Homily: The Fifth Sunday in Lent [March 22, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            Today’s Gospel tells the story of the raising of Lazarus. John tells us that Lazarus was in the tomb for four days—or just about the amount of time it took to read the passage we just heard-- before Jesus came on the scene. I don’t understand the need for these book-length Gospels in Lent. I’m just glad they didn’t ask us to stand and listen to a reading of Moby Dick. There are many interesting aspects to this very long reading, perhaps my favorite of which is that Jesus waits two days after hearing of Lazarus’s illness before he heads over to Bethany to see the family. Because of the delay, Martha accuses Jesus of letting her brother die, to which Jesus answers, “Your brother will rise again.”

            There are many conjectures as to what Jesus was doing during his two-day pause. My guess is that he was thinking and praying before committing to a course of action. I once went to hear a talk by a Russian Orthodox bishop from England named Anthony Bloom, who had written a book about prayer. When anyone in the audience asked him a question, Bloom actually closed his eyes and prayed for a long moment before answering. At first these pauses felt kind of weird. But we all eventually relaxed and realized that there just might be something to a reflective pause before speaking. One of these days I’m going to try it.

            In a world that values action over reflection, Jesus’s delay feels frustrating at best. And Martha, the sister in that Bethany family who always seems to value action over contemplation, is quick to blame the delay for Lazarus’s death. It is only her dialogue with Jesus that takes her out of her reactive mode and deepens her understanding of who Jesus is and what he is up to. This interaction is a good object lesson for all of us who often act without thinking.

            One point of the Lazarus story concerns the way Jesus affects the people he encounters. Martha is engaged and her understanding is transformed. But this story also reminds us that Jesus can affect people in other, negative ways. We learn later in John that the raising of Lazarus prompts the authorities to want to arrest, try, and execute Jesus. In fact, right after this story, they try to kill Lazarus himself. When God’s light and love come into the world, some of us are warmed and some of us are frozen. Jesus engenders contrary responses. Some are converted, and some become persecutors. In this respect, Jesus is a clarifying mirror in which we see ourselves and either want to embrace the truth or kill it.

            I think the other powerful thing going on in the Lazarus story is the short pithy statement, rendered as a single verse in the King James Version:  “Jesus wept.” We learn this as Jesus first sees the body of his friend. Both the evangelist and the onlookers say that Jesus loved Lazarus. We have a miracle story here, but the raising of Lazarus is entwined with Jesus’s love for his friend. This is not a magic trick. It is a healing done in the context of a long and deep relationship.

            The first section of John’s Gospel is often called the Book of Signs, depicting seven events which reveal Jesus’s identity and elicit either a faithful response or resistance. Turning water into wine is the first; the raising of Lazarus is the seventh. In between Jesus will also feed the 5,000, walk on water, and give sight to the man born blind. These are not so much miracles as they are indicators of who Jesus is and what he is up to. Each one gives us a window into some aspect of God.

            It is clear that this final sign is telling us something about resurrection, the event we celebrate at Easter and the point to which our entire Lenten season is tending. We preachers often talk about resurrection as if it’s simply about life after death. But, especially in John’s Gospel, resurrection is as much about the quality of life now as it is about its duration beyond the grave. The transformation of Martha’s understanding shows us one aspect of resurrection. The liberation of Lazarus from the tomb shows us another. 

            Jesus raises Lazarus after much prayerful deliberation. He does it in the context of his own friendship, Lazarus’s family, and a supportive community. The life to which Lazarus will return is determined by these markers. It is not only biological life. It is life lived fully in relationship. Risen life for you and me has all the marks of Jesus’s way of being. It is loving. It is courageous. It is compassionate. It is committed to justice. And it is available to you and me in the here and now.

            Here are the two things I take away from today’s Gospel. 

            The first is that all this happens in the context of Jesus’s love for Lazarus and his family. Jesus raises Lazarus because he loves him. When we’re obsessed with our problems or the world’s chaos or the cruelty and suffering of others, we tend to lose sight that the whole encounter between God and us is about love.  Jesus goes to Lazarus’s tomb out of a deep loving commitment to Lazarus, and his raising of Lazarus is the result. In the same way, God loves you and will raise you. God offers you not only life beyond death. God offers you life within life. You are invited to live today as Jesus shows us how to live in the Gospel. You can be just, caring, compassionate, forgiving, and fearless now. You don’t have to wait for that kind of life until you die.

            The second thing I learn from this story is expressed in Jesus’s command, “Unbind him and let him go.” Lazarus was bound in the traditional cloths of burial. God’s commitment to you is a promise of liberation. There is a reason why prisoners and slaves and oppressed people have always looked to Jesus in hope. Just as God will free Jesus from death, Jesus will unbind Lazarus from his funeral garments. In the same way, God seeks to liberate you from everything that binds, imprisons, and oppresses you. The risen life on offer in Jesus is not abstract. It is specific. Lent is the time to look at whatever within you and outside you is holding you back from being the fully alive person God created you to be. Lent is the time to let all that go.

            Next Sunday, Palm Sunday, is the day we begin our Passiontide walk with Jesus from triumphal entry to betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and the empty tomb. It is possible to experience Easter without everything that leads up to it, but the shared experience of Holy Week will help us to take in the depth and power of this process in the context of our church community. Jesus loved both Lazarus and his family. God loves both you and the church. Our time together will show us the depth of that love, and it will empower us to live as truly alive and risen people in the here and now. So let’s do all this together, and rejoice in who we’ll have become when the stone is finally rolled away, and we, like Lazarus, are unbound and let go. Amen.

 

            

 

 

 

 

Homily: The Fourth Sunday in Lent [March 15, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

Some of you know that I served on the staff of another All Saints Church (this one in Pasadena) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Because I was not the rector I didn’t get to preach very often. Late in the 1990s  a parishioner asked me when I was preaching next. I answered, “Some time in Al Gore’s second term.”

The culture at All Saints Pasadena was and is a bit different from the culture here. We associates didn’t preach very often, but when we did we had to be attentive to the extreme ideological and personal sensitivities in the congregation and especially the staff.

I did get to preach every once in a while, and on one occasion I preached on the very (long) Gospel we just heard, John’s story of the man born blind. At the staff meeting on the following Tuesday, one of my colleagues had a pained look on her face and said wanted to give me some “ constructive criticism” of my sermon. The phrase “constructive criticism” alerted me that I would be taking incoming, so I braced myself for the assault I knew was on the way.

She didn’t complain about the sermon as such, but she took me to task for talking about the Gospel story’s use of blindness and sight as figures for understanding. “You compared being blind to not understanding. I invite you (another loaded phrase in progressive circles)” she said, “to stop using metaphors of disability in the pulpit. That would include no longer singing ‘Amazing Grace’ because of the line ‘I once was blind but now I see.’”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Oh for heaven’s sake!” I blurted without thinking. Not use metaphors of disability? That idea is so lame.” Not, I imagine, the response she was looking for. She didn’t get the joke, but you do.

Speaking abstractly, she was right, of course. We should not compare deafness or blindness to lack of understanding. But the problem is that I wasn’t the one making the analogy. It is Jesus himself who seems to be explicitly making the comparison. I was merely along for the metaphorical ride.

Today’s Gospel [John 9: 1-41] is a long narrative, a story the scholar Andrew McGowan has compared to a drama in five scenes. It tells the story of a man blind from birth whom Jesus heals. The Pharisees get involved and so do the man and his parents. In the final confrontation between Jesus and his accusers, Jesus tells them: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” The healing of the blind man is contrasted with the seemingly willful refusal of the Jewish leaders to understand who Jesus is and what he is up to. 

As my reactive Pasadena colleague rightly noted, we should be careful when using physical disabilities as figures for states of the soul. As a person who has worn glasses since age 10 and hearing aids since age 60, I would wince if someone used my nearsightedness to accuse me of moral myopia. And, though I may not always hear you, I am not deaf to your concerns. And much of Western literature has turned the blindness/sight question on its head. Tiresias, the blind seer in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, sees things that others don’t. Sometimes blind and deaf people are the ones who truly get it.

But the inadequacy of the comparison should not get in the way of our understanding the spiritual process going on in this story. Jesus, called earlier in this passage “the light of the world” is bringing God’s clarifying light to bear on us and our doings. What we see in his life and ministry is the willingness to look the truth full in the face and to act on what he sees there. He does not accuse the blind man of having been born in sin. He lovingly responds to the man’s need by making a paste of mud and putting it on his eyes. The early church father Irenaeus saw in this act a reprise of the Genesis account of God’s making human beings out of the mud of the earth. Jesus ushers in a new creation, and the world he heralds does not disparage anyone because of the physical or social or racial or economic or sexual identity they bear. The “light of the world” shows things both as they are and should be, and our job is to help God turn what ought to be into what is.

There is another aspect of this story that has always interested me, and that is the willingness of almost everyone to throw the man born blind under the bus. Everyone, that is, except Jesus. The disciples treat him as the object for a lesson about sin. The Pharisees use him as a weapon to wield against Jesus, and when he resists them they drive him out. Even his own parents shift the responsibility away from themselves and onto their son. “He is of age,” they say, “ask him.” It is only Jesus who treats the man as a fully human being, as a person with more to his story than his blindness. Far from throwing the man under the bus, Jesus invites him to climb on board.

The point of this story is less about the miracle of restoring sight to the blind than it is about who Jesus is for you and me. The so-called experts in this story cannot see him at all. It is only a man born blind from birth who is open to the possibility of new life on offer from the one who is the light of the world. Jesus sees the man for who he is beyond his physical characteristics. The man sees Jesus as the one who is bringing light and love into a broken world.

You and I inhabit a time similar in its gloom to the one in which Jesus lived. Our world is no stranger to the knee-jerk judgmentalism exemplified by the Pharisees in their interrogation of the man and his parents. Even on good days we can attribute base motives or bad acts to those we do not agree with or understand. We make snap judgments based on appearances.

Jesus is the light of the world. If we are going to proclaim that with integrity, we will need to be willing not only to believe in him but to commit ourselves to acting toward others as he did to the man born blind. Jesus looked at him, loved him, healed him, and saw him as a particular, loved human being. Jesus knew that the man’s blindness did not define him.

In the same way, when God looks at you God sees you in all your wonderful particularity. No matter what our external markers, we have been made in the image of one who knows us and loves us as we are. In following that One, we claim God’s loving  acceptance of us and commit ourselves to working to see each other as God sees us. 

We have all, in a sense, been born blind. It is the light and love and blessing of life in the community that gathers around Jesus that allows us both to be seen and to see. Those aren’t metaphors of disability. They are states of the soul. And we find the gift we give thanks for today in the way God sees us, loves us, and calls us to lives of gratitude and compassion as we seek to follow the One who brings light and a new creation into our lives and the world. Amen.

 

 

Homily: The Second Sunday in Lent [March 1, 2026] All Saints, Beverly Hills

            All of us have come to church this morning with the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on our minds. I’m sure there is a wide range of opinions on this, and since I’m not the rectorI don’t think it appropriate to share mine with you.

            Christians of good will can differ on issues of war and peace. In January of 1990, as the first President Bush contemplated invading Kuwait, he called our Presiding Bishop, Ed Browning, to the White House for guidance. Bishop Browning advised against Operation Desert Storm. Unsatisfied with that counsel, the president called in Billy Graham who told him to go right ahead.

            Christians will always differ among ourselves when these issues arise. But one thing we do not disagree on  is that we are called to stand and work for peace. As Thomas Merton said, “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”

            As events in the Middle East unfold, it is our job as Christians to pray and work for peace between nations and peoples. 

            In the words of the Prayer Book Litany we sang last Sunday in this building, we pray “That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world; to give all nations unity, peace, and concord; and to bestow freedom upon all peoples, We beseech thee to hear us good Lord.” Amen.

            Now to the sermon.

 

Anyone who has ever taught school at any level knows the student who skips class and then comes up to you at the start of the next one and asks, “Did I miss anything?” Being the snarky cuss that I am, I was always tempted to answer, “No. We were so bereft by your absence that we sat here for an hour in the dark.”

            Nicodemus has always struck me as the kid who missed class and then expects you to teach it all over again just for him. In today’s Gospel [John 3: 1-17], he comes to Jesus by night and seeks answers that he is perhaps too afraid to seek in broad daylight. To many in the church he has become the figure of the earnest inquirer, the secular doubter who is intrigued but unwilling yet to commit. To me he’s a guy who just wants super-secret special attention.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Nicodemus does display an interest in Jesus, but he is not a tortured doubter—he is after all a leader of the Jewish community. He is drawn to Jesus but perplexed by him as well. And, following my student analogy, as this passage develops he does seem to be the dense kid that doesn’t get it. He mistakes being “born from above” for literally re-entering the womb. And at the end he throws up his hands with a despairing cry: “How can these things be?”

            If this were the only occasion on which we were to meet Nicodemus he would seem to be a dead-end character. But we actually see him twice more in John’s Gospel. Later in the story, he stands up for Jesus when others in the leadership want to arrest him: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” [John 7:50] And then much later, after the crucifixion, when they are preparing to bury Jesus, we learn that “Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.” [John 19:39] Nicodemus has an interesting faith trajectory. Although he began as a timorous inquirer, by the middle of the story he has become an ally, and at the end a committed disciple. 

            So the first point today is a reminder of how mysteriously God works in people’s lives. To my mind, the whole Nicodemus story is an argument for a gradual process of conversion, a progressive deepening of belief. You start out tentative,  you risk more involvement, finally you’re totally committed. We are born again not necessarily in a moment of baptismal immersion nor in a blinding flash but in a process that works its way over time. At least that has been my own experience, and I presume that of many others here today as well.

            Even if I find the early Nicodemus a trifle annoying, I do admire who he becomes and I find his persistence admirable. The second point of this story for me is the way it highlights the disparity between those of us who are drawn toward the holy and those who seem to live quite happily without it. [The late Louis Simpson expressed this in a poem he published in 1998, “The People Next Door”:

 

He isn't a religious man. 

So instead of going to church

on Sunday they go to sea. 

 

I hear them returning

worn out and glad to be home. 

This is as close to being happy

as a family ever gets. 

I envy their content.

 

When I first read this poem, I thought that the “content” he envied was that of living in a nuclear family. But reading it now, I wonder if their Sunday satisfaction is really the experience affluent worldly leisure without any perceptible spiritual depth. The people next door seem perfectly satisfied with the creature comforts of capitalism. They certainly don’t appear to question the justice of their having a boat while others live in trailer parks. And their excursion does not even explore the wonders of nature:

            They cruise up and down, 

see the ferry coming from Bridgeport 

to Green Harbor, and going back 

from Green Harbor to Bridgeport...

When the kids start to get restless 

and his wife has a headache

he heads back to shore.

 

Neither Louis Simpson nor I think of these neighbors as “bad” people.]* We/I merely marvel at the ability of many to accept the world on its face, no questions asked. Isn’t there more to life than  brunch, or boating (or cycling or playing golf or shopping) on Sunday? Isn’t there any nagging restlessness in their souls that drives them to explore what might be the meaning and purpose of all this?

            Now this is not one of those sermons where the preacher beats up the people who are in church on behalf of all the people who are not in church. I know that you and I are fellow travelers in nagging spiritual restlessness. None of us would be here if we weren’t drawn at least to think about what is behind and beyond all this. As Emily Dickinson says, “It beckons and it baffles”. You didn’t have to get out of a warm bed to come here this morning. But you did, while thousands didn’t. What is it that makes worship indispensable for some and marginal at best for others?

            I’ve pondered this question a lot over the course of my life, and I have never found an answer that satisfies. But as we think together about Nicodemus and his journey by night to see Jesus, I want to suggest that this nagging restlessness is neither an innate nor learned trait. We are not born spiritually curious, nor did our families make us this way. Rather, this nagging restlessness is a sign that God is at work in us. When Jesus says that we must be born from above, he is talking about the mysterious way God goes about drawing us in. As with Peter at the Transfiguration, so Nicodemus has been taken into new life. He began as a seeker and ended as a disciple. This transformation is what Jesus calls being born from above. He has experienced a change that is God’s doing, not his. 

            While we can’t give credit to Nicodemus for his own conversion, we can at least congratulate him for placing himself in circumstances where it could happen. The problem with contemporary life is that it offers us so many attractive opportunities to avoid thinking deeply about anything. [Louis Simpson wrote about his neighbors before the advent of social media. Today, the poem’s family could scrap the boat entirely and simply sit at home and scroll on their phones.] I’m not saying that going to church is the only place you’re going to encounter God. But I am saying that it’s hard to be open to the mystery of God’s purposes for you and your world if you never open yourself up to the possibilities of joy and wonder. And here is primarily where that happens.

            God transformed Nicodemus’s inner and outer life over time. Lent is the season you have been given to let God do that same work in us. Over these several weeks you are invited to step away from at least some of life’s distractions and move toward contemplating what really matters: God, the world, other people, yourself. As Jesus says toward the end of today’s Gospel, 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

 

That’s not just a slogan to be put on signs held up at ball games. That’s the clue to what this whole Jesus experience is about. God wants you to have life and have it abundantly. Lent is the season and today is the day to take God up on this offer. Amen.

*Omitted for length because of Iran attack disclaimer.