Lent 4A, 19 March 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

• 1 Samuel 16:1-13. The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul?”
• Ephesians 5:8-14.Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
• John 9:1-13, 28-38.  So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of [the One] who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.

O God of Love, grant us the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today’s lessons hold special power for me; they were the appointed readings for a pivotal moment in seminary, when I was learning to grapple with difficult Biblical texts (as it turns out, most Biblical texts are difficult if we’re taking them seriously). They were the appointed readings for my first Sunday as your priest, 15 years ago, when I asked our head usher Steve Babcock to pass out red pencils with the bulletins. I’ll get back to that in a moment. Then three years ago, these were the readings on the first Sunday of the pandemic shutdown, when my wife Joy live-streamed the service on Facebook using her phone. And here they are again, in this strange time being called post-pandemic, but certainly not post-COVID.

In church time, we have just passed the half-way point on our journey through Lent,  we’ve seen 22 out of 40 days. (“But who’s counting?” you may ask; the answer would be, “I am!”) How is it going for you; have the first 22 days gone by quickly or slowly; have you been taking the Church’s prescription for Lenten disciplines? Are you feeling that your practices are preparing you to be able to celebrate Easter? Have they been too hard or too easy, memorable or forgettable? Do you need to make adjustments in them so that you would be better-prepared to celebrate the abundant glory of God in another 18 days (not counting Sundays)? Because ready or not, Easter is coming!

The words of the Proper Preface for Lent (that part at the beginning of the Eucharistic prayer that changes depending on the day or the season) come to my mind; we pray to God:

You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast; that fervent in prayer and in works of mercy, and renewed by your Word and Sacraments, they may come to the fullness of grace which you have prepared for those who love you.

I’ll sing it in a little while, but I want to ask you now to reflect with me about your response to its bidding that you cleanse your hearts and prepare with joy for Easter (through prayer and works of mercy, through engaging scripture and sacramental worship, so that your experience of grace may become fuller than ever).   Check in with yourself about how it is going;  any surprises? I hope so, because if the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that the fullness of grace is hard to experience when I’m overly invested in the ways I think things will or should go along the paths of our spiritual journeys (wherever we are on them).

The story from Samuel is Exhibit A. It begins with a question that Samuel hears the Holy One asking: “How long will you grieve over Saul?” You might recall that Samuel was grieving over Saul, not because he had died but because things with Saul had not turned out the way Samuel had hoped. It’s a curious story:  tired of their tribal organization, with which they had strained to withstand their enemies, the people of Israel wanted a king. They wanted to be like the other nations, to consolidate their resources, to pool their wealth and power under a centralized leader who could save them. The ancient Israelites thought that the Holy One’s dreamy system of judges with the Holy One as king just wasn’t effective. This is a modern problem too, isn’t it? Don’t we long for a God who is more effective in giving us the protection that we want?

Samuel tried to tell the people that a king wouldn’t work out. When they couldn’t be persuaded, he and God made a plan to anoint Saul, the handsomest man in the land, as their first king. Samuel then gave King Saul explicit orders to kill all of the Amalekites, including their king and all their livestock. Saul didn’t do it; although he led a victorious battle over the Amalekites, he spared their best livestock and the life of their king. Furious over Saul’s disobedience, especially that the king was still alive, Samuel personally cut him to pieces. The story goes that God regretted making Saul king, even though God had chosen him. 

What draws me into these often deeply-disturbing stories is this fantastic ancient record of a people’s struggle with the Divine, and an imagination of God, or a dream of God, Who is actively engaged, learning, changing, regretting, regrouping, trying new things, and believing in people against all odds. Our Bible is a collection of testimonies (organized into two testaments) of people’s imagination of God’s sustained belief in people, no matter how unbelievable they are. The folks that get chosen to lead God’s people are most often the left-behind, left-out, least-likely characters; they (and we) don’t always behave the way God hopes, according to both testaments.

Jewish Biblical scholar, Martin Buber, wrote that Samuel confused his own human impulses with God’s will. [1]As far as I can tell, however, we can never know, whether what we imagine God wanting, saying, or doing is what God wants, say, or does. The question that I return to is, how long will you grieve? It’s a question I hear being posed by the scripture to me (or perhaps to you?). How long will any of us mourn the fact that things have not worked out the way we wanted them to go? How long will any of us stew about people (or God) not doing what we wanted them to do or being the way we wanted them to be? Is any of us grieving, not death but utter disappointment, that our plans have not worked out? Is any of us mourning that our experience of the Divine has contradicted our expectations, subverted our assumptions, or challenged our perspectives; or do we interpret the contradictions as evidence that God must not exist? The response from the first book of Samuel seems to be a directive to pick ourselves up and move along, to look, not on outward appearances but, deeper, to the heart. It’s a matter of developing depth perception.

If the question posed in Samuel is, “How long will you grieve?” it seems to me that the question posed to the Jesus followers in Ephesus is, “How long will you sleep? How long will you keep one foot in the grave?” It’s an interesting order of things: rise from the dead is the command and the consequence, the result of rising; it’s that the redeeming love of God will shine on you, not the other way around. It reminds me of Rumi’s question, “Why do you stay in jail when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear. The entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.” How long will we sleep through the love of God that is all around us? 

Put another way today’s Gospel lesson today, “How long will you stumble around, wondering who is to blame for an illness or condition, or whether healing is authentic, rather than getting to work so that God’s glory can be revealed?” The red-pencil-editing exercise is to re-punctuate Verses 3 and 4 to read: “Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind'” (period, full stop). The next sentence begins, “So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day” (period). Since there was no punctuation in scriptures (no spaces between words or sentences for that matter), we can’t know exactly what John the Evangelist meant, but we can and should claim that God doesn’t create suffering in order to show off God’s greatness. We can and should celebrate healing whenever it occurs and whosever it is. Why not call it a miracle, whether we have a scientific explanation or not? Science is a miracle after all; life and love are miracles!

In her book of meditations for racial healing, Dr. Catherine Meeks recalls a Sufi story about Mulla Nasrudin, who had lost his key. He was outside, down on his hands and knees, looking for it. One of his friends came upon him while he was searching and asked him what he was doing. “I lost my key,” Mulla Nasrudin told him. So his friend began to help him search, but to no avail. Finally the friend asked him, “Where did you lose the key?” Mulla Nasrudin replied, “I lost it in the house, but the light is better out here.” [2]

What have we lost? Where did we lose it? How long will we grieve about it? How long will we sleep? How long will we stumble around not seeing what is right in front of us? How long will we look in all the wrong places? 

If you’re struggling to answer any of those questions, you’re in luck. As usual at Emmanuel, our fourth reading and second sermon is our cantata: Damien Geter’s beautiful “Cantata for a More Hopeful Tomorrow.” When you listen to it, breathe in the fullness of God’s grace, because surely there is a Balm in Gilead waiting for us. Let’s look for it where we lost it, deep in our hearts, our individual hearts and our collective heart. Perhaps we are made to seek because nothing is ever lost. Let’s “Go back to the parts…that house ambitions, where [we’ll find our] glory, the drive to endure [and perhaps even to thrive] by learning again to just breathe.”

This Lent develop depth perception; wake up; rise up! Engage in and celebrate healing, come when it may and cost what it will.

1. Excerpted in The Bible Workbench 15:2.
2.  Catherine Meeks, The Night is Long but Light Comes in the Morning: Meditations for Racial Healing (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2022), p. 68.

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