Two
Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday March 15, 2026 – 4th 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
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