I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 15, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 9:1-41.
There are some things in this life that cannot be explained simply, and they usually have to do with love.
We talk a lot about love here in this pulpit—God’s love and our own—and that’s really because we could talk about it forever yet still not fully capture what love is with words alone. Talking about love is like trying to paint a picture of the wind. We can capture the effects of the wind well enough—the ripples in the grass, the curtain billowing in the window, the way it makes your eyes burn—but the wind itself remains beyond our grasp. Mostly we just feel it. We live and move and have our being in it.
So it is with love. So it is with God.
To that end: I was thinking this week about my dad, and in particular about the night I came out to him. He’d driven out to Virginia in his old rundown blue Cadillac to pick me up from college for Christmas break during my freshman year. And when he got to town on a windy, rainy December night, we went to grab some food together at a diner.
Now, I’d already shared this information about myself with a few college friends, but this was the first big moment of telling a loved one about who I am. And so we ordered our hamburgers and caught up about how school was going while I worked up the nerve to tell him what was really on my heart.
And honestly, I don’t even remember what I said or quite how I got the words out, I was so scared. But I did and, although I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, given the type of person he was, it was still astonishing in the best way when he simply smiled at me and said, “oh, I knew that. And I love you.”
And that was it. No more words had to be said. No more words could be said. We just ate our hamburgers and watched the rain streak against the window and the moment was both comfortable and brand new all at once. That’s love as best I can tell of it: something that is familiar and frightening and safe and strange all at once, asserting itself, making itself known and yet never really explaining itself.
And, because the Bible tells me so, I have to come think that God is much the same way, since God is love. God, too, is familiar and frightening and safe and strange, and we begin to lose the plot a bit when we try too hard to explain God with exact precision. We just know his effects: the way it fees when the Spirit blows by, and and the way that the words of Jesus billow through an open window, and the the way he can make your eyes burn.
The wordlessness of love can make us uncomfortable, because many of us have been formed to be precise people—we want to know exactly what’s going on before we trust it; to have our ducks in a row before we act; to be sure that the odds are in our favor before we take any sort of risk. And in many aspects of life and work, these are good and reasonable strategies.
But love and the God who is love are not reasonable propositions; they are bone-deep, soul-deep experiences. And so in our relationship with Jesus, we are invited—no, commanded—to invert the equation.
Jesus says: love first, ask questions later.
Love first, then seek understanding.
Love first, then form a plan.
Love first, then believe.
That’s what my dad did that night in the diner. I don’t think he’d necessarily worked out all the theological arguments one might make about whether his gay son deserved love and support or not. I don’t think, if he’d been challenged by someone in church about why he “condoned” my existence, that he would’ve had some long rational or theological argument to convince them. I think he would have just said, “he is my son, and I love him.”
I think for him, love was its own reason. Its own proof. Its own rationale.
And that is what God would like us to see. That is exactly how Jesus asks us to speak when we are speaking of the things of God. Love first, then figure out what it is you believe. Our Gospel story today shows us this.
Think about this man who is born blind and is then made to see. Much like last week, this long story is deeply instructive to us disciples if we spend time with it—as though Jesus is inviting us to see something for the first time, too.
You might notice that the whole thing feels a bit like a trial or a test. The Pharisees are outraged and offended, as they often are, because Jesus is going around healing on the sabbath and showing signs of power that make them uncomfortable. He is loving first, asking questions about propriety later.
But they have lots of questions, lots of demands for an explanation—of who is who and what is what and how any of this could be possible or permissible or acceptable.
But here’s the simple beauty of this particular story: both the man born blind and Jesus, too, politely yet firmly refuse to engage in the Pharisee’s frenetic search for explanations.
“One thing I do know,” the man says. “That though I was blind, now I see.”
You know, that line alone tells us everything we need to know about being a follower of Jesus and a proclaimer of the good news.
It is to stand in the midst of the raucous, anxious, cynical crowd and say, “One thing I know: that somehow love has changed me. And I don’t have all the answers, but this I do know: that love—for God, for my neighbor, for my enemy, for myself— is the starting point of any true answer.”
Because the love of God that Jesus heals with is an experiential reality, a way of life, not a theory or a formula. And unless you start with that experience—of love, of mercy, of grace—you can talk about God all the days of your life and still you will speak nothing true of God. And you can make a thousand sacrifices and walk a thousand miles and give a thousand alms, but until you have brushed up against the sort of love that makes you fumble for words, the love that renders explanations unnecessary, you will not really know who God is.
The Pharisees, of course, cannot accept this. They have made an idol of their desire to understand, and so true knowledge eludes them here. The same can be said for far too many Christians, so desperate for clear answers that they don’t mind who they have to hurt to hold onto them.
As for me, and maybe as for you, too, I am ok with the God of fewer answers and greater presence. I am still looking for that God at diner tables and on rainy nights and in stories of those who have learned to see the world in a new way. The ones who aren’t afraid to look a little foolish, a little unprepared, because they have chosen to love first, and ask questions later.
I think its only then, in fact, that we can begin to ask the truly important questions anyway. It is only then that we can bear witness to the reality of a God who is hard to understand but very easy to see when you know how to look. And if your eyes begin to burn a bit, that might be a good hint he’s close by.
And that’s my hope for us in these final weeks of Lent: to practice naming those moments when God feels close by. I tell you these stories from the pulpit week by week because they are such moments for me. And I know each of you probably have hundreds of your own.
So part of our practice of discipleship can be noticing them and then writing them down in a journal or telling someone else about them, however briefly. It doesn’t have to be a mountaintop moment or a miraculous healing. But the more you look for God, the more you name God, the more you will see God, everywhere, in everyone. Hard to put into words, hard to explain, but impossible to miss.
If we do this, perhaps then we will all be able to say, “one thing I do know—that though I was blind, now I see.”
And there will be nothing else that needs to be said.
By Another Road 