I told you to expect long readings, didn’t I?! Have a seat - get comfortable. This is one week where you might actually welcome a long sermon just to be able to sit for a while. :)
Today is Rose Sunday, the halfway point of Lent. We celebrate with a slightly less somber liturgy, festive rose-colored vestments, and these readings. Rose Sunday has been observed for centuries in the church. Traditionally in the English Church, the Feeding of the Five Thousand was read on this day. That changed when we tried to bring our church’s readings into alignment with other Christian traditions. But the Collect or opening prayer is a vestige of that old custom: Gracious Father, whose blessed Son came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him.
Another name given for this day is Refreshment Sunday. Refreshment for that traditional reading, for the reprieve today provides from Lent and also, I suspect, because it just falls around the time of the spring equinox and the days truly getting lighter and longer.
Today’s readings, too, are quite lovely and refreshing, and fully in keeping with the theme of the day: Samuel’s scouting out the next king of Israel and selecting not the beefy, obvious eldest sons but the littlest, and youngest, David. The Old Testament’s commitment to exalting the least and lowest would of course become central to our Christian faith as well, focused as it is on a Messiah who completely fails to impress in conventional earthly ways and yet excels in ways no one could have imagined or foreseen. This the mystery of the Gospel that we’ll be trying to wrap our minds around from now until Easter.
In today’s Gospel story, it’s also the underdog, a blind man, who becomes the one with insight that Jesus’ disciples and the religious leaders fail to demonstrate. The set-up of this story is wonderful. All the disciples do is lay eyes on this man and immediately they need to ask the question that puts their own blindness on full view: was this man or his parents a sinner that he was born blind? Jesus already established that the world rarely works like that with clear cause and effect. When it comes especially to an illness or handicap, blaming and shaming is, to him, abhorrent. You never see Jesus do that; he only preaches and teaches against those who do.
Instead of turning this man into a theological question like the disciples do, Jesus just goes up to him. In every miraculous encounter in the Gospels there’s the first step, in itself a miracle and meant to be recognized as such: the encounter, the inclusion of that person in society by the attention Jesus pays them.
In the Episcopal Church you’ll often hear us talk about healing not just as the restoration of what was or the attainment of what’s being asked for, but also as the restoration of the sick or grieving person to community. When we do healing prayer in the chapel, part of that healing is simply enfolding into the wider body of Christ the bereaved, because there’s nothing lonelier than being isolated in our grief, or disability, or illness. Healing starts with not being shut out.
And looked at in this sense, we can all perform the healing act of locking eyes with someone, of going up to them, talking to them, treating them every bit like the child of God they are with equal stature and dignity--and (this is important) overcoming our own fears or inadequacies so we can approach another. I hear that a lot: I didn’t know what to say. They don’t need me right now. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. Or That brings up too much for me. When we make it about us, we put up (a wall) between ourselves and a person who needs a companion.
Whether they’re differently abled, grieving, without a home, whatever ails them, the first act of healing is to bring others into the circle of love and fellowship. This, to me, is the central message of this Gospel reading, and everything that follows after just proves the point that we’ll sometimes do anything to skirt and evade, rather than just address the need (and person) right before us. The disciples did that at the beginning with a theological question, which Jesus just brushed aside so he could help the blind man. After them, some new wrongheaded people step in: the religious leaders.
We begin (by the way) to tread some very uncomfortable ground between now and Easter, with tension building between Jesus and the religious leaders, and because they’re Jewish, our Gospels can start to sound uncomfortably anti-semitic, especially around Holy Week. This is a topic I always address in some form or another in a sermon, or in the bulletin, particularly for Good Friday. For now I’ll just make note of it, because you can’t help but notice it, especially in John’s Gospel.
But religious authorities are the same across any faith and time, and they share in common weaknesses of all of us: we can get hung up on the narrowest questions, not see the forest for the trees. Who gave this man his sight? Who does he think he is? When did he do it? Did he do it in the right way? Did anyone ask permission? All this questioning, which makes this reading so painfully long, almost verges on the comical if it weren’t so tragic. It’s like everyone wants to do everything except rejoice with this man. Except, throw their arms around him. They’d been passing him by for so long that’s all they know how to do. Their blindness to what the moment is asking could be any of ours.
I love the line--really more like an injunction--from St. Paul to the Romans: “Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” Just be there for people. In genuine community. Don’t talk about people, talk to them. Help them. Offer kindness, a healing word or touch, a human connection. In doing this, we too can become healers, miracle workers, with Christ.
Starting today, we enter the second half of Lent. It’s one of the heartrending aspects of the Gospel story that this man, who made a life of showing his followers how to care for others Would himself not receive that care when he needed it most. We’re challenged by today’s reading, and by what lies ahead, to follow the example of our Lord. As he says in today’s reading, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is still day.” Time is short. May God give us the strength and courage we need to make the most of every moment, and every encounter. Amen.