To say that we find ourselves in unusual times is an understatement.  In many, many ways, the norms of our world have been turned upside down. When we have spent time and energy figuring out how to welcome friends and new comers to St. Timothy’s and our sanctuary every Sunday,  we are now observing social distancing and tell folks to not gather in groups of more than 10 and to join us online.  This morning, I am here in an empty church and instead of preaching to all your smiling and eager faces, I stare into the little black dot that is a camera on the back of an iPad.  Thank you to all of you joining us on Facebook this morning, if you missed the live broadcast, you might be watching as a recording.
 
If Facebook and livestreaming aren’t enough, we have the gospel story of the healing of a man blind from birth and in our Old Testament the anointing of David as King by Samuel.  Together these readings along with the Epistles are about vision and light.
 
There is a trap set for us people of faith in this time of the Coronavirus.  Its unavoidable,  cause all we have to do is go to the grocery store to find naked shelves.  We only need to look at the news, or around town, or in our own lives, to ask the disciples’ question: “Who sinned” and thus caused this to happen?   It’s a powerful and poignant question.  John’s gospel is full of wonderful theology and there is a powerful metaphor of spiritual blindness, in this story.  For now, however I want to focus on this question: How can an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God allow totally undeserved suffering to exist in the world?  A world that God has created and loves?
 
Jesus saw a man blind from birth and his disciples asked him, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?  The old and ancient belief was that a malady of such as this blindness was from and of God.  Things that happen have to have a reason or an explanation- they have to make sense if we are going to wrap our minds around such a thing.
 
But I have to tell you, I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around this virus.  I understand the science of it all- the way it is transmitted and that we should thoroughly wash our hands; I understand the need for social distancing, for modifying store hours, switching over to takeout and even moving our worship to a new platform. But for all these measures to place such burdens:  financial, social, and even on our own relationship with the Church and the sacraments, possibly even God, it feels at times that we have been struck with a darkness and we cannot see the way ahead. 
 
There are all kinds of things that can be said about this story of The Man Who Was Born Blind: things about sin, about blindness both literal and metaphorical, about miracles, about how societies divide themselves, the barriers we erect for those not just like us and so on. He is an outcast. He is forced by societal norms to live on the margins of society and to beg for his living..
 
Yet, the most fundamental purpose of the story as it works in John’s gospel is to illuminate.  It is to shed light on the essence of who Jesus is.
 
Jesus says of the man born blind that through this man, the works of God can be made real or manifest. Does that mean that God MADE the man blind in order to demonstrate or illustrate a point?  I certainly don’t believe that.  What I do believe is that the place to look for God in this tragedy, or in any tragedy, is not at the front-end. Not at the point of causing it to happen.
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Other Christian brothers and sisters will disagree with me by but I cannot conceive of a God sitting in heaven, passing out cancer cells, birth defects, earthquakes, strokes, car wrecks, Coronaviruses and blindness like some hideous dealer at a high-stakes cosmic game of poker.
 
Instead, the place to find God is the same place where we find Jesus, who is after all God in human form- the Incarnation, as John also put it, the Word made flesh who dwells among us.  Where is God- Where is Jesus? In the middle of the mess, in the very worst parts of it, working there to bring forth something new—not something that fixes the mess, but something that redeems and transforms it.

That is where God is found- the God who is active and real among us– the God who has wounds on his hands and feet and side- the God who knows suffering. The God who knows social distancing and isolation in his passion and death and therefore is the God who SHARES our suffering and pain and who takes it into himself in the vastness of his compassion and love.
 
God didn’t poke out the man’s eyes before he was born, so he would be written down in a book of other stories or  become a handy sermon illustration for Jesus.  Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says: “If it isn’t about love, it isn’t about God.”
My point is this: that even in the midst of undeserved, inexplicable pain and suffering, God can be found.  Found in real and in transforming ways.
 
This real and transforming God’s workings are mysterious, and often chooses the most unlikely persons to be messengers, prophets, and servants of God’s will.  Samuel anoints the next king at God’s behest for reasons known only to God and does so defying all norms and expectations.  The cultural norm would have been to choose from among the older sons, instead the youngest son David is chosen. 
 
Jesus says: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” Notice that Jesus says “We.” We must work the works of God.  Paul says in Ephesians that “in the Lord,[we] are light. Live as children of light for the fruit of the light is all that is good and right and true.”     Tragedy, pain, and suffering are calls and opportunities to ministry and to service. This may or may not be a call to fix whatever the problem is – often, as in the case of this Coronavirus we simply cannot do that – but it is always a call to reach out and to care. It is always a call to discover, to bring, and to share the presence of God in the heart of the tragedy.  We are still the Church after all.  And the Church is no stranger to tragedy as the Body of Christ in this world it finds itself in the middle of this present time.
 
But terrible things don’t happen so that we can have an opportunity to minister and serve. God doesn’t work that way, either. But we are called to ministry and service.  This was Jesus’ response to the reality of tragedy and suffering—and ministry and service is our call as well.
 
What is our response?  What can we do as a congregation that now must stay in our homes and away from the Church and tune in to worship on our tablets and phones and computer screens?  Well for one, we will do what we do best. We will pray for one another and for the world.  We will still worship together and offer to God our praise and the longings of our heart. We will listen and feast on God’s holy Word and allow God to continue to nourish our souls on the sacrament of God’s very story of his dream for us and his kingdom.

But we will also live as children of the light.  We are a people of hope and of resurrection; whose Christian story knows of hardship and knows that this pandemic will come to an end and that we will be together again worshiping in this space.

We are children of light who knows in our heart of hearts that the Church, the Body of Christ, is not a building or but the people of God joined in prayer and service. 

We are children of light who will check in our neighbors, pool and share our resources, feed the hungry in body and spirit;  and together we will find this as an opportunity to see NEW light and  NEW ways that God is at work in our church and in the world. 

We are Children of the Light, healed of the darkness that blinds us to the glory of God.  We will wash the mud from our eyes and behold the love that God has for us; a love so deep, so broad, so high that in the midst of this pandemic, amidst the sick and the grief stricken, the businessman and the worker; God is present in it.  And through this difficult time, God will ultimately transform it, helping us to say, “Lord, I believe” and answer God’s call to love and serve.  AMEN.

“If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.”  These are the words of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.
 
In that phrase he was talking about Adam- and his trespass or sin of eating the fruit in the Garden.  We learn that in the beginning because of that sin, death exercises dominion.  So what comes to mind when we think of dominion?  Is it a famous athlete at the top of her game crushing it against her opponents?  Is it a warrior or super hero standing over their defeated enemies, triumphant.  Or maybe it’s the alpha predator, like a great white shark in the deep ocean or a lion on  the savanna.
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Scripture obviously paints a different picture of dominion as we enter the first Sunday on Lent.  Last week we met Jesus on the top of the mountain in a moment of transfiguration, he is the Beloved, the Son of God, his whole appearance dazzling white. But in this gospel reading, we jump back, way back, to right after Jesus’ baptism where Christ is driven into the wilderness.   Genesis is also a less than happy story- about how humans gave into the temptation- allowing death and sin to enter into the world.  The Psalm, traditionally attributed to King David does not have the image of the perfect king, victorious over a beheaded giant or defeated enemies, but rather is heartbroken over wrongdoing.
 
Lent is that season that is very much about the times and places of wilderness.  There are times in our lives when we find ourselves in the desert.  There is financial stress, grief and loss in the death of a loved one, uncertainty about a job, retirement, a diagnosis or illness can all be named wilderness. The wilderness is the Wild place- filled with uncertainly a place of wandering and hunger themes universal to the human experience.  Even without personal suffering, it is easy to read the headlines and look out across the globe and feel like nothing is improving- the earth is getting warmer, the oceans are rising, we are facing what could be a pandemic in terms of the Novel-Coronavirus, just last week the sacristy was broken into and someone tried to start a fire in the garden courtyard. The election rhetoric is heating up such that society seems to be crumbling around us. Facebook and twitter don’t help either.
 
When we think of Lent, built into our language of worship are themes of self-sacrifice, and penitence.  Yes, Lent is a penitential season, and we began our service with the Penitential Order.  We are using Rite 1 and its beautiful, yet archaic language, has the power to make us feel small in the face of God.  In the Eucharistic prayer we read and pray:
 
And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ our Lord; etc, etc.
 
Here is the acknowledgment of “our manifold sins” and our need for a Redeemer. In the presentation of “our selves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice” to God, we experience the transcendence spoken of by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:18. It is in this transcendent experience that we are brought to the Good News, realizing, as John Wesley once wrote, the change that God works in the heart through faith in Christ, our hearts “strangely warmed.” It strengthens our trust in Christ alone for salvation, assuring us that he has taken away our sins and saved us from the law of sin and death.
 
But these 40 days are not so much about beating ourselves up as they are about following in Jesus’ foot steps through the wilderness.  Matthew tells us that Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.  There are times when the world and our hearts feel like a desert or wasteland.  And there are other times when we follow Jesus and the calling of the Spirit and willingly go out into the wilds in order to be with those who are already there.  Think of sitting with a grieving friend, or walking a path alongside those in the midst of struggle or hardship.
 
In the passage from Romans, Paul describes that without Christ, the world is bound up in the sin of Adam and the curse of death. No matter how obedient we might be to the law, death will still have the final say.  But in Christ, death does NOT have the final say.  We are given a new path and a new way of life as the kingdom of God breaks into our broken world and sets things right.
 
Yes, “God is with us even in hard times,” but there is more to it. Christ replaces Adam as the mold for all of humanity. Through Christ, humanity once again has access to living fully into the Image of God and living in the victory that Death is not the end. Thus, redemption means that we are free to exercise dominion in this life—even in the midst of the wilderness, even in the midst of suffering.  Death, then, does not have dominion.  Christ does.
 
What does Christian dominion look like?  We turn to the gospel for our example.  Christian dominion is not about physical prowess or power. This is the not about power over nature: Christ rejects the temptation to change the stones into bread. Likewise, he refuses to jump from the temple or bow down to Satan. Dominance is not transforming our surroundings to suit our wants or satisfy our immediate needs. Dominance is not popularity, fame, or glory atop the mountain heights.
 
Rather dominance comes from feasting on the word of God and from worshiping God alone- a rejection of money and power for its own sake.
 
Dominion does not require one to leave the wilderness.  In fact, such dominion is possible even while entering it or being in it.  The picture of dominion given to us in Jesus and in scripture is the power of life even in the wilderness. 
In Christ we are given the possibility to dream a life that is not just about getting by or trying ot make it through the desert.  As individuals and more importantly as the Church, the body of Christ, together we lift one another up.  Together we dream and imagine Christ exercising dominion in our lives.  We draw on the grace and love that God has poured into us and share that with the world.  We are filled with God’s abundant grace and love and it is with the power of love that reach out to resist systems that try to exert dominion in other ways: racism, economic inequality, loneliness, despair.  We name the temptations and brokenness around us including the temptation to think that nothing will ever change and we should look out for ourselves.  That it is about me, and my individual wants.
 
As we begin this journey into Lent, we enter into a period of self-examination and penance. The language of Rite 1 points us in the direction of the wilderness and into it we go. We enter into the wilderness. And while in the dry and wild places of the desert, we look to Scripture and to the saints for those models and images of those who shine with the light and love of God even in the darkest of times. The goal of Lent is not to inflict punishment on ourselves but rather to allow the grace of God to transform us more and more into God’s image. This Lent, let us exercise dominion in life together. We will dare to resist the temptation to give in to the broken systems around us, and instead work to transform the world.