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.