Have you ever been on a cave tour? There is always one place where the guide will stop and turn out all the lights plunging the whole group into total darkness. It is always disorienting, and for some people, a frightening experience. Sighted people depend almost completely on their vision to navigate through the world around us, without our eyes we feel helpless. Being blind, though, does not mean you are helpless. Other senses like hearing and touch become more sensitive and it is still possible to live a full life. None of this comes easily though. There are special schools where they sharpen their senses and learn how to listen to the world around them and develop the sense of touch in their fingertips to read. For someone who has been able to see from birth this transition is like learning to live in a completely different world. Many of these people have a difficult time with this transition.

Living a life of faith is a great deal like this. We need to develop our spiritual senses in order to be able to navigate the world of faith. The biggest problem we face is not our spiritual blindness by itself, it our lack of awareness of our problem. Like someone born blind we have to be told what it means to see. Even then it is difficult for them to imagine what it means to be able to see. Working with blind students all through high school and college I had many long conversations on the nature of color. The closest metaphor we ever arrived at was to compare color to fine variations in texture and that falls fall short of the reality. The difficulty of describing sight to the blind quickly became evident. The same is true of spiritual blindness. Jesus himself encountered this difficulty. We can see a good illustration of this in one of his encounters with the Pharisees. Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains. (John 9:39)

As these verses point out, it can be more difficult for those of us who have lived with our faith longer to believe that there is more to the spiritual realm than we have personally experienced. The Pharisees are not bad people they just believe that they know more about these things than an upstart from Galilee named Jesus.

Only when we can admit to ourselves that we might be spiritually blind do we put ourselves in a position where we can begin to explore the new world, the new life that Jesus came to bring us. Jesus came to be our guide in all these things and still leads us by the power of the Holy Spirit. He is the one Isaiah spoke of when he said; The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness-- on them light has shined. (Isaiah 9:2) Light is the medium that sight explores and Jesus is the doorway that allows us to explore the spiritual light of god’s creation. With him as a guide we can move with confidence through a world that otherwise might hold a great many dangers for us. But before we can even reach that point we need to admit that we need a guide, a savior to lead us to the one true God.

Saint Paul spent most of his life trying to follow where Jesus led him. But even he still admitted his blindness In First Corinthians 13 he said; “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. If we truly want to grow in faith and love we need to first admit our need. At that point Jesus promised "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.” (John 14:18) This Lent we need to admit that we need a guide and then open ourselves to the presence of Christ in our lives. There is a new world out these just waiting for us to discover it.

Pastor Jim Bliss
March 2006