Dunbar United Church of Christ - October 25, 2009

Most of us know the hymn Amazing Grace. In the first stanza, John Newton wrote: “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” What did he mean? He wasn’t literally blind. What could John Newton see that he couldn’t see before?
Isn’t seeing a metaphor we use almost every day? Instead of saying “I understand,” we say, “Oh, I see.” Newton could have said, “Once I didn’t understand, but now I do.” What did he understand that he didn’t before?
It reminds me of a man in our Bibles named Saul who arrested people for following Jesus, and then he followed Jesus too! What happened to Saul’s eyes that the people he saw as his enemies he now saw as his family? He said that Jesus opened his eyes.
Last week I spoke with someone who was invited to a family Sunday dinner. He found out that some guests would be coming who were in this country on student visas from Saudi Arabia so he called up his mother and said he wouldn’t be coming to dinner. “Why?” she said. He said: “Because I won’t sit at the same table as the people who want to kill me. They may try to dress like we do, or speak our language -- but they’re not like us. They’re all just towelheads, mom, and I’m ashamed you’re allowing them in our house.”
When I hear something like that, I’m sad. I don’t like to hear anyone insulted or humiliated. I don’t care where they come from or how good or bad they are. At the deepest level of our being, we are all made in God’s image -- we are sacred. According to the Bible, we are all family: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists. If someone is mean to Annie or Maria -- it hurts me. And it’s the same when I see pictures of our enemies tortured in our prisons, or pictures of our soldiers dead on the battlefield. I feel grief every time I see or hear about another person’s suffering because Jesus taught me that everyone is my family -- God is the parent of each of us.
I didn’t always feel this way. During the Vietnam war when the daily news gave a head count of the Viet Cong killed, the bigger the number, the happier I was. “Kill the gooks,” I said, “kill them all!” And then -- I don’t know what day it was, or what year -- something happened to me and now it doesn’t matter who’s killed or hurt or what side they’re on -- now someone else’s pain is mine. Now I cry for someone else’s tragedy. You know what I think happened? Jesus opened my eyes like he opened the eyes of Bartimaeus -- like he opened the eyes of Saul -- like he opened the eyes of John Newton. I was blind, but now I see.