Text: John 9:1-41

Every morning I have a familiar routine.  One of the very first things I do after getting out of bed is walk to the countertop in the bathroom.  I find this case, unscrew the lids, and put a round piece of plastic in each eye.  Before I do this, the world is really blurry.  I am badly nearsighted.  I started wearing glasses in the 3rd grade and went to contacts sometime in middle school.  If the numbers mean anything to you, my contact lens prescription is in the -7’s.  This amounts to me being significantly handicapped when I don’t have my contacts in.  I trip over stuff on the floor.  I wouldn’t even think of driving.

If I didn’t have my contacts in right now, this would be a very different experience, mostly for me, but also for you.  I’d have to hold my notes close to my face to read them…or get better at memorizing sermons.  Looking across the congregation would be more for effect than actually seeing anyone.  You all would be fuzzy blobs.  I would be able to guess that Al and Kathy Bauman would be sitting right about there, and Julie and Phil Hart would be about here, but it would be a guess.

I’m so used to wearing corrective lenses that I don’t think of myself as having a disability.  It’s strange to even say.  But if it were not for these highly engineered pieces of plastic, or the glasses alternative, my experience of the world would be entirely different.  My life would be different.  My disability is easily hidden, to the point of making it functionally go away.

Those of us with bad eyes undergo a mini transformation each morning – so routine, we easily forget how vital it is to our functioning.  We…

Text: John 4:1-30; 39-42

This is a story about a conversation.  It’s heavy on dialogue, short on action.

There’s really not much happening here until the very end.  Jesus and a Samaritan woman meet each other at a well, start talking, and keep talking.  It’s a long conversation – the longest Jesus has with an individual in all the gospels.  It opens with Jesus asking her for a drink of water, but we’re never even told if he ever got it.  The conversation takes over, and turns into something much more than giving and receiving a drink of water from a well.

What makes the conversation remarkable, aside from its length, is that it even happened in the first place.  Neither Jesus nor the Samaritan woman had much business being at that well at that time.

Jesus had been in the Judean countryside, the area around the holy city of Jerusalem.  He’s on his way back to Galilee, his home region.  Up north.  John says, “Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee.  But he had to go through Samaria.”

If you look on a map, it’s true that as you head north out of Judea, you’ll soon enter the region of Samaria.  Keep on going north through Samaria and eventually you’ll get to Galilee.  It’s a direct shot.  If you’re walking on High Street in the Short North and you want to get to the church, you’re going to have to go by campus.

When John says that Jesus “had to go through Samaria” it wasn’t exactly a geographic necessity.  There was, in fact, a well-traveled route established for the very purpose of avoiding Samaria.  Jews and Samaritans had a difficult and even bloody history together, and so Jewish pilgrims traveling between Galilee and Judea would frequently take a longer route around, on the…

(No recording of this sermon is available.)

Texts: Genesis 12:1-4; John 3:1-12 (see also John 7:45-52; 19:38-42)

Over this past week, I have become absolutely enthralled by Nicodemus.  Who was this pious old man who shows up in the middle of the night?  What brought him out through those moonlit streets to Jesus’ door?  The Pharisees are so often portrayed as the villains in John’s gospel, so what was it about Jesus that had so captured Nicodemus’ attention that he was willing to cross those enemy lines?

What were the questions that were guiding his inward journey, causing his feet to stumble through dark pathways, perhaps risking everything he had built his life around?

And maybe more importantly, what ever happens to Nicodemus in the end?  Does he get it?  Does he find what he is looking for?  Does his inward journey ever connect with his outward journey?  Does he ever experience the new birth Jesus tells him about?

Maybe the question I should be asking is, “Why am I so enthralled by Nicodemus?” 

Nicodemus is a character that shows up only in John’s gospel, but he shows up three separate times, in this passage toward the beginning, another near the middle, and in a final scene toward the end of John.  These three episodes give us just enough of a glimpse into Nicodemus’ journey to make me think that the writer of John is not just relying on a few stock characters and haphazardly peppering them here and there throughout the text.  No, to me, there is something more to the story of Nicodemus. 

And I think I am enthralled by him, because I see myself in that story.  He stokes the fire of my imagination because his journey speaks to and perhaps reflects my own.  In his fumbling through the dark, his confusion, his seeming…

Texts: Genesis 2:8-9; 15-17;   Matthew 4:1-11

If you’ve read the Lent devotionals, looked at the bulletin cover, or found the pattern in the hanging dots behind me, you’ve likely noticed a visual theme.  We’re using the labyrinth throughout Lent as a symbol of the Inward / Outward journey.

It’s an ancient design.  Not necessarily this particular one, but the labyrinth.  One site in northern India has a labyrinth pattern estimated to be 4500 years old.  A cluster of islands in northwest Russia have over 30 stone labyrinths that may be as old as 3000 years.

Greek mythology includes the story the part human/ part beast minotaur who wreaks havoc on the population until the great architect Daedalus designs and builds a labyrinth whose sole purpose is to contain the minotaur at its center.  The hero Theseus eventually enters the winding labyrinth and slays the minotaur.  Some labyrinths still portray a minotaur at the center.

In later medieval times stone labyrinths show up in regions like Scandinavia, frequently around the coast.  Fishing communities likely built these with the superstitious hopes of trapping harsh winds and trolls that may endanger a successful fishing outing.

Around the same time, the labyrinth was being adopted more fully as a Christian symbol of pilgrimage.  Labyrinths were embedded into the pavement of grand cathedrals.  Worshipers were invited to pray their way along the path, into the center, a place of holy encounter, and pray their way back out.  Some writings suggest that walking the labyrinth was an alternative option for those unable to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as Christian crusaders regained and then lost control of the Holy City to the Muslim armies.  There’s a real bright spot in religious history.

In the last few decades the labyrinth has made a resurgence in the Christian imagination.  Labyrinths are popping up in…

Text: Matthew 6:24-34

Within the final 10 verses of Matthew chapter six, Jesus mentions “worry” 6 times.  Worry, Anxiety, take your pick translation wise.  Worry, as in “Do not worry.”  Anxious, as in don’t be.

In itself, telling someone not to be anxious can be predictably counterproductive.  Like we know we’re not supposed to be anxious.  We don’t want to be anxious.  When we feel anxious we get anxious about that.  We worry that we’re worrying too much.   So it goes in the land of mental loops.

In Jesus’ teaching, he highlights food and clothing as primary sources of worry.  These are basic human needs that far too few, past and present have had enough of.  And, when we do have plenty of both, we manage to find other causes for anxiety.

Jesus points away from the world of humans.  He points to the birds.  “Consider the birds of the air,” Jesus says, “they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns.”

Consider the birds.

Consider that humans have not always been sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.  As best scholars can tell, agriculture is a relatively recent experiment.  For the vast majority of our existence our ancestors were foragers, bird-like.  About 13,000 years ago humans started relating in a new way with particular plants and animals.  We domesticated them, or they domesticated us.  In different parts of the world, we started doing less foraging of perennials, less roaming, and more planting of annuals, more settling – sowing, reaping, and gathering into barns.  Even though food diversity and nutrition went down, food quantity went up, as did population.  Towns and villages got bigger and more permanent.  We cut or burned trees to plant fields in the rich soil, rerouted water sources for irrigation.  Having food reserves, we specialized into a division of labor.  And…