In the presence of God

The inspiration for this week’s sermon comes from pastor Meredith Ann Miller, who is a wonderful resource especially for parents working to share faith with their children. Read her own words here on Instagram.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A (March 19, 2023).

View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year A)

Preached at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. A video of our whole 10 am service for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (March 19, 2023) is available here.

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As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ John 9:1

Edited Transcript

May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: One God, Mother of us all. Please be seated.

One of the things that can get lost in our distraction as we hear this story and more broadly, one of the things that can get lost in John's Gospel—with its mysticism and cosmological scope, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, and the Word was with God..." It all seems so big. And one of the things we can lose in all of that is that John's Gospel is also very funny.

This story that we read today, I wish that we could stage it. Who has seen West Side Story? You remember the Officer Crupke song? I imagine this man who was blind and was healed by Jesus as the kid singing this song. If you've seen it staged, you'll remember: the judge comes in and they sing, and then they sweep the judge out of the way and the social worker will come...

And this Gospel story has that quality. This man's being dragged from one authority to another. Characters are coming on and off stage and they're all repeating the same question: Who sinned? Who sinned here? Somebody has to have sinned. Something's wrong and somebody has to have sinned.

It begins as Jesus is walking by and there's a man who's blind from birth. The disciples want to know: whose fault is that? Now, there is a lot we might struggle with in this passage, and one of them is the idea that disability is something that somehow makes our lives less worthy before God or less worthy in the community. The idea that disability is somehow a punishment. This idea comes up, in this Gospel.

Now this may be familiar for most of us: when we suffer, when someone we love suffers, we start looking around for the answer: why is this happening? Who's to blame? What answers can I get?

Even after this man receives healing through Jesus, people are still looking aroudn for someone or something to blame, still looking around for who did something wrong. So from the beginning to the end of this story, the thread would seem to be sin. Who sinned? Why do we suffer?

Many of us have brought from our own childhoods the idea that when we suffer, or when someone we love suffers, that somehow God is involved in causing it and God is trying to teach us a lesson. And even if we don't think that consciously, perhaps we ask the corollary quesiton: Why did something bad happen to someone innocent? Why is this innocent person suffering? Why was this innocent life lost?

So again, this question: Who's to blame? Why do we suffer? Why does this happen? And the desire to find, underneath it all, someone who did something wrong that we can blame. That question in the Gospel: Here is someone suffering. Why? Who did wrong: was it the one suffering? was it his parents? Who was it?

Jesus doesn't answer that question. Jesus goes to the man, goes right up to him and gets close. And I like to imagine, although it's not in this story, but it's in many stories where Jesus heals, that Jesus has a conversation with him. That Jesus asks, what is it that you need? What is it that you want? I imagine that Jesus gets this man's consent, before he lays his hands on him, intimately. The man hears Jesus; he knows the presence of Jesus. He experiences the healing that he had hoped for: no questions asked, no blame assigned.

And then nobody can accept that this healing happened! They all want to know how the healing was possible. They all want to blame Jesus. Jesus must be doing wrong. Someone, somewhere, did something wrong!

As I reflected on this story, this week, I came across the words of a pastor in California, Meredith Miller. Miller says: when we begin and end our stories with sin—with who did what wrong—we're making a mistake.

Now we are all familiar with stories that seem to begin and end with sin. Not just this Gospel today. Take this one: how does the world begin? Right at the beginning there's a snake! And the snake tempts the woman, and the woman does the wrong thing, and then the husband does the wrong thing. And then everybody everywhere is doing the wrong thing ever after, until Jesus, who takes away the sin and brings healing.

Miller says it's not that this story isn't true, because it is: the world is full of sin. The world is full of people doing the wrong thing. The world is full of suffering and Jesus is the way that we can be freed from that situation.

But: Sin is not the beginning, and it is not the end.

Miller says: In the beginning is the presence of God. Jesus is the presence of God. The story ends in the presence of God. Not sin, but the presence of God. From beginning to end: in God.

As St. Paul says, it is in you, O God, "that we live and move and have our being." Sin and our redemption are within that story. But the story is bigger. The story begins in the presence of God. It continues in the presenceo of God. And Jesus is not just a sin-reduction plan for the world. Jesus is the presence of God: who draws close to us.

The story begins, continues, and finds its end in the presence of God. Whether that's the big story, whether that's your story, whether that's the story of one hour or day or one struggle or situation in your life: the story will always begin with God and always end with God. And if you don't know that presence yet, that means the story isn't at an end.

When we read a story like this one from John's Gospel today, perhaps you ask, like me: If God can bring this kind of healing, then God, why did you not heal me? Why did you not heal the one I love? We ask God: Where were you? Why do we have to suffer? Jesus doesn't answer that question. But he's there: from the beginning to the end. Every one of our stories, perhaps especially our stories of suffering and questioning: they unfold in the presence of God.

God is there, in your story, from the beginning to the end. Amen.