March 15, 2026

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. These are the first two verses that begin the Gospel of St. John, the gospel that we are journeying through this Lenten season in this year of the lectionary cycle.

And that prologue, those first two sentences combined with a few more, traditionally was read at the very end of every Eucharistic service in the Western Christian Church. It was really only until the Protestant Reformation that that practice ended in many parts of European Christianity. But every week, we were reminded of the fact that the Word was made flesh.

Now... One of my father's professors in his doctoral work mentioned that in fundamentalisms, and specifically in fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, that often gets added on to: that the word became book. That our whole life gets defined and shaped by the Bible in such a way that it becomes a limitation, a barrier; that we lose sight of the Word of God being the personage of Jesus.

And that's not just limited to Protestant fundamentalism. But that can be true of many Christian traditions. The way in which we get wrapped up in the magisterium—the teaching of the church—or in our own liturgical proclivities. Jesus only becomes real to us in this confined and narrowed and boxed-in way.

But, again and again and again, we are reminded, both in the life of Jesus' ministry throughout the Gospels, and in hearing that prologue from John whenever it comes up, that ultimately, who we worship, what we worship, the reality of God in our midst is a living encounter with a living Christ. An embodied reality of God present among us. God in relationship. A dynamic reality. An ongoing work of the Spirit. An ongoing life in Christ that we experience anew in each and every day of our lives.

Throughout the Gospel of John, we are repeatedly reminded, too, of something we hear in our passage today: that Jesus is the light of the world. That so much of our experience is consumed by darkness, by pain, by suffering, by limitations. And breaking into that, transforming it, making it new, is the presence of Christ. The renewal and transformation that God made manifest in Christ offers to the world around us.

But again and again, we find ourselves falling back into those old patterns. This is the failure that we see with the disciples and the Pharisees today. And I pair them together because even though the disciples aren't criticized, they too are missing the boat. They too are failing to encounter this man born blind in the way that Jesus is—seeing him as a person, encountering him with compassion and love and care.

At the very beginning of our gospel passage today, we see the disciples and Jesus encountering this fellow. Maybe as a beggar on the roadside, we're not quite clear. But the disciples do not engage him. They do not talk to him. They instead turn to Jesus, act as if he's not even there, and say, "Who sinned? Who sinned that this man is blind? What is the fault underlying his condition?" They're objectifying him. They're talking about him as if he's not even there.

And Jesus rejects that entire paradigm. And in rejecting that entire paradigm, he doesn't just give them a new teaching. He embraces the man. He bends down. He lifts him up. He heals him. He encounters him as another human being. As one worthy of love and care. As another made in the image of God.

And this is the failure too of the Pharisees. They mention at a point in the gospel that they are followers of Moses, but that's not exactly quite right. One of the things that we have been discussing in the weekly Bible study as we finished reading through Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament that are historically ascribed to the authorship of Moses—is that at the very end of Deuteronomy, when Moses dies, he is buried in a secret place where no one knows.

Scholars have suggested that one of the reasons for that, in terms of the kind of arc of theological reflection in the Israelite tradition, is that Moses becomes the living law. Torah. That they are to take the Torah code as Moses among them in perpetuity. That to be a follower of Moses is to be a "people of the book," going back to that suggestion of the prologue of John.

And so when they talk about being followers of Moses, what they are talking about is that we are followers of this written, concretized, complete text that we box in, that we hem ourselves in, that we limit ourselves by. And over and over again, Jesus throughout the gospels reminds us that our call as people of faith—the depth of our engagement with Christ himself, but with God totally—is an engagement in an encounter, in relationship. The moment we kind of hem ourselves in, we have lost sight of the work that we are really supposed to be about.

And today, just like last week when we had the story of the Samaritan woman, I think it's very easy for us to kind of locate ourselves on both ends of the gospel story. Because as a collective body, we can ask ourselves where we have missed the mark. What are the ways in the limitations of our identity, the ways in which we have construed and constructed ourselves? Have we possibly objectified the other? How have we hemmed ourselves in without noticing the need immediately in front of us, the person, the relationship that we might be called into?

But also, maybe many of us have had an experience at times in our lives of being this man born blind. Of having some place in our lives of incompleteness, of brokenness, of difficulty. A place that maybe has caused us to be objectified or marginalized by others. And yet, we are reminded anew today too, that even in that dislocation, God comes to us with compassion. With love. With a recognition of our goodness. Of our sanctity. Even if the world around us does not provide it.

And that is the reminder we have in St. Paul today. He begins our epistle by saying, we were in darkness—all of us, at some point, experiencers of that incompleteness. But in Christ, in God, we can be people of light and live as children of light. That we are never completely lost. That we always have an invitation to transformation and new life available to us.

And the question is: Will we accept it? Will we take it on? And will we let it transform us? And what does that look like?

I want to give you two examples. One is President Theodore Roosevelt. I learned recently that two current senators, Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, who could not be more different than one another in almost every respect, both identify Teddy Roosevelt as their favorite president—as the one who guides and shapes their sense of public service and commitment to the people of this country more than any other.

And he was a powerful and influential figure on the national and international stage, very arguably, but very likely, certainly one of our greatest presidents. And yet, he was born in weakness. Doctors told his mother not to expect him to live out of infancy. And then when he survived infancy, they told her not to expect him to live beyond seven or eight. And yet he survived. And not only did he survive, he thrived.

We could recount the glorious achievements of his life through being a great military war hero, to being a leader of this country and president, to being the conservationist that he was in protecting our natural places in this country. But especially as he got older in life, so many of those calls that he had as a public servant—of transforming the crass and careless disregard for human life that had been part of the Gilded Age and initiating and supporting many of the revisions and renewals of public life that happened in the early 20th century—even his work in conservation was born out of this sense that he understood people that were left out and left behind.

That he had a sense of what it meant to be someone on the margins. Someone weak and powerless. And he had an opportunity to lift those folks up and to offer to them a new life, a new way of being.

And then later on in the 20th century, into the lived experience of many of us, there was a Roman Catholic French priest named Henri Nouwen, who was a spiritual writer. Some of you may have read his works over the course of your lives. But one of his central themes, which became incredibly influential in the work of people in all sorts of helping professions, was this concept that those of us who are healers in this world are often healers by virtue of a sense of woundedness.

That we have the depth of ability to be healers because of a sensitivity to the woundedness of our own lives and the woundedness that others carry. And certainly there can be times where that woundedness becomes so overwhelming that we can't be effective healers. But all healing is born of that sense of connection, that recognition and sympathy for the places of woundedness.

And so today friends, as we encounter this beautiful story of transformation, as we encounter a man transformed who nevertheless has to confront the structural inequalities of the world around him, may we not look with cynicism upon the difficulties that many of us still face. The challenges of a world gone awry in so many quarters.

But may we be renewed and rejuvenated in our own sense of transformation. May we be reminded that we still have a work of love and compassion to offer to the world. To be reminded of the places where we've come up short and can return and repent. But also the places in our own lives that are broken, in which that transformation is being offered. That we may experience love and compassion anew.

Wherever we locate ourselves today, may we hear that embrace of God. That invitation. And may we experience that transformation in this season of Lent as we journey ever closer to the light of salvation that breaks through on that Easter morning.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

March 8, 2026

I want us to begin with a small additional word of scripture. Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John—although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who were baptizing—he left Judea and started back to Galilee, but he had to go through Samaria.

I mentioned before that in some significant ways I was shaped and formed by my grandparents' generation, that "Greatest Generation." And so I carry with me some anachronisms that seem so outmoded and outdated these days. One of which is my well-worn and trusty Rand McNally Atlas, which is always in the backseat of my car. I am still captured and captivated when I open it up by the myriad byways and passages that we have throughout this country—the latticework of interstates and highways and places and opportunities we have to expediently get from point A to point B. It took decades and decades of work to figure all of that out.

That is something that we miss in our reading from the Gospel today: the "out-of-wayness" factor of what is happening here. The passages I began with this morning are the first four verses of Chapter 4. Our lectionary reading today only picks up in Chapter 5, but it is notable in verse 4 where it says, "but he had to go through Samaria," which is exactly the wrong-headed way to think about things.

The geography of the Holy Land is such that the passage between Galilee and Jerusalem was the rocky hilltop region of Samaria that made no sense to go through. If any of you have ever lived in mountainous terrain—if you ever go out to the western part of Maryland or in West Virginia—you always want to travel the valleys, the easy smooth ways. You don't go up and down the ridgelines. That is what this passage through Samaria was. Not only was it geographically difficult, it was also treacherous. This is the same passageway that the man is set upon in the parable of the Good Samaritan when he gets robbed and beaten. It was dangerous. It was fraught.

But Jesus had to take the harder way. There was something about that harder way that was at the heart of what he was doing in this moment. Now, I have many times in the past in my years of ministry preached precisely on that point: that we are called to take the harder way; that we are called to go to those who are on the margins and the fringes and the out-of-the-way places like the Samaritans.

But this year, this Sunday, this season of Lent in which we are shaping and forming ourselves anew, I want to invite us to consider our identification with or connection to this woman of Samaria. Who were the Samaritans? As a reminder, they were the remnant of the people of Israel who were left during the Babylonian Exile. In that period of exile, when they remained in the Holy Land, they ended up intermarrying with the Assyrians.

In the larger scope of Jewish identity and life, they were seen as compromised. They had married outside of the covenant. They had corrupted themselves. Their practices had gone sideways and gotten askew. They also had reoriented themselves around a separate mountain—not the mount in Jerusalem where the Temple of Solomon (or the Second Temple by this period) existed—but instead Mount Gerizim in Samaria, where they believed was really the true indwelling place of God. So, they were seen at the very least to be schismatic, wayward in their thinking, and not truly accurate and right. At worst, they were complete heretics, far beyond the pale of acceptability.

I want to invite us this morning to consider our own location as Western Christians, but especially as Christians in the United States. The Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart has suggested that we, as American Christians, are at the very least schismatic, if not openly heretical. He fleshes this out in some meaningful ways. One of the things he points out—and I think this is actually very true—is that we as Americans very often, if not almost always, default to transactional ways of living.

We see each other for the value we can get out of each other. We objectify each other. We put each other into these commodified boxes in which all we see is the benefit that we get from one another. It takes us a lot of work and a lot of effort to break down that transactional way of existing to see the humanity and the goodness in each other—to really and truly orient ourselves around relationship and the fullness of relationship.

So when Jesus comes to us today and offers the transforming good news of the Gospel, it is to a people wayward and broken. We are very much the woman of Samaria, the people of Samaria. We have a practice and a faith, but it is a faith that is so very often compromised and not complete in its fullness. But Jesus offers us the truth of the way out: that the time will come in which we will worship in spirit and truth. The brokenness of our faith experience today is not the end of the story. There is a transformation that we can receive—a new life, a reinvigorated life in the spirit and truth of God's coming among us.

What can that look like? What does this renewal of faith mean for us today? I want to offer one suggestion out of the wellspring of the work that we've been doing during the Rector's Forum on contemplative spirituality. There is a place within that tradition that helps to disorient us from our defaults and gets us outside of the routines and rhythms that keep us at arm's length from the transformation that Christ is actually offering us.

One of those gifts that contemplative spirituality offers is the gift of orientation around mantras—orientations around phrases and concepts of prayer that can deeply embed within us. This is not some mystical, otherworldly concept coming from a different faith tradition, but something deeply rooted in our own history and our own Christian walk. In 1 Corinthians Chapter 16, as St. Paul is saying his final adieus, he quotes Aramaic in the Greek. We miss this in our English translations, but in verse 22, he uses the phrase Maranatha, which translates either as the petition "Lord, come" or the proclamation "The Lord is coming."

Scholars almost universally agree that the quotation of the Aramaic here was a liturgical phrase used in worship in the first century. It was very likely a repetitive proclamation used by the first Christians to proclaim what they desired of Christ or to proclaim the arrival of Christ within their midst. Since the 1970s, at least in the United States, that phrase has taken on a contemplative spiritual gift. You can find a number of recordings of Maranatha being used in this rhythmic, prayerful way to break us out of our routines and reorient us to this phrase that can transform our lives: "Lord, come."

There was someone in our Christian tradition who helped really shape and form this anew in the 20th century: Father John Main. He was a Benedictine monk born in England in 1926. Early on in his life, he had a sense of call to some form of ordered life, but he became disillusioned and ended up leaving that process. He trained in law and entered the British Civil Service. As a young adult, he was posted to what is today Malaysia.

In Kuala Lumpur, he encountered Hinduism for the first time. He became enamored with the spiritual gift that he saw in Hinduism: the encouragement towards meditation and prayer. There was a guru he connected with, and in a movement of the Holy Spirit, this guru said, "Take of this meditation what is generative for you, but do it out of your own Christian faith. Find a mantra, find a phrase that roots you in the practice, but out of your Christian faith." The guru had encountered the Eastern Orthodox "Jesus Prayer"—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—and offered that to John Main.

That encounter reoriented his Christian life. He returned to England, became a Benedictine monk, and began offering this gift of contemplative spirituality rooted in mantra saying. He has a connection here locally as well; in the 1970s, he came to be the headmaster of St. Anselm's Abbey School in D.C. Over the ten or so years that he was there, he began a deep study of the early Desert Fathers—the monastics of the first centuries who removed themselves to desert spaces—and he discovered in them this same gift of orientation around prayerfulness and the gift of rooting yourself in phraseology.

John Main began to share that with the whole world. Up until that point, much of the contemplative prayer tradition had been seen as isolated to those who could dedicate their lives to a monastic vocation. He said, "No, anyone can do this. Laypeople can do this. You can have a family, you can have a job, but you can find and carve out a space in your life for this kind of work."

I have been really captured by that sensibility over the last several months because I think it is precisely that kind of way of practicing our faith that can disorient us from the traps that we fall into as Americans—these ways of bifurcating the world into "us and them" or "me and you," and the ways in which we so often see things transactionally. By embracing these contemplative practices, we find ourselves disoriented. I encouraged folks last week to spend a few minutes in silent prayer, and we talked about the difficulty so many of us have in simply sitting and being in silence. We are surrounded by a world of noise, a cacophony of distractions. But by embracing this opportunity to step outside of that noise and seek the solitude of silence, we find this invitation that Christ is offering to be a people of the Spirit and of truth.

Father John Main never said that there was one answer to that contemplative edge. He said, "Find those mantras in your own life." For him, it was the Jesus Prayer. For others, it may be the saying, "Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise," or the Aramaic that St. Paul offers us: Maranatha. Whatever it is, may we find a place of reorientation in it.

In this moment of chaotic uncertainty in the world around us, and this experience that we have as Americans in this current time—a time of deep uncertainty, cynicism, and unknowing—I want to offer one more phrase that I think is especially prescient. In Mark Chapter 9, we have the story of a desperate man with an ailing child. As he encounters Jesus, he pleads, "Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief."

I think this is a time in which unbelief runs rampant. When we see the many ways in which Christianity continues to be corrupted for ends and means that seem so antithetical to the Gospel, it can be easy to want to dispense with it all, to become nihilistic, cynical, and distrustful. We should be honest about those emotions and that place of deep ambiguity. Yearly assessments show we are growing significantly in the number of people who identify as agnostic or deeply uncertain—the "nones," as they call them. Many of us have moments in our life where we feel that, maybe even now.

But we have an invitation to believe even in our disbelief. May we receive that and embrace it. May we say, "Lord, we believe, even in our unbelief." In responding to Jesus' invitation, even in the difficulty of that rocky road that we walk, may we encounter the spirit of truth—the spirit of God's transforming love in the world around us. May we be people of that spirit of truth. May we be people who believe even in the midst of unbelief.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.