’s another church. And it says,” don’t give up”. “Moses was once a basket case also”. And I thought, that’s brilliant.

With Today’s message, if you know that you’re a basket case, this will be of use to you. If you don’t think you’re a basket case, you won’t hear a thing. Because it’s exactly the same sort of thing that Jesus says at the end of John 9, this chapter that we’ve just read.  He said, as they said, surely we are not blind, are we? So, you know, we’re not a basket case, are we? And Jesus said to them, well, if you were blind, like this man that I’ve just healed, you would not have sinned. But now that you say we see, your sin remains.

Can you see what Jesus is saying? He’s saying that if you claim to have it together, if you claim that you don’t need him, if you claim you don’t need his intervention, if you claim something about yourself as being righteous and worthy, something about yourself as being superior to others and better than others, then your guilt remains. Jesus is of no use to you. His gospel is of no benefit to you. Your guilt remains. Now, this passage is bracketed by two of Jesus’ wonderful statements.

In the first 11 chapters of John’s gospel, there are seven signs. Now, those signs begin with the turning of the water into wine in John chapter 2, and ending with the resurrection of Lazarus in John chapter 11. And going back a couple of years ago, we did a series here in this church on the seven signs in John’s gospel. They’re still up on the St Petri website. You can download them and listen to them, including this sign of the man who receives his sight.

There are seven “I am” sayings, well, probably eight.  They begin with things like, I am the bread of life, for example. I am the bread who’s come down from heaven. And here at John chapter 9, you have one that says, “I am the light of the world”. And then in the very next chapter, You have one where Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd”. And in this chapter nine, which connects those statements, you get Jesus acting out both those things. He’s demonstrating in the life of a real human being what it is for him to be the light of the world. and he’s also demonstrating in the life of that same man what it is to be the good shepherd.

And those of us who are basket cases know that we need Jesus to be our light. We are not a light unto ourselves. We are not self-defining creatures. We cannot make our own way in the world. If we think we’re independent navigators, we get lost. And if we think we’re not stupid straying sheep, then we’re also wrong. We need a shepherd.

I’m not sure about the calibre of our politicians nowadays. This is not a party political broadcast, but back in the day when you had people like Winston Churchill and even folk like Robert Menzies and Clyde Cameron, you had some fairly quick intellects in Parliament. Anybody remember any of those names? Yeah, some of you do. Well, their story is told of Clyde Cameron, who used to work on my grandfather’s farm in between Nuri and Tanunda as a shearer before he was in Parliament. He was telling one day of some of the incidents that took place in Parliament and someone had to apologise to the Speaker because he had said, the Right Honourable Member of the Opposition in so-and-so doesn’t have the brains for sheep. And everyone uproared and there was chaos. And the speaker banged his gavel. He said, “No, no, you must retract that statement”. It’s unparliamentary. So he said, Yes, sir, I do retract that statement. The right honourable gentleman does have the brains for sheep.

Now, if we think that we are not in need of a good shepherd, and if we think we are not in need of the light of the world, our guilt remains. Jesus can do nothing for you. But if you know that you need a shepherd, and if you know you need your spiritual eyes opened, then Jesus does everything for you.

So let’s just drill down into this sign, this wonderful demonstration of what it is for Jesus to be the light and for him to be the shepherd.

First of all, it becomes very clear that this is not just physical light that Jesus is referring to, even though the man’s eyes receive physical light for the first time, it is spiritual light. And so the $6 million question is how many blind people are in this parable? And you may say, well, there’s one, and we’d be wrong, because in fact, there were hundreds of blind people. One man who was physically blind, who became spiritually sighted, and the rest who were physically sighted, but were spiritually blind.

So you can be physically sighted and spiritually blind.

This man, was physically blind and he became both physically sighted and spiritually sighted. He became a disciple of Jesus. And it’s interesting to see the progression of his description. Who did this? Oh, it was a bloke called Jesus. And then as he’s pressed further, well, what would you say about him? Well, I’d have to say at least he was a prophet. And then that led to more discussion and eventually he said Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and he worshipped him. He became a true believer, a disciple, a follower. Whereas all the others remained in their spiritual blindness despite their physical sightedness.

Now in the last 20 or 30 years, There are neurologists and neuroscientists who research about how our very intricate brains work and have revolutionised everything we’ve known about the human brain. I heard a lecture by a neuroscientist on a podcast recently, and he would be a bloke in, you know, about my age, 35 thereabouts, young fellow. But he said, everything I learned at medical school is completely out of date now because of what we’ve learned in the development of neuroscience.

Now I just want you to think for a minute about seeing physically what has to happen to see. Now you have these remarkable optical instruments facing forward in your head. For most of us, they’re placed on either side of your nose. Well, all of us really.  And inside there is a lens which can adjust so you can read close up and look far away and sort of telescope in on something. That flexible lens sometimes becomes a bit clouded with age and ultraviolet light and all those sort of things. And then every now and then, you need that lens replaced. And is there anyone here who’s had cataract surgery? There you are. Look at you all. I’ve joined your ranks recently. We are a noble bunch.

Then you’ve got an artificial lens. which doesn’t quite move in the same way because it’s not a living lens. But what does that lens do? It does what all lenses do. It focuses the light coming in through the little apertures that open and shut called your irises. And it focuses it on a curved screen at the back, which has got all sorts of very complicated rod and cone receptors on it called your retina. And that retina converts those light signals into electrical impulses, which feeds it into your brain. And the interesting thing, of course, is that your right eye feeds it to the left side of your brain and your left eye feeds it to the right side of your brain. And in the brain, it turns it into electrochemical impulses. So you’ve got a translation of a physical thing into an electrochemical signal that’s zapping around two sides of your brain. This is pretty amazing.

Now, if you’ve ever looked through a lens, you’ll notice also that the image you see is upside down. So your brain has to reinvert the image and turn it the right way up. That’s the first thing it has to do. And then it has to do an enormous amount of processing. Like the processing power of your visual cortexes, it justifies description. There are millions of gigabytes of information just slipping around. And it’s interesting our five senses, you know, smell and taste and touch and sight and hearing and so forth, They feed in primarily to the right side of your brain, and there are millions and millions of bits of information going in there every minute. There’s millions of bits that you could tune into.

So, how do you know what to tune into? Well, you have to make a decision which is taken on the left-hand side of the brain about what you focus on. because what you focus on determines what you tune into. So your right brain receives all these billions of bits of information, receives some instructions from the left side, Then the right brain distills down what it needs to communicate to the other side of the brain, zaps it across to the other side, and then those millions of bits of information are reduced to just a tiny handful so that you are not overwhelmed.

Now, there have been a few cases medically where people who have been born blind have received their sight. Sometimes they’re born blind because of a congenital condition where their cataracts are completely occluded, and they can be fixed with a cataract replacement surgery. But if you think what normally happens as a child learns to see, it’s a long process. Firstly, they’re just seeing blobs. And then they slowly recognise that one of those blobs they’re seeing quite often is someone that we later come to call mum. And mum is associated generally with tucker. So that’s a fairly strong connection that’s sort of forged by seeing that blob and food at the same time, and it’s good for your tummy, so you start to get that link reinforced.

But have you ever seen a young baby before toddlerhood, which might recognise the face of its mother, but then it suddenly discovers its hand? Have you seen that? And it just looks at it like this. I mean, sometimes I do that too. As you get older, you just think, oh, where did you come from? But have you ever seen kids do that? And then what did they discover eventually? Their feet. Oh goodness, where did those things come from? Do they belong to me? And then eventually, once they’ve sucked their big toe and their thumb and all those sort of things, they realize that they are an independent thing and that they are not connected to all the other blobs.

Then you see the toddler learning to walk. And it has to, he or she, has to work out balance. It has to work out distance, depth of field, where the edges of things are, how it’s going to navigate its way through obstacles. And once a toddler has got his or her mind fixed on an object, can you stop that toddler for all the money in the world? No. Well, you can if you grab its heel, and then it will become enormously frustrated and throw a hissing fit and cry and eventually it will sort of give up and realise that he can’t always get everything at once. It’s a very important lesson for a two-year-old to learn. Otherwise, you end up with two-year-olds running the world, which is not far from where we are sometimes.

Now, you think about how many years it takes to learn to see. We used to live in the UK for a long time. I taught in a university college in Scotland for 12, nearly 13 years. We lived over there. And we would get visitors from Australia coming often during your long summer break, which is wintertime over in the UK. So the days were very short, But people would come partly to track down family that they knew.  Great, great grandfather, so and so, but also to do the tourist thing and you know. But sometimes one of my friends would say, after we’d been out for a drive for an afternoon to the west coast of Scotland, he said, I can’t take any more in. My eyes are full. My brain is tired. His eyes were full because he’s learning to see new things. He knows what a tree is, but he’s never seen trees like those. He knows what a hill is, but he’s never seen mountains like those. He’s read about snow in a book, but he’s never seen it. So as you get older, you experience things and it still takes you a long time to adjust and to see them.

Now, if your brain had to take every bit of information that came to it at every moment and process all of it all the time, it would be overwhelmed. So it stores memories and it makes tiny little machines. Sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it? but they’re chemical, cellular chemical machines.

So who learned to drive when they were 16? And, well, some of you learned to drive when you were much younger than that, I’m sure. Some of you still probably haven’t got a licence. But what did you do when you first learned? Who did a kangaroo hop in the old manual? Yes. Who couldn’t do a hill start with a handbrake? Yes. Who let it roll backwards? Failed their first driving test? Yes. Who went too fast around a corner and spun out? Don’t put your hand up. But you see the idea. It takes you ages to learn how to drive. But eventually, your brain builds this tiny little neurochemical machine which drives.

And so, when a huntsman spider falls down on top of your arm from the car, you can keep driving and also attend to the huntsman spider without any sense of panic. So your brain built little machines kicks in.

So when you see a vineyard that you drive past, do you ever see those in the Barossa Valley? Once or twice, yeah. You don’t have to reconstruct that vineyard every time. You’ve driven past it 10 times and your brain is telling you what’s there and it is filling in all the gaps so that your senses are not overwhelmed. Now why am I telling you all this? Because there’s a double miracle that has to take place for this bloke to experience what he’s experiencing. On one level, he has to have his optical equipment fixed. Whatever was wrong with it, we don’t know. That’s like taking your camera to the repairman and getting the aperture fixed. But then, He has to have all of that neurological wiring rewired in an instant. Otherwise, it would psychologically, mentally destroy him. He wouldn’t be able to comprehend anything he saw. He wouldn’t understand what he was looking at.

So if you think about an unsighted person, They live in a world of time, not observation. How long does it take, how many steps does it take for me to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen? They live in a world where they have to be told. They don’t say, show me how to go to the shop. ‘Cause that would be useless. They say, Tell me how long, how many steps, where do I turn? What markers do I put my hand on? See, they live in a completely different frame of reference.

And in a moment, this bloke’s optical equipment is restored. And in that same moment, in an even more incredible miracle, All of the neurochemical rewiring takes place. If you read people like Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist who’s died now, but one of his first and probably most memorable titles of a book was The “Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. Anyone read Oliver Sacks? It’s worth reading, yeah. But He talks about some people who, through surgery, have had cataract replacements because of your congenital deficiency, and they see, but it just discombobulates them completely. This man was not discombobulated. He was fully integrated. He was fully congruent, fully put together. So Jesus does for him a double layer miracle, giving him physical sight through his optical equipment, giving him at exactly the same time everything he needs with those neurochemical connections so that he can interpret the world. And he comes to faith. It’s just an astounding, an astounding story. Wonderful, true story.

But the tragedy, of course, is that his astounding healing becomes a point of theological bickering. I mean, you’d have to wonder whether these Pharisees were Lutherans. If there’s anything that 2 Lutherans can fight about, you’ll find it. Put two Lutherans in a room and you’ve got five opinions, that’s what they say.

So this astounding, unbelievable sign, miracle that takes place becomes just a point of argument. How could Jesus do this? Because he did it on the Sabbath. What’s the problem with that? Well, you’re not supposed to engage in medical practice, healing, those sort of things on the Sabbath. There’s six other days you can go to the doctor. The Sabbath is not for doctoring, okay?

And Jesus spat and he made mud. And that’s, you know, pretty close to building something. making bricks with mud, you know, that was all deeply embedded in Israel’s history through their enslavement in Egypt. And so Jesus was regarded as a sinner by one group and a saviour by another.

And this, of course, is where for every person who might come to faith, You have to come to grips with the person of Jesus. The Christian faith is not a philosophical construct. It’s not an argument about philosophical systems or doctrine. The Christian faith is a face-to-face, heart-to-heart encounter with a person called Jesus. And every person either has to decide whether this person called Jesus is a charlatan, a mythical figure, a trickster, someone who perhaps has something up his sleeve that pulls rabbits out of hats, but is not really who he says he is. Or you have to believe what he says he is, “The light of the world” and “The good shepherd”. But you’ve got no choice except come face to face with him. You can’t have a discussion about Christianity at a philosophical level without it bumping into the person of Jesus. And when you bump into the person of Jesus, the question then is this, “How are you going to see him”? Because your aim and intention will determine your action.

In research, scientific research and other things, there’s a thing called confirmation bias. It means if you want to believe that a thing is so, then you will look for all the evidence that confirms it is so, and you will subconsciously suppress all the evidence that says it’s not so. Confirmation bias. You want that thing to be proved.

Now, what happens here, of course, is that you’ve got a man who is in terms of confirmation bias, a blank slate. Because the only thing he can say, which is just a beautiful thing to say, is, “Look, you guys, I don’t know what you’re fighting about, but I know one thing. I was blind, now I can see, and this bloke did it”.

So what’s the problem? He’s got no confirmation bias. He’s just got an experience of bumping into Jesus, you see? But the others have got confirmation bias. They say, well, Jesus by default has to be wrong. He’s done something on our holy day, our Sabbath day. He has to be wrong. So what do we do in order to prove him wrong? It’s like I said before, if you’ve got a toddler who sees something that they want to go for, They will navigate their way around chairs and tables and crawl over the dog and grab the cat and throw the cat aside in order to get what they want because your wanted object fixes the way you proceed in the world. You know that when it’s time to get your counter lunch down at the Vine Inn. What you want fixes what you attend to. And if you’re fixed on getting your counter lunch, the other people are not people, they’re roadblocks. And you’ve got to get there before they do. Doesn’t happen to you, does it, really? Kind, patient people.

Or just try standing in the queue at the supermarket, at the fast checkout line, when you have counted your items. and you have less than 12. And the person in front of you has 26 because you’ve counted their items. Can you see what I mean? If you want to see Jesus in a certain light and that’s all you’re intent on seeing, that’s what you’ll see. And what will prevent you from seeing who he really is, is that sense of denial. “I’m not a basket case”. “I don’t need him to be my light”. I am able to make my own way in the world. I don’t have the brains of a sheep. I don’t need a good shepherd.

So this man moves from the experience of bumping into Jesus to wondering who he is. Is he a prophet? Is he something like that? To absolute faith. He worshipped him. The others were scared. They were frightened. It says they were frightened of being ejected from the synagogue and they had cast this man out. The word there is very strong. It’s the same word that’s used for Jesus when he cast out demons. And we think, oh, being cast out of the synagogue, that’s like saying, no, I won’t go to church anymore. No, completely different. Because to be cast out of the synagogue meant you’d lost your friends, your family, your social contacts, your business contacts, all of the people who you had relied on in your community. It means you’re probably going to lose your livelihood. It means you’re going to be ostracised and isolated. To be ejected was to be alone. And they were scared. And Jesus as the good shepherd comes to this dear man. and he follows him after he’d been cast out. Now he’s sighted, they don’t want to know him, what a curious thing. And he finds him, the good shepherd finds him. and you may be scared of bumping into Jesus because of what it might cost you or what it might mean or what it is that your friends might say to you.  You might be scared of confessing your faith because of your or your social media profile, but he’s a good shepherd and he finds you and he follows you.

So I’m really, really happy to say today that I’m with Moses. I’m a basket case. Kirsten and I are both basket cases. If you want to join us, be a basket case, then the light of the world and the Good Shepherd is yours. In his name. Amen.

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