Lent 4A sermon

4th Sunday in Lent Year A
April 3, 2011
I have been given a lovely gift this week, and I want to share it with you. Early in the week, before I’d even begun to think about this homily, I was looking for something to read. I found, on my bookshelf, a book that David’s aunt had sent to us two years ago; a book that she had read with her church during Lent that she had wanted to share with us. Well, I’d stuck it on my shelf and forgotten about it, until this week. The book is called Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives, and it was written by Wayne Muller, an ordained minister and therapist.
I was hooked on this book from the second page with this paragraph: “A ‘successful’ life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond the limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks” (2). “…As it all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: I am so busy (2).” “With a few notable exceptions, the way problems are solved is frantically, desperately, reactively, and badly. Despite their well-meaning and generous souls, community and corporate leaders are infected with a fearful desperation that is corrosive to genuine helpfulness, justice or healing. As Br. David Steindl-Rast reminds us, the Chinese pictograph for ‘busy’ is composed to two characters: heart and killing” (3).
It is more than a little disturbing to me to hear the disease of my own life experience named in such a clear and concise way. And I know that I am not alone in living this rushed and harried and violent life that Muller writes about because I see the results of this life in the lives of others all the time—in the nurse at the doctor’s office, in the person on the phone, in some of you who so desperately want life to be different but who cannot break out of the system of busy-ness and violence in which you find yourselves caught.
What’s most interesting to me about this image of life that Mu ller articulates is that it is not unique to our age (although the developments of progress and technology have certainly intensified it). We can see glimpses of this violence in our gospel reading for today. What starts out as a conversation between Jesus and his disciples leads Jesus to heal a man who had been blind from birth. And then we see 33 chapters worth of resulting conflict and drama among the newly healed man, his family, his community of faith. It is a whole lot of talking and arguing and conflict and drama, all about authority and sin and legitimacy. And the man who was born blind just keeps telling his story: “I was sitting there, and the man called Jesus walked up and healed me of my blindness”. Eventually, he gets put out of the synagogue, exiled from his faith community, for telling his story. And Jesus finds him and offers him a new community of faith and a new way of life to go along with his new way of seeing the world.
We are very much like the man who was blind from birth who was healed by Jesus and given the beautiful gift of a new way of being in the world; as a result of this gift, this new way of seeing, he finds himself caught up in the drama and the violence of those around us. But he stayed faithful to the story, and after what I am sure was a most painful exile, he was rewarded by a glimpse of the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
We are also very much like the Pharisees. We do violence to others when they speak the truth about the disease in the way of the world and the way of our lives. And we ostracize them; we refuse to listen, and we even squeeze them out.
Today, the 4th Sunday in Lent, is also known in our tradition as Laetare Sunday. It means Rejoice Sunday, and it was traditionally a time when the mood of Lent was somewhat lightened so that people could get a little bit of a reprieve and then journey on through the rest of Lent.
The gift that I received this week from the Holy Spirit’s encouragement to pick up this book on the Sabbath, I share with you this day, so that we may all rejoice together.
Our lives do not have to be like war. God does not want that for us, and God invites us, through Jesus Christ, to live into the wholeness that is already deep within us. Muller writes that we tap into that existing wholeness by remembering the Sabbath. He writes, “While Sabbath can refer to a single day of the week, Sabbath can also be a far-reaching, revolutionary tool for cultivating those precious human qualities that grow only in time. If busyness can become a kind of violence, we do not have to stretch our perception very far to see that Sabbath time—effortless, nourishing rest—can invite a healing of this violence (5). …Sabbath is a way of being in time where we remember who we are, remember what we know, and taste the gifts of spirit and eternity (6)…Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us (8).”
On this 4th Sunday in Lent, may remember who you are and what you know; may you easily receive the gifts of healing and Sabbath and new vision that our Lord has to offer you, and may you take the time to listen to your life, “to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, and true”, and be freed from the violence of the world and of our lives.

(Muller, Wayne. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives. Bantam: New York, 1999.)