Born to Shine, to Manifest Glory

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A

Sermon for March 15, 2026

Grace to you and peace in the name of Christ Jesus who comes to give us true sight and insight, to make apostles out of ordinary, excluded, disinherited people, and to free us from the ways we blindly blame and scapegoat one another. Amen.

Often attributed to Nelson Mandela, the following little reflection was actually written by Marianne Williamson, American self-help author, political activist, and occasional presidential candidate. This is from her collection, Return to Love. She writes:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us. It's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure,” and “our playing small doesn't serve the world,” she writes. As children of God, we are born to shine, to make manifest the glory of God that is in us. And in the spirit of today's gospel text from John, we are sent, like the man born blind, to make manifest the glory of God that is in us.

Born to shine.

It's Lent. A word derived from the old English, lencton. Be invited to hear “lengthen.” As the hours of daylight increase, we proceed through the 40 days of Lent from Ashes to Easter. The season of lengthen, the healing of blindness has been preached during Lent for almost as long as the Church has lived.

These are Lenten days. And as they lengthen towards more and more sunlight, we are urged to let more and more light into our lives, and to make it manifest in our living.

In the ancient liturgy, baptism is described as enlightenment, and the baptisms on Holy Saturday were called photismos, the ancient Greek for enlightenment. We keep this symbol before us still. The blessing of the new fire, the paschal candle, the candles handed out to the newly baptized into the whole congregation at the great Vigil of Easter evokes our baptismal sending.

So the season that is marked by lencton, the lengthening of days, is the season of our baptism, of our photismos, of our enlightenment. After all, we are born to shine, to make manifest the glory of God that is in us.

Now on the surface, this week's gospel, the account of the man born blind, is a story about affliction and about sin and about healing. But it is worth noting that the story opens with Jesus rejecting the idea that affliction is punishment for sin. Underneath the surface of the story is the account of insiders and outsiders, pain and disappointment of feeling excluded.

Jesus rejects the idea that this man's sin or his parents' sin or anybody else's sin resulted in the blind man's blindness. Think of it this way, he insists: this blindness is not the result of some sin in the past, but rather it's an occasion for doing God's works now and in the future. And what is God's work? It is much broader and deeper than the physical restoration to sight.

First, Jesus evokes God's work in Genesis 2, making spittle and dirt together to bring forth a new creation. “The Lord God breathed into the dust,” remember? A clear poetic evocation of God's work in creation, for a new creation is unfolding.

But then secondly, he sends the man to wash in the pool of Siloam. Siloam was a spring-filled reservoir in lower Jerusalem, built centuries before by King Hezekiah. In Hebrew, Siloam means scent. Go wash in the scent. We have a clear poetic evocation of baptism, a form of commissioning, a form of enlightenment in that sending. Jesus is creatively calling the man to become apostle, again, a little bit of Greek, from the New Testament word apostolos, which means a person sent forth. Go wash in scent and be sent.

Better yet, he's anointing the man as an apostle, not with precious oil, but with spittle and dirt and municipal water. Common stuff, like cheap wine and tap water. With common stuff, the holy is revealed, God is revealed, God's will is revealed, with spittle and dirt and local water.

Jesus is recruiting a new apostle from the ranks of the excluded and the disinherited. And in so doing, he's overturning the conventional hierarchies of his day. His disciples don't see it, they're busy trying to assign the sin. His family and friends don't see it, they retreat into safe denial. And the religious authorities certainly don't see it. They're getting bogged down in Sabbath legalism, whether or not the healing is counterfeit and should be dismissed. It couldn't be real after all, it's the Sabbath.

In short, the one who is blind now sees. And the ones who supposedly can see show just how oblivious they really are.

Forms of blindness diagnosed in the Gospel text today are varied, as are ours. Again, there's the blindness of faithful disciples, who speak in trite religious slogans and phrase their theology of illness in terms of blame and shame. Then there's the blindness of neighbors and family, who will not be involved in this new vision out of discomfort or out of fear. And then, there's the blindness of the religious establishment, which could not see that anything good might happen outside of its own system.

Jesus poses an alternative, and the alternative is seeing rightly, embracing the enlightenment that is our baptismal identity, and then being sent into the world with a commission to make manifest the glory of God that is in us. Born and reborn to shine.

Jesus turns the conventional wisdom hierarchy of his day and the conventional wisdom hierarchy of our time upside down, or one might say he turns it right side up. But conventional, personal, and institutional blindness persists. And we must note that it's riddled with hypocrisy.

Some of you have probably been to Salem, Massachusetts, the site of the infamous witch trials of the late 1600s. There's a striking street mural in Salem of a man dressed in his 17th century garb, sternly pointing an accusing finger off to his left and yelling, witch! But on second look, one notes that the artist gave the accuser himself a green complexion and a wicked look and so on. And in that simple image, there's a profound idea. It's often the exclusionary act itself, the one that points away and accuses someone else of evil that actually embodies what it purports to condemn.

Likewise, the accusatory cry of “sinner” in the Gospel text today is brought to the very person who turns out to be a worthy apostle. And the very people thought to be religious turn out to be captive to the contemptuous and oblivious and exclusionary way of sin. They cry out, you were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us? And they drive him out.

And thus, the story lays a trap. It's important to know the Gospels are a little more complex than we sometimes allow them to be. There's a trap here.

If we're listening carefully, we dare not point an accusatory finger toward the Pharisees or toward the disciples or toward all those other Christians down the street who are different from us. Jesus sends us forth to let go of blame and recrimination and to turn instead to interpreting the world in all of its beauty and affliction, its hardships, brokenness, and blessing as a steady stream of opportunities to participate in God's works of love and healing and reconciliation.

In our time, we dare not point an accusatory finger even at those we know to be suspect. Members of the other political party, or the other faith tradition, or the other nation, or the other racial group, or the other gender identity, or any other “other.” Here, we dare not point an accusatory finger at another, or we'll miss the opportunity to participate in God's works of love and healing and reconciliation.

We take our creation, baptismal anointing, with spittle and dirt and municipal water, as ascending into the world. And it's ascending to shine, not to condemn, making manifest the glory of God that is in us. And in so doing, we are healed of our own deep and abiding blindness to the will of God. Upon this truth, we have hope.

On March 15th, 1965, 61 years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech before a joint session of Congress, calling for legislation to safeguard voting rights for all Americans, and in particular for black Americans and others whose voting rights had been systematically denied on the basis of race. Just eight days before that speech, the nation had witnessed Bloody Sunday, the day when 600 people set out on a march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery, demonstrating for voting rights and protesting the murder of a civil rights activist.

As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers were met by local and state law enforcement, who brutally attacked them with clubs and with tear gas. ABC News covered it; that was something new. In all of its violence, ABC News covered the tragedy, and the nation became increasingly concerned, and institutional blindness began to fall away.

Johnson's speech that day was structured around the Civil Rights Anthem, We Shall Overcome. Toward the end of the speech, watched by more than one in three Americans, President Johnson declared, “Their cause must be our cause, too, because it's not just Negroes, but really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Tragically, the possibility of a bloody Sunday doesn't feel like the stuff of long ago. It's hard to believe that we remain in need of overcoming bigotry and injustice more than half a century later. But friends in Christ, we're not there yet.

From our second reading this morning, from Ephesians 5, “once you were darkness,” not you were like darkness or in darkness, “once you were darkness, but now in the Lord, you are light. Live as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”

My sisters and brothers, as children of God, we are born to shine, to make manifest the glory of God that is in us. We are sent into the world bearing that enlightenment still. And Jesus comes to give us true sight and insight, to make apostles out of ordinary, excluded, disinherited people, and to free us from the ways we blindly blame and scapegoat one another.

Think of hardships in another way, Jesus says. Not as the results of sins in the past, but rather as occasions for participating in God's work of amazing grace here and now. Do you see?

Amen.