Who Sinned?
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, June 7, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to John, the 9th chapter, verses 1 to 12 and 35 to 41.
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” 10 But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” 38 He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. 39 Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Movement One: The Question Before the Question
Tonight we join Jesus and his disciples as they come upon a man who had been born blind. It’s important for the story that we know something about this man’s identity. We know his gender, we know that he’s disabled and has been so since birth, and we know that people in the community know these things about him. These identities set up the question on which we will be focused tonight: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Who sinned?
We need to sit with that question, because it probably shocks our Midwest American sensibilities. It’s the kind of question we might expect from a child. “Mommy, why does that man look like that?” We know how our mothers would have reacted and as adults we would probably react the same way.
Yet in first century Palestine, it wasn’t a strange question to ask. Though the question is cruel by any standard, it wasn’t considered cruel, not in the social and theological framework that people were accustomed to living in. The theological world these disciples inhabited had a certain logic to it that attributed suffering to sin. Sin had consequences that ran through bodies and bloodlines. If something was wrong with you, something must have gone wrong somewhere. The question wasn’t meant to be malicious. It was part of the received wisdom of their tradition. It was the only story they had for what they were seeing.
Who sinned?
But notice what the question does. It doesn’t ask who this person is. It doesn’t ask what he needs. Worse than even othering him by assigning him some pejorative classification, it transforms this human being into a theological and social problem to be solved. He becomes the occasion for a debate. Throughout his whole life, every morning he’s woken up, every relationship he’s navigated, every way he’s learned to move through a world not built for him collapses into a single diagnostic question.
Who sinned?
That question has a very long life. It has traveled through the centuries, and it is still being asked. We know it. We’ve heard it. Some of us have asked it about others and even about ourselves.
Movement Two: The Archaeology of a Slander
Before we get too far into this message, I want to be clear that though this man and his encounter with Jesus are our entry points, I’m not necessarily preaching on him or on people living with disabilities, though we will come back to disabilities. Because it’s Pride Month, in fact Pride Sunday, and we are on the first Sunday of a four-part series on LGBTQIA+ people in the church, I’m going to be speaking about Queer issues, not disability. It’s not my intention to collapse Queer and disabled identities onto one another nor am I trying to say that Queer experiences of faith and Queer theology and disabled experiences of faith and Disability theology are the same.
Yet for centuries the church has asked this same question about Queer people.
Who sinned?
The question hasn’t always been crude. It hasn’t always been the fire-and-brimstone preacher with the bullhorn. Sometimes it’s come dressed in careful, measured theological language. It’s arrived in pastoral letters and denominational statements. It’s been spoken in the form of “we love you, but…” and you learn quickly that everything before the “but” is decorative.
This tradition has told Queer people that our desire is disordered. That our love is broken. That understanding ourselves in any sort of authentic way is the consequence of something having gone wrong in our upbringing, in our psychology, in our will. That our presence in the church and that our claims on marriage are the theological problems and occasions for debate.
Those forces, those discussions, that rhetoric, those tired hermeneutics, and that lazy theology doesn’t just wound Queer people. Those forces traveled. They moved down the hallways of our homes where they sat down at kitchen tables with our parents. They whispered to mothers who had just watched their child come out to them: what did you do wrong? They asked fathers: where did you fail? They handed families the same ancient question in modern clothes.
Who sinned?
Think about what it costs a family to carry that. A father who can’t stop turning it over and over. A mother who replays every decision. A sibling who learns that love comes with conditions and starts applying those conditions to themselves.
Who sinned?
The question doesn’t just wound individuals. It dismantles the very structures that are supposed to hold us. It teaches families to be afraid of each other. It gives love footnotes, fine print, and exceptions.
The worst part, though, is the question and the resulting substitute for love gets inside who we are as Queer people. Many of us believed it. Many of us spent years, decades, turning ourselves inside out trying to answer it correctly. Trying to pray ourselves into a different shape. Trying to want what we were told to want.
Who sinned?
Movement Three: Jesus Refuses the Frame
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”
Jesus doesn’t engage the question. He doesn’t engage in the theological or social question. He rejects the frame of the question entirely.
Neither.
What Jesus says next has been the subject of much theological debate: “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Some readers hear in that statement the same kind of cruel theology that teaches that Judas was created solely to betray Jesus. That this man’s suffering was engineered by God for a specific purpose. That’s worth wrestling with as is the idea that disability is suffering in the first place.
But there’s another way to hear it. Jesus may not be explaining the blindness so much as redirecting the conversation. He’s saying: stop looking backwards for a cause. Look forward. Look at what’s possible. Look at what’s about to happen. The question isn’t who sinned, the question is what is God doing here, right now? What has God always been doing through and with this man? The man isn’t the problem. His identity as disabled isn’t the problem. The problem is how people have seen him and how they’ve questioned his identity.
Movement Four: Where Our [Ableist] Theology Fails Us
Now you might be ready for the next part. The miracle. The celebration. The part of the story to which we’ve been building. Jesus heals the man. Amen! Alleluia! Praise be the God who heals!
But does the man need healing? You might, rightly, say, “Yes, he’s blind. He needs to be healed.” Yet, something might be tugging at your heart, though. Tickling your logic. Is being blind an affliction or is it part of this man’s identity? Are the challenges he faces because he’s blind or because the world is built only for people who can see?
Disability theology presents a challenge to the narrative of healing. If because the built world, the world designed by humans, is built for people who can see and someone who is blind struggles in that world, then do they need to be cured? Do they need to be healed? Because if they need to be healed then who else needs to be healed?
The world is built for people who can hear. Do people who are deaf and hard of hearing need to be healed?
The world is largely built for people who are right-handed. Do left-handed people need to healed?
The world is not only built for rich people, it’s largely designed by rich people. Do poor people need to be healed?
The world is largely built for men. Do women need to be healed?
The world is largely built for cisgender people. Do Trans and nonbinary people need to be healed?
The world is largely built for straight people. Do gay, lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual people need to be healed?
The world, particularly the United States, is largely built for white people. Do people Black, Indigenous, and People of Color need to be healed?
Yes, these questions are outlandish—even the ones that have been asked and continue to be asked—but we need to sit with why we think people needing to be healed of their racial identity is problematic, but not why it’s equally problematic to think someone needs to be healed of a physical disability.
When progressive people discuss race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, we acknowledge that people don’t need to be fixed, but rather the circumstances and dynamics in which they live and move. The same should be true for our siblings living with disabilities. As much as a person is blind or deaf so too is our society blind or deaf to their need.
We do not need to heal the person, we need to heal the world.
Movement Five: Tikkun Olam
Our Jewish siblings call it Tikkun Olam – “the healing of the world.” It’s a collective goal achieved through both systems-level interventions and healing each other. It’s a social philosophy and theology of care.
Notwithstanding the professional and personal calls that some of us hold as medical doctors and mental health therapists, we are collectively called to help people heal from the trauma, abuse, and hurt they have sustained in churches, families, and interpersonal relationships. As Christians we follow Christ who modeled healing in authentic actions both public and personal, both large scale and in smiles and moments of understanding.
As the story from scripture continues, the man who was blind returns and his community doesn’t recognize him. They don’t know what to do with him. They keep arguing about whether he’s even the same person. Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg? Some say yes, some say no, he only looks like him. And the man keeps saying: I am the man.
He’s been named and renamed by other people his entire life. The disciples had named him a theological problem. The neighbors had named him the beggar. And now, having encountered Jesus, he’s forever changed.
I am the man.
So perplexed by this man and what’s happened to him, his neighbors and the whole community kick him out. They just can’t deal with him or with that has happened in their midst.
And Jesus hears what’s happens and immediately goes looking for the man.
Jesus speaks the sentence that closes the passage: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”
The Pharisees catch the edge of that and ask, “Are we also blind?”
“If you were blind, you would not have sin,” Jesus responds. “But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
Jesus inverts everything they assumed. The ones who were certain they could see, the ones who had the theological categories all sorted, who knew exactly what the problem was and where the blame belonged, they’re the ones in darkness. And the man they’d dismissed, expelled, reduced to a diagnostic case, he’s the one who ends the story seeing.
Movement Six: What We’re Celebrating
Friends, it’s Pride Sunday. And I want to say plainly what we’re celebrating.
We’re celebrating the people who survived questions about how they sinned, statements about how they should be loved even though they sinned.
We’re celebrating the Queer Christians who have stayed close to their faith even when their faith tried to expel them. We’re celebrating people who kept showing up to the God who kept showing up for them.
We’re celebrating the families who chose their children. Who sat across the kitchen table with everything they’d been taught and said: I choose you and I choose love. Whatever that costs me.
We’re celebrating the parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and godparents who had to grieve the theology they’d been given in order to keep the child they’d been given.
We’re celebrating the churches, congregations, and denominations who have done the hard work and have come through in full affirmation of the Queer community.
We’re celebrating the ones who are still in process, who are carrying the weight of questions, not yet sure what they believe about themselves, not yet sure they have permission to lay it down.
We’re celebrating the ones who never got to experience a church where you could be openly Queer and know that God loved you just as you are, just as they created you to be.
But we’re not celebrating with our eyes closed.
We know the wounds are real. We know that some of you carry the particular grief of having been rejected by the very communities that were supposed to hold you. We know that some families are still broken because of their decisions and the theologies they carry. We know that questions about sin still have power in too many churches and in too many homes.
We know that the church continues to prop up attacks on the Queer community in statehouses and the federal government.
So, we celebrate with our whole selves, including the parts that are still healing. Because that’s Tikkun Olam. Because that’s what it means to testify to love.
Amen.
How beautifully written. Thank you Ben 🏳️🌈♥️