Be With Me (Palm / Passion Sunday A)

   

Be With Me

Palm/ Passion Sunday A
29 March 2026 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Matt 21:1-11; Psa 118:1-2, 19-29; Isa 50:4-9a; Phil 2:5-11; Matt 26:14- 27:66; Psa 31:9-16

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

Early in my ministry at Trinity Ashland, just before Holy Week I found myself at the bedside of a parishioner who had been suffering for a long time from a terminal illness.  He was still lucid on occasion, but often floated between a painkiller-induced semi-sleep and the reenactment of vivid memories that seemed to me to be almost like waking dreams.  I did all the things that any of us can do in such situations, and a few that are a priest’s special calling, like granting absolution after hearing confession and celebrating Eucharist at his bedside.  I anointed him with oil and prayed.  I sang to him, held his hand, and listened to him recount stories from his long courtship and short marriage.  On the last day I saw him, I asked him what he wanted me to do that day.  He seemed a bit more withdrawn than usual, and was clearly close to death.  He smiled and replied simply, “Just be with me.” 

 

“Just be with me.”  This is the voice of basic human need.  It doesn’t demand that we fix anything, figure anything out, or make anything right.  It just asks for companionship, for being present, for mutual sharing of joy and sorrow.  Joys thus shared are multiplied; sorrows thus shared are made lighter. 

 

“Just be with me.”  It is a call we hear from friends, siblings, co-workers, neighbors, children.  Sometimes it is not—and cannot be—put into words, but is there all the same.  Our pride, or our fear, or our need to establish our own personality and life sometimes prevent us from phrasing the words.  But the appeal is the same regardless:  A parent suffering through the rough times of an adolescent or young adult child; a spouse suffering through the illness and final decline of their partner: “Just be with me.” 

 

During Lent every year, I have had the experience of hearing confessions and giving quite a bit of pastoral counseling.  Hearing a person’s private demons, fears, and regrets and then reassuring them of God’s love and pardon is one of the many ways we have of being present, of responding to the call, expressed or left unsaid, “Just be with me.” 

 

Hearing confession can be hard on a priest.  When someone shares their pain and you are truly present for them, you feel pain.  When you see their anguish, you feel anguish.  You share in their suffering, take on some of their pain.   

 

This has made me have a different perspective on what it means to be present, to have compassion, to love, and to be a channel of God’s grace.  It involves sacrifice and going through pain along with someone. 

 

Sacrifice, you see, is not about doing some ritual or act to placate an angry deity or drive away impurity or guilt.  It is not about proving to God or anyone else by some action that you somehow are worthy of forgiveness.  Sacrifice is about giving up, letting go.  It is about sharing yourself and what is yours with someone else, whether God or one of your fellow creatures, and letting that other person share with you, whether a meal, a feeling, or an experience.    

 

Love is not about having your way or being in control. 

 

Love is about being vulnerable, seeking the good and the will of the beloved.  Love is about being present for the beloved, about responding to his or her call, “Just be with me.”  Love is by its very nature sacrificial.  

 

Being a channel of God’s grace, or God’s love, is not about forcing conformity to some conception we have of God or of God’s will.  It is about opening oneself to God’s grace, to God’s one-way and totally undeserved love, and gently, lovingly, passing such love on to others.  It is about letting go and letting God work God’s love in God’s way and on God’s schedule. 

 

Today is Palm Sunday, the Sunday of the Passion.  The word passion comes from the Latin word meaning suffering, and the Gospel today is Matthew’s retelling of Jesus’ sufferings. 

 

But in a real sense, this is the Sunday of the Compassion.  These stories about Jesus’ sufferings are about Jesus suffering along with us, being one among us, fully present with us, and sharing our common lot of living in a world of pain, brokenness, fear, death, and apparent meaninglessness. 

 

The story that we will hear next week tells of the first Easter, when all such pain, brokenness, fear, death, and meaninglessness were put to flight.  Easter led the earliest Christians to see in Jesus the human face of God.  This led them to see in the Cross something far beyond a simple case of profound and deadly injustice and all-too-typical human suffering.  

 

Easter redeemed the Cross for the early Christians. It turned a Roman instrument of torture and execution into something with far deeper and broader meaning.  From the beginning, Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as something that changes everything.   St. Paul, writing just a couple of decades after Jesus’ death, writes, “For I delivered to you as of first importance the tradition that I also received: that Christ died for our sins … was buried, … was raised on the third day … and then appeared…” (1 Cor. 15:3-5).  “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, no longer counting against them their over-stepping of bounds, but rather giving to us what it is that reconciliation really means” (2 Cor. 5:19).  “[Through Christ] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). 

 

When we hear such things as “Jesus died for us,” “Jesus was a sacrifice for our sins,” “By his wounds we are reconciled, and by his stripes we are healed,” or even, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the World,” we often understand these as if they were saying “Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins, to suffer in our place the punishment we deserve for our own misdoings.”  

 

This doctrine of transferred punishment is a relatively recent innovation in Christian thinking, first expressed as such around the year 1100 by St. Anselm of Canterbury when he answered the question “Why did God become Man?” with “because social inferiors cannot pay the debts of honor the owe to superiors; only someone of the same rank can do that.”  This idea of satisfying the honor of an offended liege lord grew into the idea the payment of a forensic penalty by someone else, and became the most popular way Western Christians understood the atonement only after the Renaissance.   This way of thinking expresses well the sense of relief and deep gratitude we experience when we realize that Jesus, indeed, died for us and as a result all will be well. 

 

But it is based on a way of understanding God that Jesus himself would have been uncomfortable with:  an angry Deity who demands violence and blood to make things right.    But Jesus taught again and again that God is a loving Parent, a God who sends the blessings of rain and sunshine on both the righteous and the wicked, and who takes delight in the creation.

 

“The wrath of God” as an image does not describe the heart of God.  Rather, it expresses how our relationship with God feels when we are alienated from God.   The doctrine of transferred punishment is rooted in the idea of a Deity demanding to be placated, regardless of whether this demand is called “the justice of God” or “the wrath of God.”   To take this doctrine literally and use it as the central way of understanding the meaning of the Cross demeans the Cross and belittles God.   And this is so because it is not God, but human beings—flawed, imperfect human beings—who believe in the myth of redemptive violence, the lie that things can be made right simply through bloodshed and the infliction of pain.    God is not a divine schizophrenic child abuser.  God is a loving parent.  Jesus on the cross is not what God’s anger or legal claims to justice look like.  It is what God’s love looks like:  self-sacrificing, fully present, and moved by compassion alone.  

 

A fuller, more biblical understanding is found in today’s Epistle, where Paul is quoting from an early Christian hymn: 

 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death--

even death on a cross.  (Phil. 2:5-9)

 

The image here is that of God emptying himself, humbling himself in the incarnation and taking on the human face in Jesus, and then further emptying himself and taking on not just all the pain and suffering it means to be human, but also taking on some of the worst of that, death, death on a cross.  In this, God is sitting along with us, answering our cry, “just be with me.”  God loves us, and loves us sacrificially, taking on himself our pain and suffering, our fear, our unknowing.  The passion of Christ is thus the compassion of God, the Deity’s sharing with us all the worst of what our lives as human beings can throw at us.    In this light, we see that Christ is our priest, our pastor, our parent, and our friend. 

 

In the passion story, there is a detail in the garden of Gethsemane:  Jesus asks his closest friends to go with him to pray.  In Matthew, he begs them, “watch with me.”  Jesus too asks us, “just be with me.”  "Take up your cross, and follow me," he says. 

 

We can be there for Jesus in the garden, and on the Cross, by being present to his children around us. Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said, “Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.”

Friends.   With the early saints I believe that Jesus died for us, and suffered for us on the Cross.  In this great token of love, God shows his solidarity with us, and manifests compassion.  The great resurrection of Christ from the dead redeems this pathetic Roman execution and makes it the emptying of God himself for us. 

 

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Life to the Dead (Lent 5A)

 

Life to the Dead
Homily delivered the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Lent 5A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
22 March 2026; 9:30 a.m. Said Holy Eucharist
Ascension Lutheran Church, Medford (Oregon)
Readings:  Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45; Psalm 130

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. 

My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple. After several years, they were finally able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with second-degree burns.  His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I witnessed the unbearable, wondering if God existed at all, or if so, how he could be good and loving.   My mother-in-law, after a long life of hard work and joyful service, deserved, to our minds at least, the golden years with her children and grandchildren.  But cancer robbed her of that, and us of her.  My father, whose faith in God, love for others, and joy in living was such a sign for me as a young man of God’s love, also did not get what appeared his just reward.  Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease robbed him, bit by bit, of his personality and memory, and left his sweetheart, my mother, bereft and abandoned.  I think this is our common experience:  we all have times of great pain in our lives.  I am so sorry to hear that you lost a member of the church this week.  I express my deepest condolences to the Freeman family.  Greg’s loss is just not right, not right at all.     

Life can seem at times to be a string of scenes where God, if Good, seems absent or impotent, or if Almighty and ever-present, seems to be a monster.  There is no way to get our heads, let alone our hearts, around it.  Maybe the problem is the term “Almighty.”  A much better translation, I think, would be “All Nurturing.”  The point is not that God can do anything, but that there is no situation so bad that God cannot help. 

Just after my wife’s death 4 years ago, I read the book “The Faraway Nearby” by Rebecca Solnit.  In it Solnit notes that Hansen’s disease, what we normally call “leprosy,” is a disease caused by a bacillus.  Here’s the thing—the damage caused by the disease, the disfigurement, the loss of extremities, the gradual death of the body part by part, is not caused by the bacillus.  The bacillus attacks the nerves, and what happens is that the damaged nerves no longer feel pain. But pain is one of the ways we define the limits of our body: without it to warn us, we take hold of burning pains and don’t flinch away.  We stub our toes savagely and then don’t favor them and care for them.  And so the painless damaged parts, no longer felt or seen as part of ourselves, become infected and die.  Psychological pain is like physical pain in this; it helps define us precisely because it helps us recognize when things are not as they should be.  Pain is in part what defines us, and helps us care for ourselves.  It’s a package deal—pleasure and pain, joy or horror.  We mustn’t blame God for this.  It’s just how our species evolved. I think it’s what God intended in creating us.       

From the beginning, people of faith have had to deal with unfulfilled hope, and apparent abandonment.  In today’s Gospel, both Mary and Martha separately confront Jesus about his delay in responding to their plea to come and help their brother Lazarus: “If you had been here, he would not have died.”  When Martha asks it, she adds hopefully “Even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” She does not dare ask him to raise her brother from the dead; she has already been disappointed enough in Jesus.  Jesus’s answer, “Your brother will rise again,” draws an ironic, almost bitter reply from Martha, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection—on the last day!” She leaves unsaid what she is feeling, “But that doesn’t do us much good here and now, does it?” 

Jesus replies, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She replies, timidly, “Yes, Lord, I believe”—not that her brother will come forth again—but “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God.”  She trusts Jesus, but is too beaten down by grief to hope for anything concrete for her brother.  

When Mary in her turn confronts Jesus about his delay and lack of help, she is reduced to weeping.  Jesus does not reply.  Like all who truly love, he is content to be silent and yet wholly present with the beloved.  Observing the scene of bitter grief he himself is deeply moved.  The Greek says simply “his insides were put into turmoil.”  And when they show him the place where the body lies, he begins weeping.

So the bystanders say, “See how he loved him!” But others take it as an occasion to doubt Jesus: “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

When confronted with horror, we respond with despair, or sometimes with what seems to be unwarranted persevering trust.  At other times we blame others, questioning their motives or abilities.  All these responses are seen in this story of bitter disappointment and loss.

But then in the story, Jesus performs a sign pointing to the mystery of God being present here in Jesus, this Jesus who weeps and suffers alongside us. It is his last great sign before the cross and its inevitable sequel: coming forth victorious from the tomb. 

He raises from the dead his friend Lazarus, something that Martha hoped for, but was afraid to ask.  He raises him not to life eternal and transformed.  Remember that Martha specifically said she would not be comforted by Lazarus’ resurrection on the last day.  She wanted her brother back here and now, with things close to as they were before the grim visitor Death had come calling.  Jesus gives Martha and Mary what they want, and brings Lazarus back from the grave to this mortal life.

The author of the Gospel of John tells us: “...these things are written so that you may come to trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through ftrust in him you may have life” (John 20:31).  As this story tells us, it matters little whether it is life here and now or life on the last day. 

In Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment, this story plays a central role.  Young radical Raskolnikov has committed a murder and theft to even, as he thinks, the score of social injustice. But he suffers from guilt and self-loathing from it.  He meets a young sex-worker, Sonya, forced into the dehumanizing trade to feed her younger siblings.  She herself once suffered from guilt and self-loathing.  At the main turning point in the novel, she tells Raskolnikov what changed her: this story from John’s Gospel. She reads it to him. It is hard for her. Her voice breaks several times, she pauses and stammers, but she reads the whole luminous tale. 

 

When Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Sonya draws a painful breath, and reads on, in her own voice “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who should come into the world.”  The story changes Raskolnikov’s heart.  He begins the long hard process of regaining his own humanity. In the end, there is redemption and joy, both for him and Sonya, who accompanies him to Siberia to help him through his penal exile.

When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he leaves the deed unfinished.  Lazarus comes forth, but still bound by his funeral wrappings.  Jesus tells Mary and Martha to untie the burial cloths, to “unbind him.”    That is how it is with us: We, though alive back from the dead, remain bound and paralyzed by the grief and disappointment we have felt. Jesus tells us to unbind each other, to complete the miracle.  Sonya goes to Siberia with Raskolnikov, we assist one another in this ordeal.  We share in being present for each other, sometimes just being there silently with our beloved, and weeping along with them.  

Beloved, I have known the healing and strength of Jesus.  I have seen what can only be called him giving life to the dead.  I saw it in my own life four years ago: crushed by the death of my wife and retirement, bereft of feeling and a sense of who I was, and unable to feel, love, or be fully live again.  And with Martha, and with Sonya, I said with all my heart, “Yes, Lord Jesus. I trust you.  I believe, I give my heart to you. Show me how to move forward, how to regain life.” I started singing on chorale groups that made my heart wake up.  I started dating and found someone I loved dearly to whom I am now married.   Life to the dead. 

Beloved, we are going to get safe and sound through this messy, cruel, but all the same glorious life.  In fear and anxiety, we will find Jesus mighty to save, and always at our side in whatever we have to go through.  In illness, mourning, and even in death, we will see that the way of the Cross is the way of light and life.  As St. Julian of Norwich taught, all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well. 

 

In the name of God, Amen.

 

 

The Pool of Sending (Lent 4A; Laetare Sunday)

 

The Pool of Sending 

15 March 2026

Fourth Sunday in Lent Year A

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41; Psalm 23

11 am sung mass; Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin, Oregon

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, homilist

 

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

In the spirit of today's epistle's counsel to "expose fruitless works of darkness," I want to start today by noting that regardless of how you may view the former leader of Iran, clearly a wicked religious fanatic, our faith and moral tradition is clear in saying that the war President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu launched three weeks ago and that still rages is not a just war by any definition.  Both say that they are trying to make their countries secure, strong, and powerful again, and even want to make Iran great again.  But absent an immediate and looming threat, the likelihood of making things better and not worse, and a clear and well thought out plan to achieve victory while minimizing civilian losses, this war does not meet any of the standards of a just war in international law or the moral theology of Christianity or Judaism.  Curiously, as you will see, there is a subtext into today’s readings about power and vulnerability and even military threat that speak to us today,. 

 

Today’s scripture readings seem to be all over the map: the choosing of David, the beloved 23^rd Psalm, Paul talking about light and darkness, and the story of Jesus giving sight to the man born blind.   But they all relate to how God deals with us in our weakness, whether this is not being the kind of person others expect in a leader, being like lambs subject to prey, trying to hide things in the dark, or blindness. 

 

Pretty little red-headed David is chosen as a military ruler (“king”) over his brothers, all big he-men, because God doesn’t look at outward appearance (in Biblical Hebrew, “the eyes”) but on the heart.  He is so small, so little, that his father Jesse doesn’t even present him to Samuel. But his heart is right, and, ironically for the story-teller, he has “pretty eyes.” The Psalm tells of a “shepherd” who can be trusted.  Several words in the Hebrew psalm mark it as alluding to military deployment:  a “shepherd” was a way of talking about an NCO, a marine gunnery sergeant. The word for “green pastures” in Hebrew refers to overnight stays, whether those of real shepherd staying in the fields with his sheep, or to bivouacs supervised by those gunnery sergeants. “Paths of justice” uses a technical term for entrenchments, and can be translated, “trenches that lead to victory.”  Admittedly, the tradition has turned the poem of “Yahweh is my gunnery sergeant and I don’t have any reason to fear” into a gentle pastoral idyll.  But it connects with David, the small and handsome red-head boy caring for sheep who, though unlikely, became the military leader who rescued Isra’el. 

 

So what of today’s Gospel?

 

When you go to any of the public churches in China, you often will see outside the wall of the Church a similar site—beggars, some visibly and horribly disabled, lining the walkways, shaking small begging bowls or cups, and saying in Chinese (and sometimes English), “Please, help me, please help.”  This scene is often also encountered just outside of major Buddhist Temples or Monasteries.  Presumably the beggars gather at such places because they or their handlers believe that people frequenting them are more likely to be moved to compassion and give alms, or at least be shamed into giving alms because their presence at such a place implies that they place a value on compassion, whether they feel it or not.    

The scene in today’s Gospel takes place in just such a setting.  Jesus and his disciples are walking in an area where beggars gather, probably just outside the Jerusalem Temple.   They see a man who has been blind since birth begging, and the disciples ask who is to blame for such a thing.  They automatically view the man as an object of pity, something I think that most disabled people find demeaning and offensive.  Worse, they are thinking of the idea in Deuteronomy and Chronicles that if you obey God, you will be blessed with health, wealth, and long life. So if you are missing out on any of that, that means you committed some sin; it’s God’s punishment.  “Who sinned, this guy or his parents, that he should be born blind, condemned to a life of begging,” they ask. 

 

Jesus replies that no one is to blame.  Jesus’s God is a loving father who welcomes the recalcitrant child home, the One who sends the blessings of rain and sunshine both of the righteous and the wicked.  Disability, sickness, poverty, and suffering are not punishments, they just happen. He says, instead of asking “who is to blame,” ask “how can I help?”  The man’s blindness gives Jesus the chance to heal him, so the works of God can be made manifest.  Like Mr. Rogers, he says when facing horror, don’t look for who to blame, but look for the helpers.  

 

It is like a story in Luke 13 when some people use a regional slur to ask Jesus how he can explain Pilate’s massacre of some of Jesus’ Galilean compatriots while they were at worship in the Temple.  There Jesus replies, “Do you think that these people were being punished for some spectacular sin?  Not at all!  I’m telling you, all of us probably deserve such bad stuff, and should turn from our wrongs. But just like those 18 Judeans killed when the tower at Siloam [a tower built next to the pool of Siloam, probably by unscrupulous contracters!] collapsed and crushed them.  My Galilean friends they weren’t any more guilty than the rest of us.”  Such bad stuff just happens. It’s random. Don’t blame them and don’t blame God.  

 

In today’s story, Jesus says he must do the works of God who sent him into the world.  He stops, spits into the dirt and with it with the dirt kneads into a bit of moist with which he anoints the man’s eyes.  He then sends the man to wash it off in the pool of Siloam, where he gains his sight and becomes a witness to Jesus. 

The beggar’s disability is clearly a symbol for the disabilities we all live with, whether physical or spiritual.  Note the irony at the end of the story where the spiritual blindness of Jesus’ opponents is contrasted to their physical sightedness and to the healed man’s clarity of vision on both counts.  In some ways, we are all the man born blind. 

Jesus is giving the blind man new life, the “birth from on high” mentioned in John 2.  Jesus uses mud to heal, an act reminiscent of the creation story found in Genesis 3, where Yahweh as a potter sculpts the mud into a human being before breathing on it to give it life. 

Jesus sends the man to the pool of Siloam, a Greek form of Shiloah, or “sent.”  It is a spring within the city walls that play an important part in the story of Isaiah and Ahaz—Isaiah tells the king not to make any alliance with the Assyrians out of fear of being besieged by local petty kings, and to trust that God would provide adequate water for the city in the spring of Siloah.  When the king appeals to the Assyrians, ultimately to the ruin of his people, God says to Isaiah in an oracle, “this people has refused the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, and melt in fear before” the local tyrants. (Isa. 8:6).  Again, the imagery here suggest God’s care for us in times of miliary threat.  It is to this spring that Jesus sends the blind man. 

The "Spring of Sending" here echoes “I must do the work of my father who sent me into the world,” but it also must refer to the fact that Jesus has sent the blind man to the pool.   A similar juxtaposition of Jesus being sent and then sending those he interacts with is found later on in John's Gospel, when Jesus appears to the disciples in the evening of the day of his resurrection:  “Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”  And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:21-22).

This “Jesus sent to send us" is, I think, a model and pattern for all missiology, or theology of mission.  That’s what the Latin word mission means: “sending.”   God sends Jesus, who heals is with grace.  In order to accept this grace, we ourselves are sent, both to overcome our past (wash off the mud) and to help others (tell the others what God has done for us).  

We must never think that we come to God through our own efforts.  It is God who stops and anoints our eyes with mud, who creates us new, who gives us new life and sight.   The beggar here doesn’t ask to be healed.  Jesus just heals him. He knows what we need better than we do, and wishes ill for none of the creatures he has made.    We may be begging for a few crusts of bread, for enough sustenance to get through the day, but he has things in mind for us that are, in the words of the prayer, "more than we can ask or imagine."  

How we react to God’s grace is key.   Our vision may be so deficient that we do not know what we need to do to amend our lives, or what it is God expects.  So we must follow the mission God gives us.  Like the man with spit-mud on his eyes, we must go where we are sent.  It is only thus that the grace of God can take root and grow in us.    

(For my Calvinist friends—if saying that "God wishes ill for none of his creatures" and stressing the importance of our reaction to grace is Arminianism, so be it.  The doctrine of a universal salvific will has been a hallmark of catholic doctrine—whether Roman, Eastern, or Anglican—since the beginning.) 

When God reaches to us to heal us, God also makes demands on us.  He sends us.  He asks us to wash the mud off.  To the pool of Siloam, the flowing waters of Siloah, we must go.  And if we trust him, we do what he asks even if it doesn’t correspond to what it was that we thought we wanted in the first place. 

And what he asks us to do is simply share with others our experience of how he healed us.  No argument, no appeal to authority, no scripture quoting.  Just tell them what happened to you. 

But we are also not just like the man born blind in the story.  We are also like the religious opponents of Jesus who react to the sign that Jesus has just worked.  They believe they know God’s demands and standards, and look at the miracle and note that Jesus kneaded clay on a Sabbath, one of the acts of work prohibited by their understanding of the Sabbath.  So they reason that this miracle either could not have come from God or did not occur. 

Where the blind man goes to the Pool Sending, these other people refuse.  As Isaiah says, “they reject the gently flowing waters of Shiloah."  

The opponents of Jesus are certain in their religious beliefs, and do not want to be confused by facts.  The blind man, is unsure of many things, But once he gains his sight, he is sure of what Jesus did.   He responds to the legal arguments of the people so certain of God’s will by saying merely, “All I know is that I was blind but now I see.”

We, like the blind man, need help.  We, like the Pharisees, tend to think we already know what it is we need.   Jesus sends us in many ways.  Sometimes, it is a voice of conscience to be better in our prayers, sometimes, it is an urge to work for social justice.  Whatever it is, and however it comes, when we hear God’s voice speaking to us, sending us, let us respond.  Let us run to the pool and do what we’re told by God.  Then we will be in a position of sharing what we know—not merely what we hope, or what we wish—but what we know, with others, so that they might begin to hear the voice of God sending them as well.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Begotten by Water, Borne on Wind (Lent 2A)

 

Begotten by Water, Borne on Wind

 

1 March 2026

Homily Delivered the Second Sunday in Lent Year A

9:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist;

Sat. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

  The Rev Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

 

Genesis 12.1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4.1-5,13-17; John 3.1-17

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

When I was very small, our family went on vacation to a warm spring in the Rocky Mountains, and spent an afternoon at a swimming pool there.  I remember very clearly, because I almost died there.  I loved the water.  My family sat on the edge, talking and watching me as I played on the steps going into the shallow end.  On the middle step I could splash and play, and put my face under. But I stepped too far back, off the steps. I took a breath, and sunk down.  Standing as tall as I could, I was about 4 inches short of the surface.  I bounced up and took a breath, and sank again.  But I had not gotten enough air.  I could see my father through the surface, but he was looking at my mother and not at me.  I bounced up again.  Again, not enough air.  I started to panic.  I couldn’t breathe.  I bounced again, gulped, but to no avail.  I looked up just as things started to go dark, when my sister started pointing to me.  My father’s strong hands were at once around my arm, pulling me into the air, sputtering and gasping.  

I went on later to become a competitive swimmer, lifeguard, and swimming instructor.   But that early experience left a mark.  I had a very hard time learning how to float on my back, perfecting it only when I was 14 years old.  All my teachers said, “Oh, but it’s so easy! All you have to do is put your head back and relax!  Let the water hold you up!”  But try as hard as I could, every time I put my head back, it felt like I was falling.  I tensed up and sank, the water rushing up my nose.  I had learned from that earlier experience fear, and the need to be in control.  And to float, I had to learn to relax, and give up control. 

 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus meets a man who wants to stay in control.

 

As we read in the verse just before this story begins, Jesus knows “what is in each person’s heart.” (John 2:25).  And then our story begins, “now there was a person, a Pharisee named Nicodemus.”  In the story, Jesus sees Nicodemus’ heart, and tells him what he needs to hear, not what he wants to know. 

 

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in private, away from the crowds that surrounded Jesus during the day.  This “Pharisee” this “teacher in Israel” says, “I know who you are, Jesus.  I have seen the signs that you perform. I know you are from God.”  He calls Jesus “Rabbi,” wanting to ask him questions about scripture, the commandments, and how to enter God’s royal domain.

 

Jesus answers, “Unless you are begotten from on high, you cannot see God’s royal domain.”   Spiritual rebirth is required, not discussions about religious rules.  

Nicodemus misunderstands: he thinks that Jesus is speaking of biological rebirth, tripping over the fact that the word used for “from above” can also mean “over again.”  Jesus corrects him by contrasting the physical body and the breath that animates it (or the “wind” or “spirit” that gives it life--it’s the same word in Greek and Aramaic). “Truly, I tell you: no one is able to enter God’s royal domain unless they are begotten of water and wind. Flesh begets flesh, but wind begets wind.”  Spiritual life is unpredictable and as invisible as the wind:  You can hear the sound it makes, and see its results, but cannot see it directly. “So it is with everyone who is begotten by the wind.”  

 

Nicodemus still misunderstands.

 

Jesus tells him that it won’t make sense unless Nicodemus accepts Jesus’ own explanation of who he is rather the conclusions he has already drawn.  “How can you understand my teaching on heaven when you can’t even understand a simple example drawn from day-to-day life?” 

 

At this point, it is clear that Jesus is no longer talking to Nicodemus. The Evangelist is talking to us.  In a phrase Martin Luther called “the Gospel in miniature,” he concludes “God went so far as to give over the only Son, so that everyone who puts their trust in him might not perish but rather have boundless life.” 

 

OK—the story is complicated, relying on many puns and plays on words not apparent in English. But basically, the drama of the story is pretty straightforward:  Nicodemus says, “I know who you are.  The signs that you perform show you are from God. Tell me what you know.”  Jesus replies, “You don’t have a clue about who I am. You heard about me supplying wine for a wedding feast, and driving out money-changers from the Temple, so you think I am worth listening to, and come here. But you do this in secret.  If you think you’ve just professed faith or trust in me, you don’t know what that means.  Faith is not about opinions privately held, conclusions safely stated.  It’s trust. It’s commitment. It involves risk.  It requires a totally new orientation, a new life.  In fact, it’s like a new birth.”  

 

Nicodemus again misses the point, and asks, “How? How can this happen? How can these things be?” Nicodemus has questions, but not the right questions.  He wants Jesus to give him a formula, a check-list on how to be born of God.  Jesus sees that Nicodemus will not get closer to God without relaxing, without giving up control. So he tells Nicodemus about water and wind.

 

Scripture uses many different images to describe what Jesus is talking about here: turning back, surrendering to God, being washed clean, becoming a child, getting married to God, finding a treasure buried in a field and selling everything to buy the field, being sprinkled with purifying water, new creation, new life, waking up from a deep sleep, coming to one’s senses, regaining eyesight.  Some passages describe it from how it feels on the inside and call it forgiveness; others look at its results and call it a healing.  Though Jesus here calls it a new begetting or a new birth, some passages call it a death, or dying to one’s old way of life. 

 

Early Christians, who borrowed from John the Baptist a rite of full immersion into water as a way of effecting this process of death and new life, called it a burial in the water.  That is why Jesus here says we must be begotten both of water and of wind. Though the Gospel of John never directly refers to sacraments like baptism and the Eucharist, it does make passing meditative allusion to them, as it does here. 

 

Jesus has in mind being pushed backwards into water, once and for all, with that feeling of falling, with that feeling of drowning.  The contrast could not be sharper—this is not Nicodemus’ view of tidy purity ritual washings, done regularly and on schedule according to the rule book he wants from Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus the rule book he wants. Though Jesus is no slouch when it comes to the demands of justice and faith, he knows that without God breathing in us, rules only bring frustration and arrogance:  flesh begets flesh.  Nicodemus wants a list of things he must do; Jesus talks about being begotten.  Nicodemus wants rules; Jesus talks about the wind seemingly randomly blowing here and there.  Nicodemus wants to play it safe; Jesus wants us to take risks. 

 

The wind blows where it will, the breath breathes where it wants—giving up control to God, living in the Spirit, cannot be mapped out, counted up, or predicted. This confuses Nicodemus, who knows how to trust the security of the rules, rituals, and moral aphorisms of conventional religion.  He asks Jesus “how can I make this new birth happen?”

Jesus replies, “This is not about what you need to do. You cannot give birth to yourself. This is about God, who breathes life and makes the wind blow.  Take the risk.  Relax and let go.  Let God do whatever God wants to do with you. God may just surprise you.”

 

Some people misread this story just as badly as Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus’ words. They think that “being born again” is an action they must take.  Like Nicodemus, they think their salvation lies in taking an action, even if it just confessing Jesus with their lips and believing in him with their hearts.  But Nicodemus confesses Jesus in the opening line of the story.  And Jesus says that is not enough.  We have to open ourselves to God, trust him fully.  It is that simple. It is that risky.  It may feel like drowning until God reaches down and pulls us into the breath of new life. 

 

Nicodemus later in the Gospel learns to allow himself to be carried away by the wind.  He speaks up for Jesus in the Council, and after Jesus’ death, with a friend asks to help bury Jesus’ body.   Risks, indeed, but exactly where the wind blew. 

 

What happens when we learn to let go and let God wash over us?  What happens when we let ourselves be borne up on the wind of God? 

 

We are more sure of the love of God, but less sure of our own formulations about God. 

 

We stop trying to use rules to limit God and control others.

 

We begin to listen to God’s Word without prejudgment, without fear.  

 

As in the beatitudes, we begin to notice God where we least expect Him.  

 

Our heart is more and more open, and our mind less and less closed.

We can look at true horror in the face, even the decline and death of those we love, the decline and death of even the truly saintly like Father Jim Boston, and not be afraid or resent God. 

 

Siblings and Friends, we are damaged goods, all of us.  We are like Nicodemus in the night.  But God made us for a home we have never yet seen, and that we can barely even imagine now. Jesus tells us of that home, because he came down from there. He loves us dearly, each and every one.

Jesus not only showed us the way, he is the way.  He accepted and opened himself to the will of his Father, risked all, and let himself be borne away on the wind, even to the point of being lifted high upon the cross.  Through this and his glorious coming forth from the grave, he is reaching down to pull us from the deep water.  

 

Let us all learn to relax as we let ourselves fall back into the mysterious love of God.  Let us lose our lives so that we may find them.   Let’s not struggle as he buries us in the waves and pulls us up again, sputtering, into new breath and life.  Let us allow ourselves to be borne away on his wind.   

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.