Fourth Sunday in Lent - Series A Eph. 5.8-14

Covid- 19, the new corona virus was not a phrase known to us a couple of months ago.  Never before singled out, never contracted by humans, its newness in our population meaning we are without treatment or immunity. Thankfully, it's only a small fraction of folks that die from it.  The disease is relentless, unstoppable.  It must avoided by action on our part.  Our medical system inadequate to combat it due to our

Now let's flip this whole thing on its' ear referring to "anastasisitus.a thanatos"or Iroughly speaking} the resurrection of the dead.  In case you hadn't noticed, light has this way of being visible.  The world we see around us is light to us, much more than my vision made out of light. 

"You were once darkness," writes the author, " but now you are light." Faith reveals light. At issue is existence.  Light reveals.  Darkness is nonexistence.  Such is the physics and metaphysics of the Bible.  Therefore our identity in Holy Baptism, our existence is wholly baptismally created, established in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Now as light, revealed in the promise of faith, is as relentless as any disease, disease to the nonfaith powers. Our ease with the predictable, the friendly, the settled-upon becomes the disease of salvation, healing, and hope.  This disease is relentless, this disease is unexpected, the disease is transformational.  You can see it from a distance, even anticipate it to a degree, but its' impact will not be fully known until it actually arrives.

This Second Reading is particularly blunt in its language, "Nobody should deceive you with stupid ideas."  Some of those deceptive ideas are that God is on the side of the good, God desires us to earn the things that save us, it'll come out alright if we believe; as if the wrath of God was in charge.  What kind of a god except a wrathful god would articulate such things?  "Whose to blame this man or his parents that he was born blind?"  Such is the "natural question", the question to the wrathful god, rightfully rejected by the nones and the dones.

"No one has ever heard of the healing of the eyes of a man born blind.  If this man wasn't from God, he wouldn't do this," confessed the man born blind.

He didn't ask to be healed.  He hadn't exchanged any words the Lord up to that point.  Hearing the "I Am" of the messiah made the blind man a believer in the light.. Our Baptismal light, from the Paschal candle of Easter resurrection, proclaims to us the disease of new life in Christ.  The God who explains the inconveniences and annoyances of his work points us to the god of  faith active in love. 

There is no discounting the troubles and terrors and incompetencies of this pandemic.  But the trust in getting through with courage and faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose light illuminates the power of God over death and over life, through darkness into his marvelous light.  For "light produces fruit that consists of every sort of goodness, justice and truth. So let us awake to the struggles of the world around us with the assurance that "everything revealed by the light is light, awakened to the Christ that is shining on us!