9:30am Westfield
1 Samuel 16:1-13 : Ephesians 5:8-14 : John 9:1-41
It’s many years now since I, my kids and the world enjoyed the fascination of the Where’s Wally? phenomenon. For those who missed it, Wally was a dorky guy who sported a beanie, thick glasses and a red-and-white horizontally-striped jumper. He was then inserted into a more or less complex picture containing dozens upon dozens of other faces and bodies – and you had to find him. Thus – Where’s Wally? For a while Wally became so popular that even a TV cartoon show came into being. Wally was an engaging character – and a miraculously harmless piece of entertainment in what even then was a violent world.
These days I still enjoy pitting my eye and brain against pictures that appear strange, absurd or impossible. Like those very clever creations that depict two or more faces or people or horses or houses or whatever in the one picture. Mind you, it doesn’t even have to be as sophisticated as any kind of optical illusion – I continue to enjoy “spot the difference” pictures.
It’s all, of course, about looking and seeing, or not seeing, as the case may be. Which is what we have in today’s readings.
Exactly like the difference between hearing and listening, looking at someone or something does not guarantee, even for a lifetime, that we will ever see who or what is really present.
At the risk of sounding like a foreign film caricature, we have a saying: He can’t see the wood for the trees … Looking but not seeing.
In our everyday world, the world of physical “reality” or experience, the spiritual constantly intersects or is simply present in ways that elude our ordinary perceptions. We look without necessarily seeing. Not always because we’re oblivious. Sometimes we know the spiritual reality is within reach but we try too hard or we input the wrong data or run software that’s inappropriate for the task at hand.
Samuel was doing that when God commissioned him to select the new king to replace Saul. Sam basically went for a Saul look-alike, using a pre-determined formula based on assumptions about what a king should look like. So he looked at the handsome, hunky sons of Jesse and time after time sed to himself and God, Yep, this is the guy. Just look at those pecs! Ooh, I can just see the oil glistening on those muscles ..
And God hit the WRONG!!! buzzer and told Sam to look again. God lets Samuel know early enough what the score is but it’s still a process fraught with more error than success. And what God sez, as we might suspect, gives it to us pretty precisely:
Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have
rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward
appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.
The LORD looks on the heart.
It’s this ability of the Living God to see beyond appearances that leads to the choice of David as Saul’s successor, even though Dave is the youngest son and considered so insignificant and unlikely that he’s left out in the paddock looking after the sheep.
But isn’t that a significant little fact? Looking after the sheep. Isn’t this the persona of the true king of Israel? The shepherd, the one who ensures the safety and well-being of those in his care? “The Lord is my shepherd” is not a sentimental, throwaway line but a profound theological and spiritual insight.
Throughout the pages of the Hebrew scriptures the Living God chooses the unlikely to lead and care for God’s people and we can safely say that these choices come from God’s habitual and unerring practice of “looking on the heart”.
We can turn all this into a neat spiritual game, turn God and the spiritual into a sort of divine Where’s Wally – Where’s Yahweh?. And let’s face it, no self-respecting spiritual director or anamchara, soul friend, would be without the question, Where’s God in all this? in their spiritual toolkit.
And that IS a useful – even essential – thing to do, don’t get me wrong. We DO need to ask ourselves, constantly, where God is in all our experiences, especially because we find it so easy to look without seeing.
The writers of the Christian scriptures saw the matter in terms of darkness and light. We are unable to see because we are looking in darkness. But Jesus has brought light into the world so that now we CAN see, if not exactly clearly, at least with greater insight than before. This is where Paul comes from in the passage from his letter to the “worshipping community” at Ephesus.
And it’s the essential spiritual point that emerges from the well-known story of the man born blind in John’s gospel.
In neither case are we wrong to think or speak of spiritual blindness or darkness. It’s part of our reality and something we have to work at either overcoming or dealing with through the surrender and impoverishment of deep, silent, attentive prayer, sitting in the presence of the Living God – what Brother Laurence famously called “the practice of the presence of God”.
But it’s so easy for this to become another throwaway line, a self-conscious and self-deluding excursion into another world separate from empirical reality. As Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Mind-Based Stress-Reduction Clinic points out, “There is not a single one of our senses that CANNOT be fooled.” So much for empirical reality.
But part of our desire for faith and heart for Jesus is the experience of the spiritual intimately involved with the ordinary, daily lives we experience. Is this not the very basis of that question, “Where is God in all this?” …Because we DO believe that God is in “all this”. And yet it’s a belief constantly tested, and rarely more so than when tragedy becomes a personal experience.
Because of the prayer chain messages that have wended their way through our Parish since Friday many, possibly most of us will be aware of the car accident outside Southern Cross involving very close friends of one of our parishioners. Three young men are in Royal Perth Hospital with injuries more serious than initially suspected. Hard against that came the news of a mother, Anita, whose 14-month-old son was on life-support in Princess Margaret Hospital after falling into a home pond. The life-support system was to be turned off last night. Anita is the work supervisor of another parishioner, the first parishioner’s sister, who has developed a close bond with Anita.
And it’s not that long ago that E died, then Allan’s mum and dad within a week of each other.
Arguably, we all fear or have faced these kinds of unimaginable events at some point, exactly the kind of lived reality that demands that we see beyond the thing we are merely looking at, where finding the spiritual in our present-moment reality is not a game but an essential demand to which we need to pay attention.
So often we are left watching and waiting, feeling totally helpless because of it. But that is not true. Watching and waiting are among the noblest and most selfless actions we ever pursue. Remember the courageous faithful who watched and waited silently, even helplessly, at Jesus’ cross. Watching and waiting bear witness not only to our concern but to our love, which expresses itself in our willingness to stop our busy and burdened lives to think about someone else.
Or, in our helplessness, we say, “I can only pray”. I know I’ve heard myself utter those words at times. But, really, ONLY?? We say it as if it’s inconsequential, that it doesn’t do anything to help – and beneath it lies the dark and desperate demand for the divine Mr or Ms Fix-it to swoop down and magic it all away.
That’s not prayer. That’s wishful thinking. It’s better to think of what prayer does than what it might be. And what prayer does first and always is put us in God’s place. Prayer, as with watching and waiting, takes us from the realms of mere dispassionate spectators, and puts us in God’s place. In the relative frailty of our humanness we may not be able to see very clearly beyond what we’re looking at but the more we make the attempt, the clearer will become our sight.
In our anger and fear and panic in the face of life’s innumerable injustices we may well demand to know where God was on such-and-such a day, between the hours of this-and-that. What we end up with is one of the classic cases of looking and not seeing.
Where was God at Southern Cross? Where was God when Anita’s baby fell into the pond? God was in the hands and feet and bursting hearts of the people who brought aid, rushed to hospitals, picked up the phone. And God is now in the hands and feet and bursting hearts of those who wait and watch and pray; in the skill of the surgeons; in the compassion of the nurses; in the kindness of the tea lady; in the arms that hold Anita; in the care and thoughtfulness of her loved-ones and friends.
These are not accidental things. These are God present, here and now.
And perhaps as we desperately seek a fix or an answer, it’s disappointing to hear all this. That’s okay. But we do need to understand that just as classically this is where we do precisely find the presence of the Living God – in these apparently mundane and ordinary things, events, people.
May we not only look upon the tragic moments of our lives but also see the love and compassion of the Living God within and beyond them.
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