Rev. Devin McLachlan

It is about 580 years before the birth of Christ,

            And Jerusalem - the city that  a thousand years before the birth of Christ

                        King David had declared the capitol of his kingdom --

Jerusalem has been overthrown,

            her people marched off to captivity in Babylon,

the kingdoms of  Judah and Israel broken and scattered.

Trying to hold to their identity,

            Jewish scholars in Babylon begin to write down, codify,

The stories of their people and their relationship with God.

Stories that would let them try to see as God sees.

The stories of nomads like Abraham and Sarah and Hagar.

            The stories of slaves like Miram and Moses and Aaron.

                        The stories of agrarian tribal leaders like Joshua.

And the stories of how this group of nomads, slaves and agrarian tribes

            Became a kingdom.

How the people demanded a king

            Even though God's prophet, Samuel, warned them

                        That the power of the monarchy

would be built on the sweat, blood and taxes of the poor.

The story of how their first king, Saul, would gradually fall apart

            through pride, paranoia and murder.

And in today's reading,

            The anointing of a new king even while Saul was still on the throne.  

It is a long, long story.

The anointing of David

            was only the beginning of David's story.

Ahead of him was a difficult road,

            From the slaying of Goliath to battles with neighboring peoples,

From falling in love with Saul's son Jonathan

            to grieving the death of Saul and Jonathan on the battlefield,

to becoming King, with the responsibilities and temptations that come with power.

It is a long, long story.

The anointing of David

            Was only the beginning of David's story.

Just like into today's Gospel

the physical transformation

            Of that anonymous man born blind

is not the conclusion of a story of healing.

            That anointing with clay and spittle

--- a use of spit and mud that sounds bizaare to us but was not unheard of in Jesus' day --

 that anointing is only the beginning of the story.

The moment of healing happens at the end,

            not with a change in physical vision,

but when the man sees Jesus in a new way,

when the man's family and neighbors are given the opportunity to see

            the man, one another, and God in a new way.

It is difficult to learn to see in a new way.

            It has nothing to do with how we might use our eyes.

In the story from First Samuel, the key verb is rà'â

            To see - and to provide.

God tells Samuel "I have seen for myself a new king."

And Samuel the seer, whose childhood mentor Eli was blind,

            Even Samuel cannot see the new King

 When he thinks to choose Eliab, David's eldest brother,

            God says

"the Lord does not see as mortals see;

            They look on the outward appearance,

                        But the Lord looks into the heart"  

It is difficult to learn to see in a new way.

There were about five years in my life when I stopped going to church.

  I could only see the outward appearance of things -

            and where I looked I saw a God who was either absent or cruel.

It's a story I've shared with some of you before.

            It is one of the stories of my own journey with God

A story I find myself turning to

            every time Scripture presents me with a story of healing.

When I was 16,

            my father, 54, was diagnosed pancreatic cancer.

He was given only a few months to live.

But he survived surgery.

            He survived radiation.

                        He survived chemotherapy.

We prayed and prayed and prayed.

He received anointing and laying on of hands

            at the Episcopal church we attended in Chicago.

The cancer went into remission

            and my teenage faith seemed to know no bounds.

Until two years later

            when his cancer came back with a vengeance

and in a few short months

             a tumor that had practically disappeared

                                     metastasized and caused his death.

When we first learned that the cancer had returned,

I began to understand what CS Lewis meant

            when after his wife's death

he wondered if God was simply the cosmic sadist.

All I could see at the time was that

We had prayed for healing,

            And God had played a cruel joke,

                        giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

It is difficult to learn to see in a new way.

            It has nothing to do with how we might use our eyes.

Some time in my twenties -

            When I had come back to church with some reluctance,

                        Pulled back by a call to ordination but still confused about God -

I was given the comfort of seeing in a new way.

I looked back through that Valley of the Shadow of Death

            five years behind me,

            and saw for the first time that God had anointed my father,

that God had healed him and healed my family

            and that God was still healing us.

In those last three years of my father's life

            We began to be healed as a family.

healed from some of the substance abuse and anger

            that had damaged all of us for so many years.

We didn't exactly become the Brady Bunch,

But we began to come together as a family.

            We were broken free from some of our destructive behaviors.

God isn't done with me or with my family,

But in the midst of my father's dying

                        I now believe that my father was anointed and healed.

At the time, I had been looking for healing

            with the same near-sightedness with which Samuel

                        had been looking at Jesse's sons.

There was nothing wrong with my prayers for physical healing.

Nothing wrong-headed about that desire,

            Nothing wrong-headed about grieving,

                        Nor with feeling angry over my father's death.

But because I had been hoping that faith

            would recuse us from all suffering, all sadness, all mortality,

my heart did not see the healing that was taking place around me.

I am so very thankful for doctors and for prayers,

            for miracles large and small,

                        for physical transformation and physical healing.

But what makes my heart leap

            is the healing of hearts,

the healing of relationships

            between people, between nations,

                        between us and God.

And that healing takes us on strange journeys, through strange stories.

David's story does not end with his anointing -

            in fact, it was only just beginning!

Our story of God's anointing is a long one.

            It is a story that is not yet finished,

                        For us, for our family, for our nation, for this world.

In the midst of that most comfortable psalm,

            Shepherded by God, lead to green pastures and still waters,

Well fed and anointed,

            The psalmist still passes through that dark, dark valley.

The story of faith is a story  of God walking with us

             through the valley of the Shadow of Death,

 God walking with us away from the violence of kinship and kingship and land

                        To God's Holy Table.

A story of God shepherding people and kingdoms

            to the green pastures and still waters  of God's reconciling love

It is a story we share with David, and Jesus, and the man born blind,

            With Miram and Mary and Martha

With Jews and Palistinians, with everyone we name in the Prayers of the People,

            With everyone who sees God and one another in a new way.

            It is a story of anointing and healing.

                         It is just beginning.