March 15, 2026 (Fourth Sunday of Lent) - Fr. Steve Moore
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Usually during Lent I have a list of things to give up. One of them is social media. But I didn’t do that this year, partly because there is so much going on and I have to preach regularly that it’s hard to detach. I would prefer to detach, but every once in a while something comes up that is worthwhile.
A Facebook friend posted this poem the other day because she heard the geese going by. Canadian geese are making their way back, and then the weather said, “Ha!” But this experience of hearing geese reminded her of the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
I like that because it reminds me to stop and look. So often the world goes by and we do not see. We only see the things that are immediately in front of us, and even then we don’t really see. Not really, anyway.
I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know, that our computers have algorithms and all sorts of things that show us the things they think we want to see. And those are the things we see.
Now, if you were to get on my YouTube—this is not scandalous—if you were to get on my YouTube, you’d see a lot of sketch comedy and stand-up comedy and sermons. I’m a pretty boring guy. But I was struck this week because I regularly look at sermons, especially I look at a lot of synagogue services, because the preaching of Jewish rabbis is fascinating and wonderful in so many ways.
So I clicked on this one, not really knowing what it was, and it was a synagogue service. But the sermon was not a sermon. It was reflections, so it caught my eye. I didn’t realize when I clicked on it that it was the Shabbat service from Temple Israel in Michigan. They were gathered in another place because, as you may know, their house of worship was bombed last week in an attack, and the rabbis were reflecting on that experience — the experience of being the site of a terror attack, of watching their own congregation come together.
And it’s not just that they’re a synagogue, they’re also a school. So there were one hundred and forty students in school when this man ran into their building and started to blow things up. And fortunately, there was not a great loss of life, but it was terrifying. And they talked about the heroic heroism of so many, the ways in which the community came together, even the ecumenical community which made spaces for them. And they talked about the scourge of anti-Semitism in our day.
The things we’ve learned, though, since that attack are also pretty sobering. The man who attacked the synagogue, who died in that whole tragic experience, had himself lost his family in Lebanon the week before because of Israeli bombings. Now that in no way excuses this act, but it helps us to understand that there is always context. And so often in our rhetoric, there are sides.
We’ve seen it writ large, especially since October seventh, when the attack of Hamas on Israel made a huge impact on that people. They lost as many in that attack as we lost in our September eleventh. And yet following that was the horrific war in Palestine, in Gaza, with a loss of life and genocide. And on both sides, we’ve watched people take sides and fire at one another, not understanding the complexities of that region and the difficulties and the hatred involved on both sides.
Now, I’m not doing a both-sides explanation, but there is no logic that we can attest to for anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. We have to hold both in tension and recognize that our way must be different. But I would argue to you that part of the problem is that our way of seeing is also partial.
Less notable in the news a couple of weeks ago, Colman McCarthy died. You may not know that name. He was a commentator for The Washington Post for years, later a professor of peace studies. His major argument was that we don’t try peace because we’re not trained in peace. From our earliest ages, we play war. We play video games that talk of war. We see war as one of the only ways in which we can achieve our goals. We are often brought up in families where violence or corporal punishment or some aspect of that is the way in which we are raised and is seen as the right way to rear children. We live in a culture where conflict is often held up as the way to gain, whether it be in the world of business or politics. And so we never think of peace as the way forward.
And yet so often there are examples in our world of people who have brought the end of conflict and real change because of peace. We hold them up and put them on a pedestal — Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. — and think, well, that was great, but we can’t do that. That’s not really practical to do that in our day and age. And so we recognize that our sight is limited. We look at the world in a particular way.
In my clinical practice, one of my focuses is working with suicidal people. And what research tells us is that when someone is in the suicidal mode, they have a limited view of their world. When I’m in therapy, I often show people — you know when you’re little kids and you take the toilet paper roll or the paper towel roll and you look through and you can only see that small little circle? Your vision is focused, but you’re missing all this other information. That’s true of people who are suicidal especially, but it’s often true of many of us. We look at the world from our perspective, and we forget that there is so much more that we are missing.
In the Gospel today, Jesus opens the eyes of a man blind from birth, and there’s so much that is being missed. And in the process of the man coming to see and see clearly, the Pharisees, by contrast, lose their sight and are blind.
Now, part of the story I want to hold up for you today is that Jesus spits on the ground and makes mud. I’ve always found this particularly disgusting. I’m a little bit of a clean freak. I think I would have passed on being healed if I’d known that that was happening. But the more I think about it — yes, it’s disgusting to me — but dirt and spit. The dirt, and if you might think about this, the Latin word for earth is humus, of the earth. It’s the same root as the word humility. Being grounded that is mixed with the spirit, the life force of the mouth, the place where the word is formed and the Word made flesh. This is the healing power that gives sight to the man born blind.
And if that’s true of him, isn’t it true of us? Don’t we have to recognize that we have to be grounded and of the earth, and be able with honesty to see the world around us, but also to see it through divine eyes — not as it is necessarily in the way we perceive it, but as it is as God perceives it?
The problem with the Pharisees is they’ve already made their judgment. They already know what’s happened, and Jesus is a sinner. He has healed on the Sabbath, and he’s not conformed to their way of looking at the world and their laws. And because of that, they cannot see the man born blind who has never seen.
And this is important because there is no place that chronicles someone blind from birth who gets to see again in all of Scripture. There’s no place in which this person who is thought to be born in sin — and think about the ways in which we carry our attitudes toward others, to those who have disability, those who are on the outside of what we consider to be normal, or when we fall into those categories — this is the man who Jesus sees. Jesus reaches out to and heals using dirt and spit. And as he, through the process of coming to see and then being questioned, comes to see more clearly that Jesus is the Son of God.
During this Lenten time, we are invited to check ourselves and look at how we are seeing and what we are missing. Are we locked in our own algorithms, our ways of looking at the world? Do we remember to stop and notice the wild geese passing overhead and recognize that spring is upon us? Do we take in the sufferings of others — the Jew and the Muslim? Do we recognize that our own attitudes and our own ways of talking about conflict can lead to a rise in anti-Semitism, can lead to a rise in Islamophobia?
And so we must be very careful and guarded about how we see each other as real, live human beings made in the image and likeness of God, from the earth, made out of the mud and the clay.
We must all wrestle with the fact that we don’t see as God sees. We must all wrestle with the fact that we have limited vision by the nature of us being creatures. And yet it is in and through our faith that we learn to see. It’s in and through this experience of the divine that our eyes can be opened to the suffering of others and the wonder of creation as we encounter it.
