4th Sunday in Lent, year A: Spotting God

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

4^th Sunday in Lent, Year A

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector

I was speaking to a parishioner last Sunday who was on hand to greet folks who might not have heard about the recent church closures. She came in with a big smile on her face and was talking about how beautiful it was outside. Snow creasing the mountains’ folds. Sky’s too blue to be true blue. Heel scuff of cloud shoving off east. First buds stippling the maples. Crocuses unfolding by the side door, a buttery yellow. And the chickadees’ spring song threaded through it all. She called it a, “God Wink.” A moment when she came to herself and saw with eyes washed clean the world charged with God’s presence.

My kids call it “God Spotting.” It’s a little practice of keeping your eyes peeled and your heart open, of stepping into possibility and the capacity to be surprised. “Where’d you spot God today?” I’ll ask. “Well, Scarlet forgot her lunch, so we all shared from ours and you know what? We all had enough, and it felt good!” Or, “I saw a mother quail and her seven little chicks scooting out from under the juniper bush in the backyard!” Or, “I flunked my spelling test and my friend gave me a hug.”

It’s such a simple practice, but it’s very effective in helping to tune into the goodness and graciousness of God and God’s presence and action in the midst of our so-called ordinary lives. In reading through our Gospel account for this morning I’ve been pondering what the story of the man born blind might have to teach us, particularly in the midst of the current public health crisis. I got to thinking that an awful lot of the time, it’s me who is blind, who doesn’t see from the place of gift, grace, and abundance. It’s me who needs Jesus’ healing compress of spittle and mud and a rinse in the waters of Siloam.

And when we dig into the story a little more, it becomes clear that blindness is a pretty universal condition. It’s the man’s condition from birth, of course, but we could say that the entire community is blind as well. After he’s healed they don’t even recognize him! Did they ever really see him? Were they blind all these years to the presence of this blind man in their midst? Did they brush past him without ever seeing the person, the face, the precious child of God behind the illness or the affliction?

That’s what Jesus comes into the community to heal. Not just the blind man’s affliction, but the community’s blindness to the least of these in their midst. Their hard-heartedness. Their bland indifference. Their inattention and their distractedness. Their captivity in a way of seeing and being that notices only labels and not people, precious in God’s sight. As Paul writes in his Letter to the Ephesians—“Sleeper awake!”

I remember leading a poetry workshop at an inner-city school in Philadelphia. We started with what I call “sketch poems”—little snapshots in words of ordinary, everyday scenes: people, places, things. The kids sketched broken water fountains, leaky toilets, dark, dank stairwells lit by a dangling fluorescent light on the fritz. And the task was simply to notice, to write what was “close to the nose,” as William Carlos Williams says, without any commentary or judgement. We typed them up, did a reading, and published a little anthology of their poems. And the next day we got a phone call from the principal. He was irate in a way that only someone from the City of Brotherly Love can be irate. These poems were giving the school and the district a bad name. What in the name of everything that is holy did I think I was doing?

Paying attention, really looking, has a profound capacity to change things. These kids were writing what they saw as clearly and as accurately as they could. They just looked and wrote what they saw without ever intending to make a statement about inner city schools, but that’s exactly what happened! Their attention to what everyone else just sleepwalked past awakened people from their slumber, opened their eyes to what they were blind to all this time. That’s why attention is just another word for love. That’s why Simone Weil can say that attention, absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. That’s what William Carlos Williams means when he writes,

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

So much depends! When we’re not paying attention, it’s easy for us to miss those God Winks that litter our lives. It’s easy for us to get carried along by fear, distraction, and anxiety and not spot God’s steadfast covenant faithfulness to all of God’s people present and active in our midst. That’s really what our psalm for today that we all know so well is reminding us of. It seems providential that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic we would hear this psalm: though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we will fear no evil. Of course, what the psalm is not saying is that if we trust in God nothing bad will ever befall us. That’s a kind of blind sleep in itself. What the psalm does tell us is that no matter what we face, God is with us. No matter the outward circumstances those green pastures, those still waters, are available to us.

With the banquet table of divine love before us and mercy and goodness behind us, we can be certain of God’s presence with us, for us, and ahead of us, no matter how grim things might appear. But it takes unhooking from all the stories of lack and loneliness for us to be anointed by this ever-present and inexhaustible reality. It takes awakening from our slumber to perceive with the eyes of abundance, provision, and restoration. It takes a little sacred pause by the stilling waters for us to see that there, in the depths of the heart shines the light of Christ that no darkness, no panic, no fear, no illness, not even death itself can extinguish.

In these coming days and weeks, what if we as a community of faith practiced these sacred pauses throughout the day? What if we practiced being poets of the holy ordinary and woke from our sleep to see with eyes attuned to gift, hearts open to reality that we dwell in the house of the Lord even here, even now? What if, even as we keep up with how this emerging public health crisis unfolds and how best to love and serve our neighbors, we also practiced God Spotting—giving thanks for all the tender mercies that anoint our heads in ways we’re often too busy to see or acknowledge? What if, each of us allowed Jesus to touch our eyes with spittle and mud and washed our hearts and minds and bodies clean in the waters of Siloam, so that we could see, as if for the first time, the presence and action of the God of steadfast love who makes a way out of no way, in the midst of our so-called ordinary lives? And what if we shared with one another these micro-mercies that litter our days?

Might that not be a way to fill someone’s cup? Might that not just be the anointing oil your neighbor needs? Might that not just be the place of springs to which the Shepherd is calling us each by name?

Let us pray Psalm 23 together

The LORD is my shepherd; *
    I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; *
    he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul; *
    he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
                                Name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; *
    for thou art with me;
    thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of
                                mine enemies; *
    thou anointest my head with oil;
    my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days 
                                of my life, *
    and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.