March 15, 2026
Lent 4
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
A couple of weeks ago, Canon D Littlepage from the bishop’s office made an offhand reference to something Bishop Mello said in his address to diocesan convention last fall: the Episcopal Church, Bishop Mello said, is Christianity’s best kept secret. It was not a compliment; it was a warning sign. We don’t like to toot our own horn, and we certainly don’t like to be too Jesus-y about things. We love to either rest on our laurels (more Presidents of the United States have been Episcopalians than any other denomination) or bemoan all that we have lost (we’ve gotta get more kids, more young people, churches are closing, no one new is coming through our doors, they’d rather go to a yoga studio than come to church, and on and on).
Now, there is nothing wrong with taking pride in our history. Nor is there anything wrong with trying to find ways to reach those beyond our doors with the blessing of the Good News we have to share. The problem is that when we spend so much time looking backward at how good things once were that we are unable to enjoy the gifts that are right in front of us and to think creatively about the future to which God invites us.
The prophet Samuel had anointed Saul as king just as God had told him to do, and now God was finished with Saul and seeking a worthy king for the people. And Samuel is conflicted. The end of chapter 15 of 1st Samuel comes just before the section we heard this morning, and it says “Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel” (15:34-25). Samuel didn’t want to move on, but God was insistent, doing a new thing, and the next king Samuel anointed was David, the great king of Israel and ancestor of Jesus.
We humans have a way of getting stuck in how we understand our world and the people in it. A first impression can be hard to shake. In many ways, I will always be the spoiled baby of the family to my five older siblings, and that I now stand where I do each week is still jarring to them. To others who may have known me at other times in my life, maybe I’m the divorced woman or the single mom without twonickels to rub together or the woman whose son died by suicide. And yes, I am all of those things, but they are not all that I am, nor do they accurately calculate the sum of my life.
We have a tendency to reduce people to their history, I think. Cancer survivor. Homeless person. Mentally ill woman. Paralyzed man. Divorced person. Widow. As if our identity is some random fact about ourselves or our experiences.
The same tendency is on display in our story from John this morning. It has customarily been known as the man born blind. We are led to believe that the blindness is the salient thing about him.
But not to Jesus, it isn’t.
I imagine that, to those who lived in this community, this man who had not been able to see since his birth was like a fixture, a presence. Maybe he begged on the same corner every week. Maybe folks crossed to the other side because they were a little afraid that whatever the sinfulness it was that caused the blindness might just be catching. They certainly were incapable of believing that a man who could see after his encounter with Jesus could possibly be the same one they had known all his life.
Different people and groups of people have different reactions in this little drama that unfolds over the course of this chapter.
To the disciples, this man is a teaching tool. “Jesus, who sinned – this man or his parents?”
To the religious leaders, he is a tool for entrapment. “Who was this man who healed you? How were your eyes opened? Where is the man?”
Not satisfied with the man’s answers, they seek out the parents who are not going to allow themselves to get into trouble. “We don’t know anything about this. Go ask our son.”
This story of the man who regained his sight is sandwiched between Jesus’s statement that he is the light of the world in Chapter 8 and that he is the Good Shepherd whose sheep know his voice in Chapter 10. Maybe it’s less about physical sight than it is about being able to see what is true, what is good, what is real.
The man whom Jesus healed doesn’t need to see Jesus to know that he is the Messiah. He asks, “And who is he, sir? Tell me so that I may believe in him.” And Jesus replies, “…the one speaking to you is he.” He can “see” Jesus, but just as significantly, he hears Jesus’s voice, he knows this voice, just as those sheep who know the Good Shepherd’s voice.
The religious folks haven’t quite got this figured out yet. The disciples aren’t exactly clear on it. The man’s parents and neighbors can’t see what has happened because their expectations are getting in the way of it. To them, he is the man born blind, and there is no way around that.
This man whose life was changed by a random encounter with Jesus knows who he is, and, by the end of our story, he knows who Jesus is.
Everyone else is still unseeing. In the darkness. They are scrambling around trying to explain, dismiss, reject, keep the man in his place.
But the man won’t be put back where he was. He was blind and now can see.
As we look around, we, too, have a place, a label, a name for everything around us, and it can trap us into an inability to see that God is doing a new thing right here and right now.
There is a saying that a car has a big windshield and a small rear window, because you have tokeep looking ahead, not backward. That’s true in our own lives and in the life of the Church.
So, the next time you are tempted to pigeon-hole yourself or someone else, or you are remembering the good old days at St. John’s, think of the man whose sight was restored. He is no longer what he was, and he is moving into a future filled with light and promise. When we wash the mud from our own eyes, maybe we can see what Jesus sees, each person in their full humanity, beloved of God, just like each one of us. Maybe we can see what a vibrant and welcoming community we have inherited at St. John’s and live as people and a community called to live in the light that has dawned on us, walking boldly into a future we cannot yet see, yet trusting in the promise that goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, as the psalm says, that we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.