A Fresh Perspective

In 1972 songwriter and singer Johnny Nash, made it to number one on the pop chart singing: I can see clearly now the rain is gone. / I can see all the obstacles in my way. / Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. / It’s gonna be a bright, bright sun-shiny-day. Rarely though, do we see so clearly. Rarely do we see all the obstacles in our way or all our blind spots that prevent us from seeing. Paul says in his beautiful poem on love in First Corinthians: “For now we see in a mirror dimly.” The Gospel of John equates seeing with believing, and believing, as I have said so often, is about trusting and serving and loving. Believing is about being faithful to the way of Jesus. So seeing is trusting, seeing is loving, seeing is serving. Our capacity to see greatly impacts our capacity to trust God, and love and serve others. Our Gospel text today says that as Jesus went along he “saw” a man blind from birth. What did Jesus see? Jesus sees a man who is very vulnerable and at a grea...

There was once a man who was a current member and former deacon of the First Baptist Church of Jerusalem, who began to question many of the doctrines he was taught, but was afraid to tell anyone in his faith community about his questions. During this time of doubt and uncertainty, his job was terminated. The large corporation he worked for decided that the money invested in his job could be best utilized as a pay raise and incentive for the top managers already making 10 times more than what he was earning as a service worker. Unable to find work, he soon found himself in a men’s home existing on food stamps. Unemployment had been terminated when the Tea Party became the dominant party in government. Fortunately, they had not yet been able to do away with food stamps. A former member of FBC, Jerusalem and former professor at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Jerusalem ran into him at a local jobs fair, where the former professor learned about his plight. The former pr...