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Who, or what, is to blame?                        John 9: 1-25                   March 2, 2008

I stand before you today with both sadness and joy in my heart. I am sad, you see, because the political primary season is winding down. But I am joyful, too, because this coming Tuesday's primaries will be great fun to watch, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama face off in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont. Fortunately, we have no church meetings scheduled for that night. I plan to be glued to MSNBC until the bitter end, as Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert analyze, dissect and report on results.

This time, I do have a horse in the race. A candidate who I hope wins the Democratic nomination and eventually becomes the next president. But that's really not the main reason why Tuesday's primary coverage, for me anyway, falls into the category of must-see TV - as did all of the other great evening wrap-ups following recent primaries, both Democratic and Republican. The whole electoral process is one of the best things about America, in my view. And I love it. Despite its shortcomings.

Part of the reason I love it, I should tell you, is because I believe that in our 21st Century world, Christians have a duty to be politically active. We have a duty to let our voice be heard and hold our political leaders to task. As people of faith we have a duty to speak the truth to power. And speaking the truth to power, in the United States in the 21st Century, means keeping up with the issues and pulling the lever on Election Day. It means working within the political process.

But let me be clear. I am not suggesting that Christians should automatically be supporters of one or the other of our major political parties. The notion that "faith voters" or "values voters," as we are sometimes called, should always vote with Republicans or Democrats is downright offensive. Neither party should consider us a part of their "power base."

Jim Wallis, the Editor in Chief of Sojourners magazine, puts it this way in his new book, The Great Awakening: "Faith communities," he says, "should be the ultimate swing vote, always examining issues and candidates on the basis of their own religious convictions. Our communities must demonstrate public and political leadership in vital matters that secular politics tends to ignore."

Wallis was speaking this past week in Philadelphia and Kris and I had the privilege of hearing him. He told this joke at the outset of his remarks:

Two senators - one a Republican and the other a Democrat - were eating together in the Senate Dining Room. The Republican said "You Democrats know nothing about religion!" "That's not true," insisted the Democrat, We know a lot about religion." The Republican then issued a challenge, "I'll bet you twenty bucks you can't recite the Lord's Prayer," he said. "You're on," the Democrat said, and then began, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep." When he finished, the Republican reached for his wallet and replied, "Darn, I didn't think you could do it!"

Wallis's point, when he tells that joke, is that the whole notion that religion somehow belongs to one party is, in a word, silly. The political categories of Republican and Democrat - or left and right, for that matter - simply don't describe religious voters. I believe he is absolutely correct in that analysis.

And Wallis is also correct when he points out that the politicians in Washington, on both sides of the political aisle, are in the habit of taking a problem and doing two things with it. First, they try to make people afraid of the problem and, second, they try to blame it on the other side.

Sadly, this practice goes beyond Washington. You could argue, I think, that finding blame has become one of our national pastimes. Right up there with football, baseball and shopping.

Who can we blame for the protracted war in Iraq? Who can we blame for the sluggish economy? Who can we blame for the housing slump? Who can we blame for the crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market? Or the alarming rate of teenage pregnancy? Or the crime and violence in the streets of our major cities? The list of issues that prompt us to look for someone to blame is endless.

As Christians, we are called to avoid the blame game. We are called to be intolerant of the politics of blame.

Our text for this morning recounts one of Jesus' teachings on this very subject.

Jesus and his disciples are "walking along," John tells us, and they encounter a man who is blind. The disciples, seeing this blind man, ask Jesus, "Who sinned that this man was born blind, he or his parents?"

Jesus, as usual, is unwilling to play along. Refusing to answer the unanswerable question, he replies, "His blindness is an opportunity for God to be glorified." And then, instead of assigning blame, he proceeds to heal the man's blindness. Thereby giving glory to God.

Like the rest of the people in the first Century, the disciples could not begin to understand the physiology of horrible conditions such as blindness, especially when such conditions happened at birth. They believed that this man's blindness was caused by sin - either his own sin or his parents' sins. In their minds, someone must be blamed for the blindness.

Jesus' reply to the disciples' question, on the other hand, suggests that no blame is necessary. By his words and his actions, Jesus moves beyond blame. He takes action and heals the man - because the loving act of healing, not blaming, is what glorifies God.

It's interesting, isn't it, that the disciples didn't even think to ask Jesus to heal the blind man. No, they didn't care about curing his blindness; they just wanted to know who is responsible.

"You are asking the wrong question," Jesus tells his disciples. "This man was not born blind because of his own sin or the sin of his parents, but to provide an opportunity to show the power of God."

The disciples, you see, were playing the blame game. They wanted to know who was at fault. They wanted to assign the guilt, if you will. They wanted to say he's blind because of this harmful action, or the deeds of that sinful person. But Jesus was not about to let them get away with any of that. Jesus showed them, instead, that it was more important to give glory to God. That healing, not blaming is what God calls us to do.

My friends, when we look around us and observe our current political and cultural landscape as modern-day followers of Christ, you and I, like the disciples who heard and watched Jesus that day, are also called to respond to our Lord's flat-out rejection of the blame game.

And we are called, as well, to reject the politics of those leaders who espouse a different philosophy.

Unfortunately, there are still some who call themselves Christian, these days, who fail to understand this important message. Some Christians who evidently haven't read this particular chapter in John's Gospel.

For example, who was it that blamed the attacks of 911 on the people of New York and their tolerance for same-sex relationships? Sadly, people who called themselves Christians.

And who was it that blamed the people of New Orleans for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, citing their sinful deeds? Sadly, people who called themselves Christians.

And who is it that continues to blame the spread of HIV AIDS on the victims of that horrible disease? Again, sadly, people who call themselves Christians.

Thankfully, the influence of those who preach this blame-oriented and, I would suggest, flawed form of Christianity is diminishing. Jim Wallis, whose recent talk and new book I mentioned before, is extremely optimistic. He is optimistic that what he identifies as a "revival of faith" will change both the way we Americans conduct our political discourse and, more importantly, the way we live our lives.

Once again, I think he may be right. I certainly hope and pray that he is right.

The basis for Wallis's optimism is his observation that Christians on both sides of the aisle are "hungry for a new kind of politics."

His book is filled with examples that support this optimistic case. Examples which suggest that moral values "will and should be the focus of America's political future."

The most helpful notion in Wallis's book, in my view, is his discussion of what he, and many others, like the prophet Nehemiah, for example, and the Apostle Paul, call "the common good."

"The common good," he writes, quoting Catholic social teaching, "should make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on." "With that understanding," he continues, "the role of the state is to defend and promote the common good of civil society. . .providing for the needs of all."

Sounds curiously like the words of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, where he calls on the nations to "do unto the least of these," doesn't it?

The good news, Wallis reports, is that there are spiritual leaders all over the landscape - prominent ones like mega-church pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels as well as dozens of not-so-prominent ones; young ones and older ones, Evangelicals and main-liners, Protestants and Roman Catholics - all of whom have rejected the politics and the religion of fear and blaming and are embracing, instead, an agenda which, in order to glorify God, changes the world in which we live. An agenda which addresses not just abortion and same-sex marriage - the divisive issues of the past - but global warming, global poverty, the relief of third-world debt and the AIDS pandemic - issues of the present that can serve to unite us for the common good.

It is a movement, my friends. A revival of faith and justice. A "great awakening" that could have at least as significant an impact as those movements that historians have called "great awakenings" in the past.

The awakenings of the past have sparked America's independence, abolished slavery and led to social reforms like child labor laws and women's suffrage. This one, if Wallis is correct, will be "a new, interfaith collaboration in overcoming the social crises that confront us all today." Hopefully, we Moravians will find ways to join this movement. I'll keep you posted.

In a minute, we're going to conclude our service this morning by singing "Amazing Grace!" - one of great hymns that grew out of one of the "great awakenings" of the past. Before we do that, I'm going to read for you the concluding paragraph of Wallis's book. It is, I think, worth repeating verbatim. "Imagine," he writes, "politics being unable to co-opt such a spiritual revival but being held accountable to its moral imperatives. Imagine a social movement rising out of spiritual revival and actually changing the wind of both our culture and our politics. Imagine a fulfillment in our time of the words of the prophet Amos: 'Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.' Just imagine."

                                                                             AMEN

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