"Hungering for Clarity" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday March 15, 2026 – 4^th Sunday in Lent
Scripture Reading:  John 9:1-41


I’m wearing my contact lenses this morning, but without them or without my glasses, I am extremely nearsighted.  I’ve worn glasses since I was 5 years old, and I can’t remember a time when I’ve been able to see clearly without contact lenses or glasses.  Last winter, shortly after Christmas, I noticed that even with my glasses, things were starting to get blurry, especially in my left eye.  Trees were looking like shapes rather than being able to see the details of their branches.  Road signs were harder to read until I got up close to them.

And when I saw my eye doctor last March, she confirmed that yes, indeed, my vision had worsened from my previous appointment, and she calculated a new prescription for me.  I wasn’t getting new frames for my glasses, so a couple of weeks later, I went back and they took my glasses away from me for a bit while they put the new lenses in them.  For a little bit, I couldn’t see anything – I sat there in the waiting room, seeing the shapes of people and hearing their voices, but not knowing who it was. You could have sat down right next to me, but unless you told me who you were, I wouldn’t have known that it was you.

And then she brought my glasses back to me.  All of a sudden, I could see clearly.  I could see the other people in the waiting room.  I could read signs in the window of the stores across the street.  And once I got out of uptown, I could see the branches on the trees again.  The world had come back in to focus.

You may have had a similar experience, if you wear glasses, or if you’ve ever had cataract surgery.  You put the lenses in front of your eyes, or the surgeon replaces the cloudy lens in your eye with a clear one, and all of a sudden the world comes in to focus.  We see the world through the lenses that we look through.

I wonder about the man who was born blind in today’s bible story.  He had never seen anything in his life, and all of a sudden he does.  I know how exciting it is to get new lenses in my glasses and to be able to see the way that I have in the past – I can’t imagine how it must have felt to obtain a new sense that you had never experienced before.  I wonder how he felt in that moment?  Was he excited?  Disappointed? Overwhelmed? Grateful?  It is a relatively long story, but I wish that John had given us just a few more details!

I do want to take a little detour to say that this is a challenging story when you look at it from a disability theology perspective.  Jesus affirms that this man’s blindness was not a result of sin – either his own or his parents’ or his grandparents’ or any of his ancestors.  Which is good.  Blindness and other disabilities are not a punishment.  But Jesus also says something that I find more difficult to accept – that this man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  I struggle to accept a God who throws challenges in front of people just so that God might work a miracle or two.  This is a very sadistic image of God.  And what about people who are blind or who have other disabilities who have prayed for a miracle but haven’t received one?  Like I said, I have issues with what Jesus is saying here.

I reconcile Jesus’s words within myself by taking a broader interpretation – that God can reveal God’s power and glory through everyone, whether with a disability or able-bodied, whether queer or straight, cis- or trans-, whether male, female, or non-binary.  No state of our being can be a barrier to God working Their glory through us.

But that is a tangent.  Back to our main story at hand, and someone who has never seen before being given sight.

This is a very down-to-earth sort of miracle that Jesus does.  He literally spits in the dirt, makes a mudpack that he places on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go away and wash in a specific pool. And when the man washes the dirt off his eyes, he can see.  Back in Genesis, we see the first human formed of dirt, and brought to life by the breath of God – here we have more dirt and the spit of God enacting a miracle of rebirth and new life.

In Lent this year, our theme is Hungering for God, and this week we are Hungering for Clarity.  We are hungering to see the world clearly, and to see where God is working, and to see where we are going.

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a facilitated conversation with my colleagues in this Region about church and ministry in these times that we are living through right now.  6 years ago today was our first Sunday after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic; and since then, it has felt like we, as a society, have had the rug pulled out from under our feet again and again and again, and it feels as though nothing will ever be familiar or stable again.

I know that you all know what the world has been going through, but when you put things into perspective, in the past 6 years, we have experienced:  a global life-threatening pandemic; revelations of systemic racism as we have seen threats to Black and Indigenous lives; who remembers the “truckers protest” of 3 years ago?; increasing hostility from the global superpower that is just over an hour away from here; inflation and trade wars; unaffordable housing for so many people and increasing homelessness; wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran; and overall a general mis-trust of authority and isolationism that has pervaded society.

This is a very destabilizing time to be living through.  What we knew in the past is likely gone.  Even if things were to change overnight – the end to all wars and a new government south of the border – even if all that changed overnight, we can’t go back to the way that things were a decade ago.

One thing that the facilitator of our conversation this week pointed out to us was that in turbulent and uncertain times, when our stability has been ruptured, one of the first casualties is our imagination.  We lose our ability to imagine, to dream of something that is both new and good.  We become stuck in the present, and we can only see the bad, and we convince ourselves that things will only get worse.

I began by talking about changing the lenses in my glasses, or with cataract surgery, how the surgeon can replace the lens in your eye.  Since we look through these lenses to see the world, the lens that we are looking through shapes what we see – things are cloudy or things are clear depending on the lens you are looking through.

What if we could take this image to a metaphorical level?  What might it be like to look at the world through the lens of Jesus?  What if we could look at the chaos of the world through, not rose-tinted lenses, but Jesus-tinted lenses?  What might we see?

I suspect that we would still see the chaos, but we might also see the pain that is behind so much of the chaos, and that we might look at the pain of the chaos with deep and compassionate love.  I suspect that we might also tune in to all of the love and kindness and goodness that is present in the world.  We might be able to focus on the people and places where hungry people are being fed, where reconciliation is happening, where people stand outside in a snowstorm to give away free pie that comes with a message of God’s rainbow-coloured love.

If looking at the world through Jesus-tinted lenses lets us look at the world today with deep love, I also wonder if looking at the future through Jesus-tinted lenses might also restore our ability to imagine and to dream.  For God doesn’t desire suffering or pain or hatred or fear.  God desires a world of love and peace and joy.  When we look at the future through the lens of Jesus, we have to imagine a future that is moving in that direction – a future where neighbour loves neighbour, a future where everyone has enough food to eat and safe shelter, a future where war and violence are things of the past.

And then once we can imagine this future, well, what’s to stop us from taking small steps towards this future?

We hunger for clarity, and while looking at the world through the lens of Jesus won’t tell us what is going to happen tomorrow, it will give us clarity on the world today, and clarity on the what-might-bes of tomorrow.  And I don’t know about you, but this is how I want to see the world.

 

“A Sliver of Clarity”
by Dennis Wilkinson on flickr
Used with Permission

"Hungering for Relationship" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday March 8, 2026 – 3^rd Sunday in Lent
Scripture Reading:  John 4:5-42

I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the Woman at the Well that Jesus encounters in today’s bible story.  She is a much loved “character” from the story of Jesus’s life – I think I’ve mentioned before that I listen to a handful of preaching podcasts each week, and one of the hosts, Dr. Karoline Lewis from the Sermon Brainwave podcast, is a New Testament scholar with a focus on the Gospel of John.  It’s a running joke anytime she speaks on the podcast or elsewhere that she will defend the Gospel of John as the best gospel right to her last breath.  And in this week’s episode of the podcast, she told us that her favourite story in her favourite gospel was the story that we read this morning.

So what do we know about this woman?  She is unnamed for one thing – we never learn her name.

We also know that she is a Samaritan, and this is significant because the Samaritan people and the Jewish people didn’t get along.  They really didn’t get along.  The didn’t get along in the way that close neighbours who have a lot in common sometimes don’t get along with each other.  Both groups claimed descent from Abraham and Sarah, from Isaac and Rebekkah, from Jacob and his many wives.  Both groups worshiped the same God, the God of their ancestors.  But due to some schism in their distant path – possibly related to the schism of the kingdom that had been united under King David and King Solomon into two separate kingdoms, the two groups practiced their religion differently, and had different holy sites.  And a religious squabble became an, “I don’t like you because you’re not like me so I’m not going to talk to you” difference of opinions.

As the narrator tells us as an aside in this story, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”

So we know that the woman at the well is a Samaritan.  An outsider, if you had a Jewish perspective.  Or maybe it was Jesus who was the outsider to her?  What else do we know about her?

We know that it was noon, and she was coming to the well alone.  This is unusual behaviour.  Hauling water is heavy work.  In Jesus’s time and place, there was no running water, and in many places in the world today, there is no running water.

When I lived in Tanzania, in East Africa, I lived on the hospital compound, and I could usually turn on the tap in my house and water would come out. (Though water outages were common enough that I usually kept a couple of jugs of water stashed just in case.)  But for many Tanzanians, this isn’t the reality.  They would fetch jugs and buckets of water from either a community tap, or a local spring, or a river, and haul it home to use for drinking, for cooking, and for washing.  In Tanzania, like in many places, hauling water is the work of women and children.  I would regularly see women helping each other lift 25-litre (6-gallon) pails of water onto each other’s heads, each one with a piece of banana leaf floating on top to keep the water from sloshing over the side, then trekking a kilometer or more back home.

It is heavy work.  It is hot work.  It is work that is done together, as it is impossible to lift a bucket that heavy on to your own head.  And it is not work that is usually done in the heat of the day.

It is very unusual for the Samaritan woman in today’s story to be at the well alone, and in the middle of the day.  Why wasn’t she there in the cool of the early morning or the evening with the other women from her village?  It’s almost as if she has been shunned by her neighbours, not welcomed in the places and groups where she would normally expect to be.

What else do we know about her?  We know that she has been married five times, and is currently with a partner to whom she is not married.

I don’t know how you have heard this story interpreted in your past, but I know that I have come across an interpretation in both sermons and in songs that names this woman as promiscuous, and that her neighbours are condemning her, shunning her for her promiscuity.  But there is absolutely nothing in the story that makes this claim.  And knowing what I know about how marriages worked in the first century in the Ancient Near East, I also know that she likely had very little agency in her marital state.

So why might she have had so many husbands?  Option 1 is that she had been widowed 5 times over.  And the effect that this would have had on her mental and emotional health is heartbreaking.  If there had been genuine love and affection in her marriages, five times she has dealt with the grief of widowhood.  And even if the marriage was more of a business transaction as was the practice of her time and place, five times she has lost the security of marriage and has been thrust into the vulnerability of widowhood.

And there are social implications of this too.  Even in today’s world, if a person were widowed five times over, the rumours fly that she or he is bad luck, or possibly guilty of murdering spouses.

If she hasn’t been widowed, the other option is that she has been divorced five times; and the most likely reason that a woman has been divorced multiple times is that she is infertile.  Marriage was about family security, and a woman who couldn’t offer that to her husband would be set aside in the hopes that a different wife might be able to do so.

And again, the emotional and social toll that this would have taken on her are immense.

Whether she has been widowed five times over, or divorced five times over, or some combination of the two, this woman seems to have been considered to be a bad luck token in her community; and as a result, she is hauling water alone at midday, without the companionship or help of the other women in her village.

And in comes Jesus.  And Jesus sees he for who she truly is.  Jesus doesn’t push her away, as if her presence might jinx him.  Jesus offers her the living water of faith and the Holy Spirit that he gives.

And I love seeing the dialogue that ensues.  She, a woman, an outsider to Jesus’s world, a woman who has been cast out from her expected social place in her village, this unnamed Samaritan woman engages in dialogue with Jesus, seeking deeper meaning and seeking to know God better.  I know that this Lent, we’re talking about hungering for God, but given that we are at a well this week, and Jesus is offering her living water, we might better say that this woman is thirsting for God.

Last week, if you were worshipping with us, we read the story about Nicodemus coming to Jesus with his questions, and it is fascinating to compare the two stories.  Nicodemus is named, unlike this week’s woman, likely because he is a man.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus hidden by the shadows of the night, while the woman this week comes to him by full daylight where anyone could see.  Nicodemus, after asking a couple of questions, just sort of fades away back into the night; whereas this Samaritan woman engages in a full dialogue with Jesus, then goes back to her village to share what she has learned with others.

Which, perhaps, makes her the very first evangelist, sharing the Good News with other people.

And, to me, it is in her return to her village that we see the crux of this story.  Because this woman who has been outcast, not part of society, grieving and working alone – because of her encounter with Jesus, she is empowered to start knocking on doors and reclaiming her place in society.  Maybe, in fact, claiming a more important place in society than she ever had before as the bearer of good news to her village.

Jesus saw her fully; and because she was fully seen, because of her encounter with the Living Water, she was able to reclaim her place in the community that had been denied to her for too long.  Because of her relationship with Jesus, she was able to rebuild relationships with her neighbours.

We are not created to be alone.  The ideal of humanity is not a hermit living in a cave on the side of a mountain with no human contact.  Yes, even for those of us who are introverts who crave alone time!  We are created for community.  We need each other, and we can only be fully human through relationship with each other.

We are created in the image of God, and the God in whose image we are created is community – the community of the Trinity, the three-in-one and the one-in-three.  God is community within Godself, and we are created in the image of community.

In a world that feels so fractured and isolating these days – sometimes because we are choosing our silos, and sometimes because people are pushed out – we hunger for relationship and for community.  We hunger for belonging, and for purpose that can be found in finding our place in the interconnected and interdependent web that we are a part of.  Like the woman at the well, we hunger to be seen, and we hunger to be accepted.  And through our relationships – our relationship with God and our relationships with each other – we can find wholeness.  Thanks be to God.

 

 

Image:  “Fetching Water, Maradi, Niger”

Photo Credit:  Water Alternatives Photos on flickr

Used with Permission

 

"Hungering for Mystery" (sermon)

Two River Pastoral Charge
Sunday March 1, 2026 – 2^nd Sunday in Lent
Scripture Reading:  John 3:1-17

Let me begin with a story.  Last summer, at VBS – Vacation Bible School – our theme was water.  We had activities and experiments all involving water.  We had a lifeguard for the afternoon and spent a couple of hours down at the wharf.  And we read some stories from the bible involving water.  We read the story about how Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea so that the people could cross safely to the other side.  We read the story about how Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and then the story about how Jesus and Peter were able to walk on water.  And we read the story of Jesus’s baptism.

When we read the story of Jesus’s baptism, we also talked about what is baptism.  Some of the VBS participants had seen a baptism, but others hadn’t, so then we took a life-sized baby doll – about the size and weight of a 6-month old baby – thank you, Elizabeth, for letting us use your baby doll – and we did a baptism right there in the sanctuary at Long Reach, talking about what we were doing each step of the way, and why.

At the end, when the kids were heading back out to the River Room, a couple of the older girls stayed behind and came up to me and said, “We still don’t get it.  How does the water do anything?  We don’t understand.”

And I was honest with them.  I told them that I don’t really understand it either.  How can a splash of water change a person’s life?  How can marking someone’s forehead with the sign of the cross clothe them in Christ?  How can this strange ritual that we do convey to us the love of the Creator of the Universe?

Like my questioners, I don’t truly understand how baptism works, but I trust that it does.  I trust that through the words and the water, God tells us, “I love you,” and that the Holy Spirit begins the process of transforming our lives.

In the end, though, baptism remains somewhat of a mystery.  In fact – you folks know that I’m a bit of a word nerd, and our word sacraments comes to us from Latin – sacramentum.  If we were to look for the Greek equivalent word, we would discover the word mysterion.  Our word “sacrament” is very closely related to our word “mystery.”

Let me take a bit of a detour here, because I also love reading mystery novels.  I love following the plot as it unfolds; I love trying to connect the clues before the fictional detective does; and I love the contract that mystery authors have with their readers that the good will prevail, and there won’t be any unresolved plot lines.

But the mystery that we are talking about when it comes to the sacraments is very different than the mystery that we are talking about when it comes to detective books and shows.  The mystery of God isn’t a puzzle to be solved.  There usually aren’t nice tidy endings.  The mystery of God is more mysterious than puzzling.  It is a mystery to be pondered rather than a mystery to be solved.

Thinking back to my questioners last summer, it felt a little bit like a Nicodemus moment.  Nicodemus was a religious leader from the denomination of the Pharisees.  The Pharisees had a very logical approach to their faith, where everyone could have access to God through following the laws of the Torah.   But there was something about Jesus that seemed to intrigue Nicodemus, that drew him to come to Jesus by night.  We don’t get to see his motivations, but I wonder if something had disrupted his faith, that had him questioning what he thought that he knew.

But Jesus’s answers only led to further confusion.  Jesus talks about being born anew, born from above.  Nicodemus tries to picture someone crawling back into their mother’s womb to be born again.  “I don’t understand.  I don’t get it.”  Jesus talks about the Spirit-Wind, how she blows where she chooses, and how we must be born of the spirit.  Nicodemus asks how can this be.  “I don’t understand.  I don’t get it.”

And this is the last that we hear from Nicodemus in this chapter.  Jesus keeps on talking, but Nicodemus… he just sort of fades away, back out into the night.  He came to Jesus seeking clarity, but leaves with even more questions than he came with.

But I wonder if this is how it is with God.  That the more that we think we understand God, the further we are from God.  That God is Holy Mystery, to be contemplated, to be pondered, rather than understood.

As we hunger for God, we also hunger for mystery, we hunger for something that is beyond our ability to comprehend.  We hunger for a love that is so deep, so broad, so un-understandable, so all-encompassing that, like Nicodemus, we are shaken loose from all that we thought that we knew.

And in our hunger… in that mystery… God is there.

 

“Look Up for Faith, Hope, and Love”
Edie Mae Herrel
Used with Permission