Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (March 15, 2026)
Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and edited for clarity.
May only truth be spoken here, and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is the Fourth Sunday in Lent—what we sometimes call Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday.
We’re about halfway between Ash Wednesday and Easter. That’s why I’m wearing rose vestments today. There are only two Sundays in the church year when we do that—Laetare Sunday in Lent, and Gaudete Sunday in Advent. Both fall right in the middle of seasons of preparation.
These seasons—Lent and Advent—exist to prepare us for the two great mysteries of our faith: the Incarnation and the Resurrection.
And we need that preparation.
We need time to ready ourselves to receive the light of these mysteries. But we also need time to hold up our lives—and the world as it is—to that light.
The light of the Incarnation tells us that God so loves the world that God gives everything, so that the world might have life.
And the light of the Resurrection tells us that, in spite of everything, love and life are unconquered.
And yet… when we hold the world up to that light, what we often see is contrast.
A painful contrast.
The light is real—but so is the darkness. We see it in the world around us, in the nations of the earth, and often in our own lives. Living in that tension—between what is and what God intends—is hard work.
That’s why these Sundays of refreshment exist.
They are meant to be a pause. A deep breath.
A moment to remember that, even in the gap between who we are and who God calls us to be—even in our struggle to live out something as simple and as difficult as “love one another”—there is still one unshakable truth:
God’s mercy endures forever.
That is the refreshment.
In today’s Gospel, we meet people who are wrestling with that same tension.
They encounter a man who has been blind from birth, and immediately they ask the question we all ask when faced with suffering:
Why?
Why does this happen?
Whose fault is it?
It’s such a human response. We ask it because we are trying to make sense of a world that so often doesn’t make sense. We ask it because we see suffering everywhere—our own, our neighbors’, the suffering of the most vulnerable—and we want an explanation.
But Jesus doesn’t give them one.
Instead, he shifts the question entirely.
He says, “It’s not anyone’s fault. The purpose is that the work of God should be revealed in him.”
And I think a better way to hear that is this:
The purpose is that the work of God should show brightly and clearly in this case.
Not that suffering is caused so that God can fix it. Not that someone’s pain is an object lesson.
But that in every situation—no matter how broken, confusing, or painful—we are called to look for where God is already at work.
To refuse the assumption that suffering means absence.
To resist the instinct to believe that God has abandoned a person or a situation.
Instead, to ask:
Where is God here?
How is the work of God shining, even now?
At the end of the passage, Jesus says something striking: that he came into the world “for the case to be decided.”
And the case, I think, is this:
Is God present—or not?
Is God present in this situation?
In that one?
In this person?
Jesus comes so that, in every case, that question can be answered.
A couple of Fridays ago, we buried a beloved member of this community, Susie.
She died young, at 64, after a long period of real suffering. Her body changed in painful ways. She lost the ability to do things she loved—making cards, talking on the phone, connecting easily with others.
And yet.
When I met with her family to plan her service, her brother said something I have not been able to shake.
He said, “I’ve been thinking about what the afterlife must be like for her. And I don’t think it’s very different from her life here.”
I was surprised. I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Well, maybe she can walk again—she loved to walk. But otherwise… she lived on this earth as if it were heaven.”
And then, without using the language of the Gospel, he said exactly what Jesus is saying:
That in her life, the work of God shone brightly and clearly.
Every single person I spoke to at her calling hours said the same thing: what a joy it was simply to be in her presence.
One of our Eucharistic visitors told me, “Even when she couldn’t speak, I could see God shining in her.”
And that is the decision Jesus comes to bring about.
Is God present in this situation?
Yes.
Yes.
So the invitation of this Sunday—the refreshment offered to us in the middle of Lent—is this:
To begin training our eyes to see.
To look, deliberately and faithfully, for the places where God is already at work.
To ask, again and again:
Where is the light?
How is the work of God shining brightly and clearly in this case?
Amen.