Lent 4 Sermon - BMT - March 15, 2026

Scripture Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13;Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:1-14;John 9:1-13, 28-38

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In the season of Lent, we're entering into something of a paradox in Christian spirituality. We are suggesting that the flowering of joy and peace and salvation is born out of the desert in these 40 days. And Christian living, Christian spirituality is deeply paradoxical. And what I mean by paradox is that two things are true at the same time, even though it looks like they couldn't be. They look contradictory, but on a deeper level, we see that they actually are true at the same time, that we see a unity. And this paradox is born directly out of the teachings of Jesus. If you see the gospels, you'll see that paradox is all over the teachings of Christ concerning the kingdom. If you want to save your life, you need to lose it. If you want to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, you need to serve everybody. If you want to live, you need to die. These paradoxical teachings of the kingdom. The reason why these teachings of Jesus, these paradoxical teachings of Jesus, the reason why they seem contradictory to us is because we don't see well. We're spiritually blind like this young man in the Gospel of John. We don't see well. What looks to us like death is to God life. What looks to us to be annihilation is to God the flowering of an abundant life. We don't see the way God sees, as we saw in Samuel, the Lord does not look at humans the way that humans look at humans. The Lord looks with regard to the heart. And this is the goal of Christian sanctity, that we who are blind would have the eyes of our own hearts enlightened, that we could see the world the way God sees the world. We see each other and ourselves, creation, strangers, enemies, friends, the way God sees them. And this condition in which we're not able to see, where we are spiritually blind, what causes this? Like what inhibits us from seeing spiritually? In the New Testament, and we see especially in Paul that blindness is brought about primarily from the passions. We're enslaved or caught up in the passions. You'll see this is often the way that Gentiles are described. We saw this last week in Romans 1, but that the Gentiles, in the futility of their thinking, their minds are darkened, they're blind and oblivious to the things of God. In Christian tradition, where they get technical and specific about this is they say that we are blinded in the condition of sin. We are actually blinded by our own anger and our own selfish desire. We're blinded by our anger and our selfish desire. That this blindness prevents us from seeing, well, reality, seeing God, neighbor, and ourselves. But this condition of being overthrown, overcome with passions, the scaffolding of it, like if it was a house, the studs and the foundation of this passionate condition of blindness, the central infrastructure that keeps that in place is the principal vice of pride. Pride is at the root of this entire system, this construct that we build our lives around, passions that result in our being unable to see, to see well, to see the kingdom. Which means I've spoken about pride in a multitude of ways over the last few weeks, but I want to talk specifically about what I'm going to call the orientation of pride. That the way that pride orients us in the world. So in the passion, in the vice, in the sin of pride, we are fundamentally oriented to the world as though we are the central and dominant reference point for evaluating anything. So everything gets evaluated up or down, in or out, good or bad, whatever, with reference to us. We're at the center of our kind of moral index, which means that everything, every interaction, conversation, relationship gets understood principally is how does this benefit me? How is this bearing a cost on me? Do I like that cost? Do I like this benefit? And this is foundationally what pride is suggesting in kind of our this is uh at the very kind of back in the back of our motives and intentions is it says something like this life is about me. Life is about me. And I know it can be really easy to create a foil of that, you know, it's you know, we're all thinking, I know those people, you know. But but I want to think of pride as a spectrum, and yes, on this end we can have narcissistic tendencies, but but then on this spectrum of pride, we can see that this mindset, this orientation to others in the world, it just colors ever so subtly our experience. I think if we're honest, it it colors quite a bit of our experience. I can recall even as uh when I was working as a chaplain and I'd be with people who are in so much pain, and I want to like love these people, I want to talk with them, I want to pray with them, and I and I'm there and I'm like giving my time and attention to this person, and in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, how long is this gonna take? Like, I got stuff I gotta do. I know you're having an existential crisis, but I gotta get to Engels. And this is this is just how subtle it is. But that we imagine that life is about me, my interactions, and this prevents us from seeing creation well. We can't see creation as intended, as gifts given to us by God that we would uh gather up and consecrate as a means of great intimacy in our union with Christ, but it's a commodity, it's something to be consumed, it's something to be used, something to gratify my desire, my time when I want it. And we do the same thing with people and relationships. How can they benefit me? How are they bearing a cost on me? And this infrastructure of pride, of viewing the world as life is fundamentally about me. We can even say, I don't know if it sounds strange to say it this way, it makes sense to me, but maybe not to you. That's okay. Uh that just means I'm I'm weird, not that you're not you're incompetent. But that for me to think of it this way, that my experience is about me. This is what pride, like my the way, and of course you might ask, well, who else would it be about? Who else would your experience? But this is what I think that pride does is it orients us with an expectation of consuming and using, commodifying. We essentially turn into some kind of Machiavellian, uh, you know, uh petty tyrant inside. And the elixir, the medicine for this, for this spiritual blindness born of pride, is humility. This is the medicine. And this is why Jesus' chief example, the imagery that he uses for discipleship, is the humiliation of crucifixion. Right? Jesus says, pick up your cross. If you want to be my disciple, pick up your cross. Now we need to remember that cross, while absolutely painful, excruciatingly painful, that the calculation of the torture of crucifixion was not physical pain, but it was humiliation. Crucifixion was death by humiliation. You humiliated and degradated somebody to death. And this is the image that Jesus uses, the dominant image that Jesus uses for life that is entering the kingdom. Humility. And if you see the paradoxical teachings of Jesus about the kingdom, we will see that humility melts away those paradoxes. You'll see that the thing that keeps those categories contradictory is pride. When Jesus says, right, if you want to save your life, you need to lose it. If you want to be the greatest, you need to be a servant of everybody. If you want to live, you need to die. In proportion that we grow and receive the gift of humility, we see that these seemingly contradictory teachings of Jesus are opening up a new path. And I can't help but think that when Jesus is healing this man who's blind, John makes it, he repeats it several times. He makes great reference out of mud. It's mud that goes on to this gentleman's eyes, right? Jesus spits in the dirt and then takes the dirt, makes mud, and rubs it on this guy's eyes. I remember at youth camp uh one, this is many years ago when I was in high school, uh, I just remember a pastor saying, like, could you imagine being blind and hearing Jesus is uh, you know, he's here and he's gonna heal heal you, and the next thing you hear is somebody like trying to hawk a loogie. But I imagine that a deep mystical spiritual reading of this is that this reference to dirt and earth and mud, this reference to humility, right? The humility that we see in Ash Windsley from ashes, ashes, dust to dust, from dust we were created to dust, to dirt, soil we shall return. That Jesus is imposing earth on this young man's eyes. But it's this humility, the recognition of rafinitude that brings us sight through Christ. And this is the many ways what this is, is a shift in orientation. Where pride relates to everybody on the assumption that life is about me. What Jesus is inviting us into, when Jesus says to pick up your cross, follow me, die so that you will live, what Jesus is saying is come to me and live a life that is not about you. Live a life where you are not the reference point for everything. And I know as soon as we hear that, we think, or at least I think, well, if if life isn't about me, how am I going to know that I'm going to be okay? Nobody else is looking out for me. That's why I'm so obsessed with myself is because unfortunately nobody else is. How am I going to make sure that I'm not going to end up in the gutter, that I'm not going to go off the rails, that my needs are met? And we hear how so much of uh pride is bolstered by fear. And this, I see in our psalm in Psalm 23, that the invitation into humility is an invitation to be sheepish. Right, don't lead. Shepherds lead. Sheep follow. Sheep are fed. Sheep are brought to water. Sheep are told when to lie down and where to lie down. Sheep are protected. Pride is wanting to assert fundamentally by saying that life is about them, that we are our shepherd, that we are the ones responsible for holding this all together. And humility, Jesus' invitation to live a life where life is not about us, but rather we are about life, or we are about the kingdom. That this invitation can only be received with great confidence in the goodness of the shepherd. Because what we're essentially doing is we're abdicating. We're abdicating ourselves off of our throne. We're becoming, as it were, de-centered. Pride, we're at the center, and humility, we're de-centered. And that center where we previously were is Christ. Paul says, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. Love that ancient uh image of Christ as our captain, right? I guess that makes us the first mate or some I don't I don't know sailing terms, but we're we're not the captain. We're on the ship, I hope. This is the invitation. The invitation that Jesus, that while we are blind, Jesus comes to us, comes to you with earth and saliva, his own saliva in his hands, and he imposes his healing powers on us of humility that bear out in great vision. And if we can hear what Paul says, awake, O sleeper, and let Christ shine on you. Awake, O sleeper, and let Christ shine on you. Confidence in the Good Shepherd is what gives us the courage and the faith that we need in this path, an invitation into humility that Jesus calls the cross. May we enter that humility, the way of the cross, this lint, as we continue to journey with this humble and meek Christ to Jerusalem to see just the extent of the love and the humility of Christ that will be on display. Amen.