Fifth Sunday in Lent; Daniel 9:3-10; Mark 1:9-15 – How we are doing in this holy season of Lent, now that we’re more than half way through? Perhaps not a bad time to pause and ask ourselves, “How’s it going?”, it being the spiritual and moral spring cleaning appropriate to the season.
Fourth Sunday in Lent; 1 Samuel 16:1-13; John 9:1-41 – We try to see what God sees and wants for our world. In Lent we try to focus the eyes of our hearts even more. In this story, Jesus heals a man who’s physically blind. And like all of the gospels, it’s really about Jesus, how people see him. Through John’s literary development and theological revelation, notice where Jesus is or not in the story, and when the man who is healed actually sees him.