February 14, 2021
/Last Sunday of Epiphany
2 Kings 2: 1-12; Psalm 50: 1-6; 2 Corinthians 4: 3-6; Mark 9: 2-9
The Rev. James M. L. Grace
In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
I would not be surprised one day to find out that in heaven there is a large, warehouse-like room, like a Costco. In this large heavenly storage room would be shelves as high as the eye can see stocked with the millions of purple boxes containing blessings that had gone unnoticed and unappreciated by all of us throughout our human lives. Can you imagine how large a warehouse containing all our unnoticed and unappreciated blessings would need to be?
For me alone, it would look like the warehouse at the end of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a government employee boxes up the Ark of the Covenant for storage, wheeling it down an aisle of some nameless government storage facility. That is what I imagine the size of this heavenly storage room must be. Vast. Never ending.
“The god of this world,” St. Paul writes, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” That verse comes from today’s reading in 2 Corinthians and is unique in this regard – it is the only place in the entire New Testament where Satan is labeled a “god of this world.”
I am drawn to the image of blindness in the verse, this inability that all of us have to notice the blessings in our lives. Several weeks ago, I was running in Memorial Park, and I ran beside two other people running together. On one person’s running shirt were two words: “blind athlete.” The person running next to the blind athlete was their guide – telling them essentially where to run. They were running the Houston marathon. Can you imagine the amount of trust and faith you would need to have as a blind athlete to run 26 miles? I cannot.
And yet I am reminded that we are all blind. St. Paul understood blindness. He himself was blinded on the road to Damascus, only to have his sight regained when he learned that the love of God conquers all hate. I am reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson for a future book club here at St. Andrew’s. Wilkerson establishes a daring premise – which is that many of us are blinded to an American caste system “based upon what people looked like, an internalized ranking, unspoken, unnamed, unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously to this day.” The invisibility of the American Caste system, Wilkerson argues, “is what gives it power and longevity.”
Like the grit, tenacity, and faith of a blind marathoner, Isabel Wilkerson courageously has unveiled something my eyes were blind to. The book and the runner help to refocus my vision on the unchanging truth that you cannot shut out the light of Christ. It persists. It runs, it writes, it will not allow for blindness. St. Paul’s sight was restored to him after three days.
During the Cold War, the East German government built a large broadcast tower in East Berlin, intending it to be a visual symbol of the superiority of their communist system. Berlin residents on both sides of the wall, however, noticed something about the tower the architects never intended. During the day, sunlight was reflected from the massive seven story, stainless steel sphere near the top of the tower. More specifically, the sunlight was reflected as a bright cross visible for miles across the divided city. Those living in West Berlin quickly dubbed the bright shiny Christian cross upon the East Berlin tower in communist as the “pope’s revenge” – a divine retaliation of the communist government’s practice of removing crosses from East Berlin churches and turning churches into museums of atheism.
The embarrassed East German government tried painting the stainless-steel sphere on the Berlin tower to eliminate the cross, but to no avail. When President Reagan spoke in front of the Brandenburg gate on June 12, 1987 demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, he spoke of the efforts to eliminate the unintended cross, saying, “there in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.” When I visited Berlin in 2018, I was happy to see that crosses returned to East Berlin churches, and a gleaming cross is quite visible on the Berlin Radio tower.
I want to revisit that vast warehouse, full of unclaimed blessings. How much is there that God has provided for us – untold blessings, just warehoused away, collecting dust, because we are unwilling to open our eyes and arms to receive them? What would it take to remove the veil from our eyes so that we might see those blessings, see them the way a blind athlete sees possibility in running a marathon? What kind of vision would that require?
It would require of us, like St. Paul, to ask that the scales be removed from our eyes – that we would see the bright gleaming cross of Christ shining above a godless land.
I cannot say it any better than Alice Walker does in her novel The Color Purple when Shug Avery says, “I think it pisses off God when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” Life is too short to fill a heavenly warehouse with more purple boxes full of unnoticed blessings. Covid is not an excuse. There is blessing in this world. Find it, relish it, open your eyes to it. Thank God for it. AMEN.