Worship Service on Sunday, September 1, 2024
Frances Jane Van Alstine, who was more commonly known as Fanny J. Crosby, was an American mission worker, poet, lyricist, and composer. She was a prolific hymnist writing more than 8,000 hymns and gospel songs with more than 100 million copies printed. She is also known for her teaching and her rescue mission work.
At 6 weeks old, she caught a cold and developed inflammation of the eyes. Mustard poultices. Okay, I looked this up because I didn’t even know what this was. It’s also known as a blister, is a poultice of mustard seed powder spread inside a protective dressing and applied to the body to stimulate healing. So this mustard poultice was applied to treat the discharge in her eyes. According to Fanny Crosby, this procedure damaged her optic nerve and blinded her. But modern physicians think that her blindness was more likely congenital, and given her age, may simply have been noted that had gone unnoticed by her parents. So sometimes a six-month-old you may not know if they can see or not. So today’s physicians are thinking that’s not what caused her to go blind, that she was blind already.
Her father died when she was 6 months old, so she was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother. These women grounded her in Christian principles, helping her memorize long passages from the Bible. In April 1825, she was examined by a surgeon who concluded that her condition was inoperable and that Her blindness was permanent. At age 8, she wrote her first poem which described her condition. She later stated, it seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life. I thank him for this dispensation. If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow, I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things about me. She also once said, “when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior.”
By age 15 she had memorized the four Gospels, the Book of Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and many of the Psalms. How many of us can say at 15 we had all that memorized. I don’t even have it memorized now. All of the Old Testament? Oh the books, yes very good. Wow. She remained there for 8 years as oh just before her 15th birthday she enrolled at the New York institution for the blind. She remained there for 8 years as a student and another 2 years as a graduate pupil. During that time, She learned to play the piano. Now remember, she’s blind. Organ, harp, and guitar, and became a very good soprano singer.
In 1843, Fanny Crosby joined a group of lobbyists in Washington, DC, arguing for support of education for the blind. Years ago, anytime you had a disability, you were always pushed away. So That’s why she had to go and argue for the blind because people didn’t do anything for people with disabilities years ago. She was the first woman to speak in the United States Senate. She appeared before the joint houses of Congress. Her composition, Calling for an Institution for Educating the Blind, was praised by, of all people, John Quincy Adams. She testified before special congressional subcommittees and she performed in the music room at the White House for President Polk and his wife. She accompanied herself on the piano with her own composition with some of the lyrics saying, Our president, we humbly turn to thee, are not the blind the subject of thy care? Gutsy, I would say. Fanny’s life was not always a bed of roses, but she always maintained her faith in Jesus. Her concept of herself was not that of a celebrated gospel songwriter. She always said that her chief occupation was working in missions. She lived to the age of 94. She was a remarkable woman and didn’t let her physical blindness blind her spiritually. Blind, and she accomplished all that and I can barely accomplish anything and I’ve got my sight.
In our reading today John speaks about Jesus healing a blind man. Time and again the Gospel of John will use images of light and darkness, blindness and sight to show the wisdom of God that is in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus can help us to know about our own sin. He can help us to trust Him. He can cure us from the disease of sin.
In the verse John 9:4, Jesus says, “We must work the works of Him who sent me. As long as it is day, night is coming when no one can work.”
In an era without electricity, less work could be done after sunset on account of the darkness. The day was the most effective time to work. In this verse, Christ refers to day as the time he has left to serve God’s will on earth. And night refers to the time when Jesus will die, ending his earthly work.
So I’ll read the passage again. “We must work the works of him who sent me, as long as it is day.” That means he’s got to work it as long as he’s alive. Night is coming when no one can work. That means his death is coming. The verse is incredibly important because it contains an attitude for every serious Christian. The attitude of Jesus expressed in the scripture must be our attitude as well. In other words he’s saying, “get her done”.
John 9:6 – “when he had said this he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and applied the clay to his eyes”. Yuck! Why would Jesus use his spit? Why would he spit on the ground? The man was born blind, which means he never had seen anything. The eyes and the brain work together to form images and people who have sight restored must have former images on the brain in order to see. Jesus knew the man was born blind. So how could he see any images? And he used his own saliva mixed with dust, Jesus’ saliva, to impart his own self through the DNA of his body to give this man his own sight. So he used his DNA to help this man to see because this man was born blind. A miracle, but also what does that tell us?
Today we use our saliva to reveal our DNA to tell us who we are. So Jesus put a little bit of that in that man so he could see. I don’t think for one moment, anyone who believes in Christ would think Jesus had to use mud or spit to heal the man’s blindness. Those of us who know Christ believe he can do as he wishes. So there is probably a deeper lesson here to be learned. He wanted the person, the blind man, to be involved in the miracle to show he wanted to be healed. You need to go to the river, wash your eyes. Perhaps it was a way for him to show or prove to the blind man that he had faith in Christ, that he would receive the healing. You have to have faith in order to be healed. It also may have been for the crowds that were around, some of whom were doubting Jesus’ power to heal. It caused those who were curious to follow the man to the pool of water and watch the healing unfold as Christ said it would. This would have removed them from Christ’s presence when the healing occurred. Faith is a huge part of the equation and it is required, a requirement of true belief in God. Without it we cannot please him. As this story unfolds, if we read down farther, the whole town with help of our dear friends the Pharisees is in an uproar. This man Jesus was breaking the law by working on the Sabbath.
They ridiculed the blind man and made him repeat himself over and over again. They insulted him and they told him how he was sinful at birth and that’s why he was blind. Who do you think has spiritual blindness in this case? The Pharisees of course. Jesus tells them in verse 41, Jesus said to them, if you were blind, you would have no sin. But since you say you see your sin remains. Jesus again disassociates sin from disability. The Pharisees guilt-wise with their claim that they can see. In their spiritual blindness, they are focusing on the letter of the law rather than the law of love.
Mark 8 also talks about Jesus healing a blind man in verses 23 to 25. “Taking the blind man by the hand, he brought him out of the village. And after spitting on his eyes and laying his hands on him, he asked him, do you see anything? And he looked up and said, I see men, for I see them like trees walking around. Then again, he laid hands on his eyes and he looked intently and was restored and began to see everything clearly. This passage, oh my goodness, The fact that the man knew what trees looked like may have suggested that he was able to see at one point and developed blindness later.
In modern times, many people will develop blindness from having cataracts. We can heal cataracts with surgery today, but keep in mind at the time of Jesus such methods were not known and if you were blind you were blind. There was nothing you could do about it. When blindness is healed using surgery, there is generally a period of middle blindness in which objects may appear blurry. Sometimes the optic nerves will be still will be damaged leading to certain permanent after effects sometimes known as cognizant blindness. One of these is the inability to recognize faces. Sometimes moving objects may be partially recognizable in the middle blindness due to contrast with the background. But without facial recognition, men may look like trees. Remember what the man said when Jesus touched him for the first time. I see men walking around like trees. Two touches. Therefore the two touches of Jesus start to make sense. The first healed the eyes themselves, similar to the way modern surgery can. The second healed the nerves. He touched them twice.
The Greek phrase commonly translated to “his sight was restored” in verse 25 is literally translated into “he was restored”. His sight was already restored, but his nerves and brain still needed to be restored. That’s what the second touch of Jesus did. So again, we’ve got spit. Why this time? We can figure the man wasn’t blind from birth, right? So why does he need spit? We know today that saliva can actually aid in the repair of inflamed cells. It creates a human environment, supplies several meaty proteins, and increases tissue factor, which accelerates blood clotting. So why the spit? So that his eyes could heal. Jesus spit. I’ll take it any day.
The spiritually blind hear the truth but they cannot see what it means. They cannot see the big picture of salvation and they are unable to see how it applies in their own life. They have trouble confessing the truth because they have difficulty believing what they cannot see. The blind men couldn’t see but they had faith and trusted that Jesus could heal them. John 9:39 and Jesus said, “for judgment I came into this world so that those who do not see may see and that those who may see may become blind.” So if you think you got it all together and you’re not using God, you don’t. He’s saying that those who without spiritual sight could come out of the darkness, but those with greater knowledge would be considered as their sins are remaining. Jesus works through the restoration of sight, but he also works through the taking away of the wrong kind of sight. The love of God is incomprehensible and overwhelming. We are unable to achieve or attain it on our own. It can only be received. Both blind men were transformed from being physically and spiritually blind to full-sightness and recognizing Jesus as Lord. However, in the case of the Pharisees or people who refuse to see, their path is the path of unseen, unlearning, and tearing down to support their own fragile power. Beware of these types of people. Jesus will make the final decision about those who believe or do not believe in him. He will execute the inevitable result of rejecting him or believing him. Are we spiritually blind? Do we allow the ways of the world to control how we think or how we feel?
Our mission as Christians, as I told Sylvia, is to help the spiritually blind to see. Those of us who invite God’s Spirit to live in the core of our being and to express Christ through us, body, soul, and spirit, become linked forever with God. Amen.
