Sermonette: Blindness

I was watching a movie the other day based around World War I. In it, the main character was blinded for a few weeks after a passing exposure to mustard gas. This explained why, in the apex moment of the movie, the character had to be guided by his comrades. As I watched the movie, I was struck, thinking about everything he couldn’t see. As the blind soldier was guided forward, he could feel what was around him with his hands, but he had no idea how many soldiers were around him, or what the buildings looked like, or if anyone was sneaking up on him. To the disappointment of the film crew, I wasn’t thinking about the plot, I was thinking about how blind the character was. I was pondering how he was completely unaware of what was going on around him.

The reality is, however, that oftentimes we’re pretty blind ourselves. Over the past few months, much of our country has been at war with each other. Republicans against Democrats. MAGA vs socialists. BLM vs All Lives Matter. Antifa vs white supremacists. Here in North Dakota, we’ve done pretty well to stay out of the fray, but the pull to join the various wars is strong. We felt the pull with the last president, and with the current president. We feel it on all the news sites. We feel it on social media. Even sporting events are quickly becoming yet another avenue where we’re told who our enemy is. And the enemy is always the same: humans. It seems all the above listed groups, and others, want to make you see some other human or groups of humans as the enemy. There’s a war and the war is against groups of people who believe differently than you.

But then I read my Bible. Did you know there were social battles in Jesus’ day? Pharisees and Sadducees hated each other over important theological points. The scribes mostly stayed out of it, but not completely. Most of the Jews hated the Romans, but some were profiting off of it. The Jews hated the Samaritans and the Samaritans hated them right back. Try reading the gospels, knowing the tensions that existed, and you’ll notice dozens of moments where one side tried to pull Jesus to fight the other. They sought to get Jesus to acknowledge other humans as the enemy. Pharisees tried to get Jesus to denounce the Sadducees. Jews tried to get Jesus to discriminate against Samaritans. One Samaritan woman even attempted to get Jesus to affirm Samaritan beliefs over Jewish ones. If you read the gospels, knowing the tensions, you’ll notice Jesus resisting calling anyone the enemy because Jesus was focused on the true enemy: sin. Jesus doesn’t battle people, he battles ignorance, hypocrisy, sin, and sin’s effects on the world.

The blind soldier strikes me because I suspect many of us are blindly wandering the world. Fumbling around, punching each other because we think they’re the enemy. What we need to do is open our eyes to the truth. The truth is that other humans are rarely the enemy. Usually, what is actually getting you all up in a tizzy is ignorance, or arrogance, or hypocrisy. Or, I think the big one today is fear. When we make choices based on fear, bad things happen. People who have given the reins to fear, lash out and hurt others around them. But again, people aren’t the enemy. Sin is. However it disguises itself, whether it be in fear, or arrogance, or anything else, the enemy isn’t people, it’s the sin. Even when we are the perpetrators of sin, we’re also victims of it.

Don’t be blind. Open your eyes and stop seeing enemies to fight, but see other humans who need help. They need love. They need truth. They need hope. They need someone to save them. The world doesn’t need your hate. It needs Jesus.