Lent 4A
3 April 2011
St. John’s Church in the Village
New York City
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

It is the middle of Lent. Perhaps it is a good time to pause and think where you are. Today is Rose Sunday when we pause liturgically from the austerity of Lent. So, consider how you are doing. Need to make any changes in your discipline? Have you learned anything, have you found out anything about yourself and how you relate to God?

We are doing quite well. Tools for Life, our program to provide necessary tools for graduates of an orphanage vocational school in Africa, is over half way to its 4,000 dollar goal. Your vestry chose this program for a few very good reasons. In Lent and Easter, we celebrate our passage from death to life. These kids are doing the same thing. Their parents died in the AIDS epidemic. As orphans in this desperately poor part of the world, they, too would likely have died—either literally through some of the diseases rampant in this part of the world, or figuratively as very young people buried in intractable poverty.

Tools for Life will open the door to self-sufficiency. These are children involved in a program known to our good friends Cherian and Kalindi Thomas. Our good doctors have helped us to find a suitable Lenten project for two years in a row now, and we are grateful to them, for their research, their creativity, and their help.

We call it “Tools for Life” because we are helping people start a new life. A guy who found a new life appears in the gospel today.

In today’s gospel about the healing of the man born blind, the crowd did not recognize the blind man at first, after he had been healed. Was this the same guy? He used to be blind. People don’t regain their sight—must be a different person.

And in a way, he was a different person, because he had been given in one way of looking at it, a different life. A new life. To find out the complete story, the Pharisees first criticize Jesus for working on the Sabbath; I suppose making that mud paste was an act against the sanctity of the Sabbath because it was work. Then they went to see his parents to see what had happened. They sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, he is a grown boy, to ask him what happened.

So they went back to the man born blind and asked him about Jesus. The only one in the story who gives a direct answer to the question about who Jesus is.

Who is he? Jesus bent over, spit in the dust and made a clay paste. He smeared it on the man’s eyes. Then, he tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam, which means sent. Make a note: the pool means sent. Who was sent? Who was the one sent to show us god?

Clay and water, notice, please, are symbols of creation. Genesis tells us that humanity was made from the rain softened clay, created from the earth. The clay mixed with water is a powerful conjunction of symbols. It takes us back to creation. And that is just what John the evangelist has in mind, he wants to take us back to the point where creation can be remade.

In Jesus, God gives us the chance to start over. Creation needs to be remade. That is why elsewhere in the NT, Paul the apostle calls Jesus the new Adam, creation being restarted. What Christianity promises, and, in f act what Lent celebrates, is our possibility of being restored and renewed, and made new men and women.

Each of us when we were baptized, made a trip to a certain pool of water, and that water means that we are sent. Just as the man born blind is the living evidence of who Jesus is—we are, to the rest of the world, the living evidence, the ones sent, to show in our own lives who Jesus actually is.

This gospel is not just about the nature of this man who could again see. It is not just about who Jesus actually is. It means that we are called to be new men and new women. And, we are doing that exercise in self examination and self dedication by our program called Tools for Life. We are working on providing tools to help young people seize a new kind of life. And we are doing this by celebrating that we, too, are sent out with a new life, through Jesus who called us, once, to a certain pool, where we came to the moment of new creation in Jesus Christ.

Reach out, grab that new life, take a button and a flyer about Tools for Life and become, in the name of Christ, a sign of new life for others. Its what we are sent to do.