Laid Beside Lazarus--March 27, 2026

Laid Beside Lazarus--March 27, 2026

"Jesus said, 'Take away the stone.' Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, 'Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.' Jesus said to her, 'Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?' So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, 'Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may know that you sent me.' When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to him, 'Unbind him, and let him go'." (John 11:39-44)

Nobody was there in that instant at the dawn of creation when God first said, "Let there be light," to be able to report on how it felt--but I bet it was a lot like this. 

Jesus calls Lazarus back to life in very much the same manner as the voice of God calling creation into existence, each thing by its own name, with the kind of authority that makes something leap out of nothing. And at that moment "in the beginning," the nothingness does something very surprising by producing "something" where there had been only emptiness before, like the hollow darkness of a tomb. And yet it is also the most natural thing in the world for the "something" to answer the creative voice of God calling it into existence. The light, the sea, the land, the plants, and the animals--they all respond to God's summons freely, and yet they cannot bring themselves into existence apart from God calling them into being first. Each creature is unable to come into being on its own, but with the voice of God, all things effortlessly come into being to be precisely what they are meant to be. That is to say, there is no point in creation at which God calls oceans into existence and only a mud puddle appears, or where God intends to create whales but can only muster guppies.  When God speaks, the creating Word of God is simultaneously so authoritative and gentle that the world comes into being with perfect joy and freedom, while also being utterly dependent on the God who is doing the calling. The same thing is true when Jesus calls Lazarus back to life--and when Jesus calls to us, too.

I think this is one of the most important--but also most difficult--implications of this whole story which we've been reflecting on throughout this past week and last Sunday. This story isn't simply about proving that Jesus theoretically "has the power" to resuscitate the dead, or telling us about a stand-alone "one-off" miracle from twenty centuries ago.  This story compels us to see that each one of us, on our own, is Lazarus--completely dependent on God's creative and powerful word that brings us to life.  This is the way the New Testament often talks about the sinful human condition apart from God--not that we are spiritually "sick" and need Jesus to come along and give us a dose of divine medicine once we are clever enough to ask for it, but rather that we are dead and in the grave on our own and not even aware of our need for someone to raise us to life.  Our journey of faith doesn't start with us being smart enough to ask Jesus into our hearts or pious enough to give our lives to the Lord; it begins with Jesus calling to us like he did at the mouth of the tomb and waking us back to life when we couldn't do a thing on our own.

If that's uncomfortably humbling, well, I think that's the price of resurrection: we have to admit that we can't accomplish it by our own effort or even ask for it first.  Jesus has to call us into life the same way that God has to call the light into being in the beginning at creation.  And, again, like at the creation story, when Jesus calls our name, we cannot help but respond and come to life, like it is the most natural and free thing in the world for us to do--because it is.  But our coming to life, like the light coming out of darkness, is only possible because Jesus calls us first.  On our own, we'll never ask, initiate, or achieve new life, because we have been laid beside Lazarus in the same grave.  We are wholly dependent on a God who is willing to take the first step, to call us out onto the dance floor while we are still bashful wallflowers up against the bleachers, and to call us into motion by name when we are frozen stiff.  Jesus shows us, blessedly, that it turns out this is precisely the God we have--or rather, the God who has us.

So let this put to rest all the variations of popular religion that turn the gospel into something we must accomplish, or at least must initiate on our own, in order to get into God's good graces.  The story of Lazarus--which turns out to be our story as well--insists that God isn't waiting for us to make the first move, because we can't.  Like Lazarus, we are in need of more than just a little encouragement to keep going on the spiritual path we have already started on. We are in need of being called back to life.  Like the light before God speaks, "Let there be," we are not able to bring ourselves into existence or into salvation, but depend completely on the same God who calls us freely into life.  

Maybe faith, then, is less about figuring out the right answers on a theology exam in order to secure our names on the Heavenly Honor Roll list, and more about responding to the voice that calls us by name, the same way that voice first called creation into existence and then called to a dead man beside a rolled-away stone, "Lazarus, come out." Maybe faith is about becoming more and more fully alive and more and more completely what God has made us to be.  And maybe we could even say that when we obey the voice of Jesus who calls us up out of our graves, it is not drudgery the way we often think of "obedience" but the most joyful and free thing we can be.

Today, do you hear the voice calling us already?  He's there--just at the door. He is calling you and me, and all of us, by name.  Can you hear it? "Come out."  What can we do, but answer his call?

Lord Jesus call us to life again today, and let your voice be strong enough to enable us to respond.

The God Who Weeps--March 26, 2026

The God Who Weeps--March 26, 2026

[Jesus] said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep." [John 11:34-35]

Jesus weeps.

He trembles. He cries. His voice cracks. And he has no teaching or parable to explain away the pain of this moment. For this moment--between the death of his friend Lazarus and the moment when Jesus summons him back to life--Jesus sits shiva and only laments the loss of his friend's life cut short. And for this moment, there are no words. Just tears.

We who have heard the story of Lazarus before, as many of us did this past Sunday, know that there will come a moment, very soon, in the story, when Jesus will raise Lazarus from the dead, and that everyone will be all smiles again before the scene ends. But this moment--this moment of utter helplessness, of total vulnerability, of sheer lament--this moment is a hard one for us to bear. This, too, is what God is like.  This, too, is the Lord of all creation and Ground of all being. Jesus shows us a God who weeps, whether you and I like it or not.

Typically, we like our saviors to be active heroes, casting out demons and curing lepers in the blink of an eye, rather than weeping uncontrollably and drawing everyone's attention while doing it. But there is Jesus, melting into a million tears because his friend died too soon.

Generally, we want our saviors to be idealized generic supermen, descending from on high (whether from heaven or the planet Krypton) but keeping their distance. But Jesus shows up as an olive-skinned Jewish rabbi from the Middle East grieving the death of another olive-skinned Jew from the Middle East, as completely human as you and me.

Usually, we expect our saviors to point fingers at an obvious easy target for an enemy to hate, someone we can pin all the blame for when things go wrong, and then for the "savior" figure to obliterate those identified villains in order to save the day. But instead we are given Jesus, who doesn't vilify anyone nor make anyone out to be the bad guy at Lazarus' grave--he is simply grieving the reality of death. Jesus grieves, because God grieves over death--any death.

And honestly, all of that is hard for us. It is a challenge for us to allow Jesus to weep--it makes him seem somehow out of control, somehow too much like us for our comfort. We want to jump ahead to the miraculous moment of resuscitation when Lazarus comes out of the grave, just like we want to skip Good Friday and Holy Saturday right to the pastels and major-key anthems of Easter Sunday. But today the challenge of Jesus is to bear the moments when our only task is grieving, and where the only right words are lament. Today, our challenge is to sit shiva with Jesus, to be vulnerable with Jesus, to grieve with Jesus, and to hold our tongues before blurting out some faux-religious justification for the terrors that happen in this world or lobbing out some half-baked tough-sounding "solution" to prevent terrible things from happening.  If we belong to the found-family of Jesus and his beloved, then sometimes the thing we are called to do, as the Apostle Paul would write to the Romans, is to "weep with those who weep," even when it looks utterly weak and pointless.

Today, in other words, the challenge of Jesus is to weep with him--and therefore with God--over every death: those still grieving from terrorist attacks a few years ago in Israel, as well as those grieving in Gaza and Iran; those who have lost loved ones in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in Sudan, and in our own neighborhoods.  We grieve over every death, never celebrating anyone's dying, because Jesus has shown us that there are tears streaming down God's face as well. And from there we cannot help but see this weeping God present also at the lynching trees of the American South while Confederate flags wave in the background, decades after the Civil War was over... and to see God there tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die... and to see God forced to flee from violence and disaster and taking up shelter among moving bands of refuge-seekers. We cannot help but see God in every place of suffering in all of human history--Jesus has shown us this about God.

We do not want to do this, but Jesus challenges us to weep with him, where he is, even though he keeps insisting on bringing the presence of God into all the places we do not think a respectable, strong, "winner" deity to be found.

So let us grieve today--with no trying to explain away the horror, or to minimize the evil, or to pretend that more weapons will keep us "safe" next time, or to skip past what feels like weakness and vulnerability. Let us sit shiva with our Jesus, who wept for Lazarus, and who weeps today for beloved ones still all over the world.

Lord Jesus, grant us to share your pain and to weep with you, rather than to avoid or ignore or to skip the necessary lament of this day.

The Hard Work of Waiting--March 25, 2026

The Hard Work of Waiting--March 25, 2026

"Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, 'Lord, he whom you love is ill.' But when Jesus heard it, he said, 'This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.' Accordingly, though Jesus loved Marth and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer at the place where he was." (John 11:1-6)

I am convinced--and I won't be surprised to hear Jesus say so when get to glory--that those two days waiting, apart from his dear friends in Bethany, were harder to get through than the two days Jesus spent in the grave himself. It is always harder to know that someone you love is in pain and to know you need to be apart from them in the suffering, than to go through physical pain yourself. It is harder not to be able to fix things for them, and harder still not to be able to be with them as they hurt.

Every parent wishes they could trade places with their hurting kid at whatever age: when they are up in the night as little ones throwing up, when they get their hearts broken after their first crush ends badly in junior high school, or when they are stressing out in young adulthood about jobs and life decisions and everything... and mom and dad have no magic wands to make it all better. Every grown child, for that matter, wishes they could absorb the suffering of their parents, too, whether it is from a cancer diagnosis, or beginning the long goodbye of dementia, or watching them age and slow down. Everybody wishes they could take away the tears of their friends who are grieving, too. Honestly, we would all rather have some way to take away the pain of those we love. And it is quite often the hardest thing we have to do to know that sometimes we have to stay back.

Jesus knows how this story is going to turn out--he knows both that Lazarus really will die after all, and he also knows that he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, too. And yet, Jesus also knows that he isn't at the end of the story, yet. He knows that what is necessary at this moment is the distance... the time... the separation. But please, let's not pretend that it was easy for Jesus, or that Mary, Marth, and Lazarus were not important to him. Twice in just six verses here in this story that many of us heard on Sunday, John the narrator has underscored that Jesus loved these people; they were dear friends to him. And it had to cut him to the quick to stay where he was, knowing both that it would mean arriving "too late" to save Lazarus, and that he would be opening himself up to accusations that he didn't care, or wasn't a help, or that he had let everybody else down.

It is easy to be the one who always shows up on time and has a silver bullet to stop every problem. It is hard to be the savior who (like with Jairus' daughter, too) gets detained and isn't there when people expected him to be there. It is hard to bear the looks of disappointment, and then to keep on bringing people to life again.

I don't think we usually give Jesus enough credit for what he suffers in this story. I mean, the actual miracle isn't hard work for Jesus--by the time he raises his dead friend, all Jesus will have to do is call to him, "Lazarus, come out!" But we forget how much Jesus was willing to endure in the in-between time. We forget that there needed to be two days in limbo waiting, and that there would be angry tears and bitter disappointments from Mary and Martha, and that there would be the unsteadiness of having his own knees give out when Jesus got to Lazarus' grave and finally fell down to the ground in shock and sadness himself when he saw it. We forget, I think, that sometimes the path to bringing life requires an unheroic-looking distance.

These days, a lot of people are learning that same pain. We would all love to get to be "heroes" who drop in and "fix" things for friends, for neighbors, for loved ones who are struggling, whether with a difficult diagnosis, a loss in their own lives, a relative who is now deploying overseas into a war zone, or someone who is just struggling to find the money to put gas in their vehicle before the money runs out. We would love it, I suspect, if we could just drop in say the "one right thing" that will cheer hearts, make the cancer go away, bring back the lost loved one, or bring down the price of groceries and utilities. We want to be useful, helpful... you know, "Christ-like." And instead, we find in so many different ways that we can't "fix" things for the people we care about.

But mark my words: Jesus knows what it is like to be there.  Jesus knows--which is also to say that God knows--that sometimes there is no quick fix.  Jesus knows that he will end up bearing the brunt of angry questions from Mary and Martha, just as God has gotten plenty of our angry questions aimed at the sky in the past, too: "Where were you when my spouse got sick, God?" "If you are so good, why did you let those children die in the news story I heard about?"  "Why did you allow my friend to be so swallowed up by the depression they kept hiding that they ended their own life?"  God, too, has been hit with our relentless questions that boil down to asking why God didn't show up when we wanted God to, and on the terms that we wanted.

You know, I suspect, that before the story of Lazarus is done, Jesus will have broken down weeping, and he will have to bear the accusations of the dead man's sisters, demanding to know why he wasn't there to prevent Lazarus from dying. He will take their angry words, knowing all the while what he is going to do for the, and he bears them all. He doesn't dodge or deflect. He doesn't insist that everything is fine when it isn't. He doesn't pass the buck or deny his choices. He takes every last word, and every hysterical punch Mary and Martha can throw at him, and he bears them. All the while, knowing he has come to raise Lazarus from the dead.

Jesus knows that in the end, he needs Martha, Mary, and even Lazarus to know that he will be with them all the way through death and out the other side into resurrection life. He wants them to know they can trust him to the end of the earth--and so he goes with them to the very brink... and beyond. If Jesus dropped in as the hero on the white horse in the nick of time to save the day, it sure would have made for a great story, but there would have always been an unspoken fear of death hovering around everyone. There would have been relief that Lazarus hadn't died... but it would have come at the expense of all of them still being afraid that one day Lazarus could get sick again, and Jesus might not be able to make it in time. So Jesus has to show them, by arriving too late on the scene, that there is no such thing as "too late" for him. But it sure must have hurt to wait those two extra days away from his friends.

We may have to see things in a similar light these days. Nobody wants their friend, their neighbor, or their relative to be left alone as they go through difficult times. We all want to be helpers and heroes. But sometimes, if helping is really about what is best for someone else's well-being rather than about an ego-trip for ourselves, we have to be ok with knowing we can't always fix situations. We have to do the hard work of waiting sometimes: to accompany people through their grief, to walk with them through their sorrow, and to face the hard questions that bubble up in those times.

There will come times when we can help in person... when we can help best by washing feet or showing up. But Lazarus' story reminds us that sometimes all we can do looks like too little and too late.  In those times, we rely on the Gospel's promise that we are not alone in that waiting time, either--Jesus is there in the waiting, too.  And even when we have only burning tears and angry accusations at the heavens, Jesus bears and comes to be with us.

Lord Jesus, give us courageous and loving patience like you.

Without Our Initiative--March 24, 2026

Without Our Initiative--March 24, 2026

"Then [the LORD] said to me, 'Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely. Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, has spoken and will act, says the LORD'." [Ezekiel 37:11-14]

Watch out--the first step is a doozy.

The first of the Twelve Steps, I mean--in an addiction recovery program, like Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step is especially hard, because it means letting go of the illusion that you're in control of things. "We admitted we were powerless... and that our lives had become unmanageable." That's how it starts--not with a vow to "just try harder," or a recitation of the old poem Invictus, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." No, instead, recovery has to begin with the honest recognition of our powerlessness, so that we can finally quit wasting our energy pretending we've got our stuff together.

In so many ways, that's all of us human beings, too--whether or not you're officially in a Twelve Step Recovery program. Left to our own devices, we're all pretty well powerless, and our lives are just about unmanageable, too--except we tend to want to fool ourselves and everyone else around that we're all smashing successes. We want to picture ourselves as the doctor or nurse who saves the patient in the nick of time, or the firefighter who comes out of the burning building at the last minute, carrying the rescued child. We don't want to consider that we're the patient on the table or the person carried out of the flames.

But the Scriptures telling us the uncomfortable truth: we are not spiritual Boy Scouts earning heavenly merit badges to make it to the next rank up; we are more like old chalky bones needing to be raised to life again through a power beyond our own. We're Lazarus, waiting to be called to life again--which isn't something we can achieve by our own power.

Maybe that's what makes it so hard to admit we are powerless like Ezekiel's valley of bones: it means that we bring nothing to the table but our helplessness. Bones, after all, can't even ask for help or healing. A sick person might have the bright idea to call 9-1-1. A child trapped in a burning house can shout for help. But bones? They don't even know their predicament--they can't even ask for help in the first place. God has to give it without being asked first. God has to step in and raise the dead, without waiting around for the bones to get their act together and request a resurrection. That means--gasp--God's work to save us doesn't depend on our being bright enough to request it, good enough to earn it, or pious enough to invite Jesus into our hearts first. We are powerless, and our lives are unmanageable, after all. We need a God who is willing to raise us from the dead without needing our initiative to kickstart it or to invite God into our hearts first. We need a God who redeems even before we realize we need redemption.

That was certainly the hard pill that the exiles had to swallow in Ezekiel's day. After generations of thinking they were invincible because they had God on "their side" or because of their national wealth or their armies or their weapons or their own generic "greatness," they were brought face to face with their own helplessness. Babylon, the empire du jour, had trampled down their city walls, burned their Temple, overrun their armies, and plundered their wealth. It was as close as you could be to national death--to being just a valley full of old bones. And it was at that point--but not before--that God could bring about a resurrection and bring them home again. Resurrection, by definition, is only for the dead, and therefore must be given and cannot be earned, initiated, or even asked for. But that's exactly when God's best work gets done.

If we, like the ancient exiles sitting in Babylon, don't bring anything to the table to earn or initiate our own resurrection, then that certainly removes any ground we have for looking down on anybody else. Bones don't get to brag, and the femur over here doesn't have reason to think it's better than the tibia further down on the pile. We're all just in need of a power beyond ourselves to bring us back to life. If I want to grow in love, it will mean abandoning the illusion that I'm more worthy of God's love than you or anybody else.

Today, then, is a day for honesty... with ourselves and with God, so that we can be honest with everybody else, too. We are helpless on our own--but that doesn't need to make us despair for even a split second, because ours is a God who meets us exactly at our helplessness. The thing that changes for us, though, once we are able to admit that we are powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable, is that we don't have to try and compare ourselves to anybody else, push them down, or puff ourselves up. We can leave that kind of arrogance behind as one more coping mechanism that never got to the root of the problem anyway. And instead, with open, empty hands, we will at last be ready simply to let God resurrect what is dead in us--and to rejoice when God does that for others around us, whether or not we thought they were "worthy" of it.

O living God, we find ourselves resurrected by your power and your life-giving Spirit--thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Allow us to quit pretending we have come to life in you by our own achieving, so that we can celebrate as you call others to life all around us, too.

Letting God Surprise Us--March 23, 2026

Letting God Surprise Us--March 23, 2026

"The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, 'Mortal, can these bones live?' I answered, 'O Lord GOD, you know.' [Ezekiel 37:1-3]

The longer I continue in this life's journey with God, the more I come to believe that faith starts, not with what we "know" about God, but with the humility to say, "I don't know, God--but you do." Faith, in other words, doesn't start with our cocky certainty about how God works, but rather with giving God the room [or recognizing that God already has the room] to surprise us.

And honestly, I think faith doesn't only start there. Mature faith has learned how to let God keep surprising us, too. A growing and deepening faith doesn't look so much like a catechism of memorized answers, which confine God to stay inside the boundaries of theological theses and philosophical propositions, but rather looks like a relationship that knows the Divine well enough to know that there's always an ace up God's sleeve.

That is most certainly where the prophet is by the time we get to the vision here in Ezekiel 37, words that many of us heard yesterday in worship. He has known the living God long enough not to put anything past the Almighty... and knowing that the moment you decree God "can't" do something, or isn't "allowed" to do something [you know, because of "the rules"], God tends to take it as a personal dare to do the very thing you said God couldn't or wouldn't do. That's why Ezekiel has learned that when God asks a question, especially something that sounds like a loaded question, it's best not to pretend to have more answers or more certainty than you really can claim.

When God shows Ezekiel a valley full of chalky old dry bones and asks, "Can these bones live again?" the obvious answer would have been a resounding NO. No, old bones cannot come to life again. No there is no hope for scattered skeletons. And by extension, the obvious answer should have been NO, there was no hope for the scattered fragments of the people of Judah, whose nation had been destroyed and whose citizens had been taken into exile in Babylon. By all reasonable accounting, the nation was, to be blunt about it, dead.

And that's really what's behind God's question and the imagery of dry bones. They are a stand-in for the exiled people of Israel and Judah, and they were certain that there was no hope for them. Their nation and all the things they built their identity on [their Temple, their capital city Jerusalem, their way of life, and their king] were gone, and they were certain that their covenant relationship with God was permanently and irreparably broken. The idea of a new beginning and a new relationship with God was as absurd as the idea of dead bones becoming living people again. So when God asks Ezekiel, "Can these bones live?" Ezekiel and all of his fellow exiles would have heard it with the same force as, "Could there ever be a new beginning for us as a people?" And the obvious common-sense, rational answer to both questions should have been, "No."

But of course, Ezekiel has known God for long enough not to fall for the obvious answer, even when anything else seems impossible. He knows that God doesn't ask a question like that without a reason, and usually the reason involves up-ending our old assumptions. So Ezekiel lets humility direct his answer: "O Lord God, you know." That is to say, "Everything else would have told me there was no hope, but you are the God who does impossible things, and you would move heaven and earth for the sake of your beloved, so I won't put anything past you any longer." Ezekiel's faith is mature enough that he's ready--maybe even expectant--for God to surprise him, even if it means admitting he doesn't have all the answers.

That's really what God's people keep coming back to, isn't it? Throughout the Scriptures, in the stories of ancient Israel through the gospel adventures of Jesus and the witness of the early church, we are most in closest [and most honest] relationship with God when we abandon all arrogance and pretense and let ourselves be surprised by the ways God's strong love does the impossible. Or, as theologian Douglas John Hall puts it, "The disciple community believes that God reigns, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. But God, as God is depicted in the continuity of the Testaments, is never quite predictable—or rather, only this is predictable about God: that God will be faithful.”

It's the same humility in faith that leads Peter to call out to Jesus, "If it's you, Lord, call me to come to you out on the water." It's the same openness for God to do a new and impossible thing that leads the Ethiopian eunuch to ask, "What is to prevent me from being baptized?" and Philip to go ahead and baptize him, even for all the long list of reasons that "the rules" say he can't. And today we are again dared to let our love of God be humble enough to be open to God's surprising actions that push the boundaries of what we thought possible.

On this day, the living God just might pose some equally impossible sounding question to you, too: "Mortal, will you love those you have written off as unacceptable and unworthy?" "Disciple, could my grace give a new beginning for someone you have written off as beyond hope?" "Child, could there be hope where you have given up, and new life for you right now?" When it happens, may we have the maturity of faith to know how, like Ezekiel, to answer humbly:

"O Lord God, you know."

Surprise us, O God, as you will--and let these hearts of ours be ready for you to move in ways we did not expect, but which turn out to be completely faithful to your character.

On Being Found--March 20, 2026

On Being Found--March 20, 2026

"Jesus heard that [the religious leaders] had driven [the man who had been blind] out [of the synagogue], and when he found him, he said, 'Do you believe in the Son of Man?' He answered, 'And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.' Jesus said to him, 'You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.' He said, 'Lord, I believe.' And he worshiped him." (John 9:35-38)

Religious folks often seem to want to ask the question, "Have you found Jesus?" But the Scriptures seem much less interested in that question than they are in what happens when we recognize that Jesus has found us.

This scene, which comes at the conclusion of the story we've been looking at all week, is a case in point.  It is indeed true that Jesus asks the man who had earlier been blind "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" but once you see that question in its context, it sounds much less like a cold call of a religious salesman at the door, and much more like, well, another instance of Jesus doing the seeking.  The man who can now see has been ostracized from his religious community because he wouldn't denounce Jesus as a "sinner" for healing on the sabbath.  He simply testified to what he knew about Jesus and what Jesus had done for him, and the Respectable Religious Leaders were outraged, so they expelled him from the synagogue.  He was now an outcast, not because of his physical malady, but because of the condemnation of the Orthodoxy Police.  So what does Jesus do?  He does what he always does: Jesus seeks out the outcast and brings them into his own embrace.

It is worth noting that Jesus has to be the one who does the seeking and finds the man who had been blind, because the healed man had never actually seen Jesus before to be able to look for him again.  When he first met Jesus, of course, he could not see him, and Jesus' curious way of healing him was to put mud on his eyes and go send him to the pool of Siloam to wash.  So he wouldn't know Jesus if he found him, and he had no particular reason to believe that Jesus was still in town.  If this man is going to be reclaimed from being thrown out and rejected, it will have to be Jesus who makes the first move.  Jesus will have to be the seeker.  And so he is.

This coming Sunday, many of us will hear another amazing story from John's Gospel, when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And in that story as well, the responsibility will fall to Jesus to take the initiative both to heal and to restore the lost, since the recently-deceased Lazarus cannot ask for Jesus' help, seek him out, or take the first step. Jesus will have to make the first move, because dead men do not even know they are dead to be able to ask for resurrection. Jesus is the seeker, and Lazarus brings only his empty-handed deadness.  Over and over again in the Scriptures, that's how it works: not so much that we have to go find a missing deity, but rather that we are the ones who have gotten ourselves lost, gone astray, or don't even realize that we are in trouble (or dead!), and God is the one who seeks, regathers, and rescues us.

So here in John 9, Jesus is the one who does the finding, and honestly, that's what the whole Christian story is really about: being found by Jesus.  Once Jesus has found the man whom he had healed, he can ask the question about belief--"do you believe in the Son of Man?"--but only after having sought him out first.  And of course, the man's response is telling: he doesn't know who this "Son of Man" is!  So Jesus even supplies him with the answer.  "It's me.  The one who is talking to you.  I am the one worthy of your trust.  I have already sought you ought."  That changes how we hear the initial question, doesn't it?  Instead of sounding like a quiz or being a litmus test (as in, "If you get this one wrong, you're not going to heaven!"), but rather with the assurance that if the man doesn't know the answer, Jesus will supply it.  Jesus doesn't say, "Well, since you didn't properly recognize me as Lord and Savior, I'm afraid you're doomed!  Tough luck!" but rather, "Since you don't know yet, I'll tell you--I'm the one to put your trust in.  And don't worry--I've already found you first!"

And of course, part of the point of stories like in this in the gospel is to help us to recognize the resonance with our own story, too.  Each of us has been found by Jesus; each of us was first sought by Jesus.   Each of us has been drawn, led, and pulled by the Spirit already, even before we were aware of it.  So when we get to a place of being able to say, "I believe in Jesus," it is only possible because God has enabled us to place our trust in Jesus.  Jesus spoon-feeds the answer to the man who had been blind, after all; he will not keep his identity secret or hidden from us.  The humbling, but deeply grace-filled, thing is that Jesus has already sought us out before we realized we should even be looking for him.  By the time we can answer the question, "Have you found Jesus?" in the affirmative, it turns out that he has already found us.  Like our older brother in the faith Martin Luther says when he is talking about the meaning of the Third Article of the Creed ("I believe in the Holy Spirit..."), at some point we come to the realization that "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him; but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel..." The point at which we come to put our faith consciously in Jesus is much more the realization that we have been found already first by the One who sought us out. And maybe the whole Christian life is really a matter of learning what it means that we have been found by Jesus, and that in his grip we are held with a love that will not let us go.

I suspect that realization will change the way we share our faith with people.  Instead of seeing ourselves as religious salespeople trying to close a deal by getting people to subscribe to our religion or buy the Savior we are peddling, we'll see ourselves as people who have been found and are helping others to recognize that Jesus has found them, too.  We will see salvation, not as a reward for reaching the end of a spiritual treasure hunt, but the gift given by the One who found us when we didn't even realize we were lost, and who gathers us into his embrace when we had been outcasts before. And maybe we will stop talking about eternal life as a prize we have earned for getting the answers right on some post-mortem theological exam at the pearly gates and more as the new kind of existence we become aware of when we realize that Jesus has claimed us and the Spirit has given us the ability to trust in him as a gift. When that happens, we'll see that belonging in the community called "church" is not an exclusive club for people who know the right password, but a gathering of outcasts, misfits, and lost sheep whose hope doesn't hang on getting the answers right but on having been sought out by the Shepherd already. And faith is simply the word for how you come to see the world differently when you realize you have been found.

Today, may we realize that beautiful, humbling truth: we have been found.

Today, may we help someone else to see it, too.

Lord Jesus, heal our vision to see ourselves as people whom your love has found, and to let that seeking love be our message to the world.

Removing Our Filters--March 19, 2026

Removing Our Filters--March 19, 2026

"Some of the Pharisees said, 'This man [Jesus] is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.' But others said, 'How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?' And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, 'What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.' He said, 'He is a prophet'." (John 9:16-17)

It's not a lack of piety or belief that keeps people from recognizing the saving power of God in this story; it's arrogant religious certainty. That's the tragedy, and the warning for us. Sometimes the Respectable Religious People are so unquestionably sure they know who is a "sinner" that they are unable to acknowledge the miracle in their midst that has come from God's own hand. Sometimes we are those Respectable Religious People ourselves, missing out on the gracious power of God right before our eyes. And it quite literally a damn shame when we miss it.

This is one of those realities we have a hard time wrapping our minds around, because most of the time we'd think it's a good thing to have strong faith, sure convictions, and solid confidence in what we believe. And, sure, all of that is true. Waffling faith that keeps looking back, twiddling its thumbs, or is afraid to step out of the boat and onto the water is not a virtue. But when faith curdles into dogmatism--when our faith shifts from being focused on God to being focused on our rightness about what we think about God--we can end up missing what God is actually doing among us, because we've filtered out anything unexpected from our view.

That's what has happened in this passage, which continues the story many of us heard this past Sunday in worship: some of the Respectable Religious People have pre-decided that nothing Jesus does can be good or holy or from God, because he has healed someone on the sabbath day. And this is the hitch--they've decided that their interpretation of what the sabbath commandment means is unquestionable, and therefore when Jesus does something that breaks their interpretation of the rule, they are dead certain that he's broken the commandment... and therefore is a sinner... and must hate the word of God. Funny, isn't it, how we so easily make that leap from "we disagree about what this religious commandment means" to assuming "because you and I disagree, YOU must be wrong, YOU must be the sinner, and YOU must reject the word and authority of God." Jesus, of course, doesn't do any of those things, despite the fact that he believes the sabbath commandment allows for healing and restoring life--in fact, that is the purpose of sabbath in the first place. The trouble here with the Respectable Religious People isn't that they take their faith seriously and care about practicing their piety--it's rather than they are unwilling to even consider the possibility that they could be wrong in their interpretations... and because of that, they set themselves up to miss out on the presence of God's saving power in their midst.

And of course it's easy for us 21st century church folk to rag on this particular group of Pharisees in this particular episode, and to miss the way we do the very same thing. It may not be a miraculous restoration of sight that happens in the course of this day, but all too easily, we make decisions in advance of who "must be" a sinner because they disagree with us, and therefore, we assume they are not only wrong but opposed to God and God's ways. And instead of seeing other people who differ as people who love the same God we do and who are striving their best to live out their faith in that God, we end up saying, "Because we disagree, YOU are wrong--and since I love God you must HATE God." We end up parting company with folks who are striving their very best, just as surely as we are striving our best, to seek the will of God and love the way Jesus loves. And we end up letting our faith become rigid and brittle like a weathered old wooden beam, rather than flexibly strong like a living oak that can sway in the breeze without snapping, precisely because it can bend.

This is at least part of why it is so vitally important for love to include intellectual humility rather than unquestionable arrogance. Arrogance isn't just bragging about my accomplishments: it's also what happens when I am so certain about my rightness than I cannot fathom even the possibility that I could be wrong, or that I could have something to learn. And it's not just bragging that kills Christ-like love--it's when I allow my rigid certainty to keep me from seeing others as people through whom God might be moving, people whom God is healing and saving right now, and even people through whom God might be teaching me something. When our faith is no longer teachable and correctible--when I am unwilling to hear someone else's perspective or see how another person views things--I should be worried that my faith is no longer in God, but in my own certainty. And that kind of certainty is an idol of the most insidious kind.  On the other hand, when we can see that our reason for belonging in the family of God comes from God's grip on us, rather than our exclusive grasp on The Truth, we can consider the possibility of our own wrongness and be open to learning from others, as well as making space for people whose perspectives are different from our own, even while they are still striving to follow Jesus and seek the will of God.

Today, without becoming spineless jellyfish who have no substance or convictions, perhaps it's enough for us simply to practice the humility that dares to say, "Maybe I'm not right about everything--and if I'm not, how would I know?" Maybe before we leap to saying our disagreements automatically mean that THOSE PEOPLE must hate God or reject the Bible, we could stop and ask, "Is there the possibility that I have something to learn here--and could I be at risk of missing out on what God is up to?" Like the line from Ted Lasso puts it (even if it's not really from Walt Whitman, as the famous scene from the TV shows claims), "Be curious, not judgmental."  When we can be curious and ask others how they see things and how they have arrived at their perspectives, we end up learning a great deal rather than missing out on opportunities for growth.  And most of all, we are less likely to miss out on the movement of God in our midst on account of our inability to see what we did not expect.

A story like this one says to me that Jesus is willing to go out of his way to help us to remove those filters we've put up that keep us from seeing God moving in unexpected ways. Maybe today's the day we let him in close enough to restore our vision to see God's goodness where we didn't think it could be found, right before our eyes.

Jesus, break down the arrogance in our minds that keeps us from seeing where you are at work, and keeps us from recognizing the people through you are trying to get through to us.