403 Formerly Known As

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Formerly Known As”, originally shared on March 11, 2026. It was the 403^rd  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   California has been known as the place where people from all over can go to reinvent themselves. Jesus has another idea. Today, we’re going to find out what it is.

   Have you ever wondered how great it would be if you could just go back in time and see Jesus walking the earth, hear him speak, maybe see him do a miracle? Have you ever thought that seeing just one miracle would lock-in your faith and remove all your doubt?

   You’d be wrong. Seeing a miracle is not your problem. Being a miracle is.

   We’ve seen spectacular weather recently. Aside from some recent winds, our weather seems miraculous to people living almost anywhere else in our country.

   We occasionally get some heavy rain, scorching heat, or strong winds in our area. And, as a pastor, I’m sometimes get the wink and elbow from someone asking something like, “Hey, ‘padre’, can’t you do something about this weather?”

   Of course, I can’t. That would be a miracle. So, I say, “I’m sorry. I’m in sales, not management.” 😊

   The main Bible reading that we’re looking at today, the one that will be read in the vast majority of churches throughout the world this coming Sunday, John 9:1-41, raises a similar question.

   Jesus did miracles. He healed a man born blind. Why don’t we see those kinds of miracles today?

   Good question!

   The passage begins with a sight that is all but unheard of today but which was not so uncommon back then, and is not so uncommon in many other parts of the world even today, in John 9:1,

¹As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 

   “Blind from birth.”

   In our country today, babies are given an antibiotic eye ointment shortly after birth to prevent blindness. But being blind from birth didn’t mean the same thing to people in Jesus’ day.   

   We might say that being born blind meant that an infection, or some congenital cause was the reason. People in Jesus’ day believed that things like blindness happened to people as punishment for sin. The only question was whose sin it was. The person’s or their ancestors’.

   The disciples ask the question, in John 9:2,

² His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

   Which is weird because the answer is one that changes over time in what we call “the Old Testament” and what people in that day called “the scriptures.”

   The Bible says that God punishes people for the sins of their ancestors near the beginning of the Old Testament, and it says that God does not punish them for the sins of their ancestors near the end of the Old Testament.

   Jesus takes the later view and so he shows a better grasp of the scriptures than his disciples.

   Jesus answers the disciples’ question, in John 9:3-5,

³Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. ⁴We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. ⁵As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

   Jesus is about to take his disciples to school. God’s works are about to be revealed. Jesus is God, and the works that are about to revealed are the gifts of God from the Creation of all things.

   That’s what a miracle is. It’s not a suspension of the laws of physics. It’s not something unexpected that just happens. A miracle is the restoration of what God intended the world to be in the beginning of Creation and a sign of what it will be when Christ returns and there is a new heaven and a new earth.

   The world was created to be perfect. Human rebellion brought evil into the world, and we can’t always connect the sin with what happens afterwards, like when a factory owner has toxic waste to dump and dumps it in the river behind the factory. He saves money, his business is more profitable, his investors are happy and he sleeps well at night. Meanwhile, people drink the water and, eventually, they get cancer. They don’t know why.

   A miracle is a sign that points to God’s Creation as it was intended to be, and what it will be once again. Clean. Perfect. And, in this case, no blindness.

   Jesus, “the light of the world”, comes into the darkness of this man born blind and the man sees Jesus. His sight is restored.

   But first, it gets weird, in John 9:6-7.

⁶When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, ⁷saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

   Did anyone, when you were a kid, usually an older female relative, ever see dirt on your face and take out their hankie, dip it in their mouth, and use their saliva to clean off the spot? Gross right? You probably make that “Ick!” face, but you were clean.  😊

   Have you ever heard someone make a toast by saying “Here’s mud in your eye”? That expression started in England around 1930 and is either a reference to life in the trenches during WW1 or a reference to this text, which kind of makes sense, because it is a toast to one’s good health. In this text, it’s about healing.

   People back in Jesus’ day believed that saliva had actual healing properties.

   Jesus used it as a signal that a healing was about to take place.

   The man’s neighbors, who have only known him as a blind beggar, have questions.

   And Jesus is not around. So, they bring the healed man to the Pharisees, who also have questions, in John 9:13-15,

¹³They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. ¹⁴Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. ¹⁵Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” 

   Do you see where we’re going here?

   If you know one verse of the Bible by heart, it’s probably John 3:16. If you know one hymn by heart, it’s probably “Amazing Grace”, and the first verse in particular:

“Amazing grace!- how sweet the sound-

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see.”

   That hymn was composed by John Newton, an English slave ship captain who came to Christ and repented of what he had done, left that work, and lived the rest of his life campaigning against slavery. He lived a transformed life in the grace of God.

   That’s also what the Bible calls a miracle! A miracle is a sign that God’s intention for creation is being restored.

   But there’s a bigger issue.

   At least the Pharisees think there is.

   Jesus has broken one of the 10 Commandments, they said, by healing, that is, doing work on the sabbath, the day of rest. And Jesus told the guy who was healed to go and bathe in the pool of Siloam, which they also considered to be working on the sabbath. Those things, they said, could not be works of God.

   They quizzed the man’s parents, and his folks don’t want to get caught up in all the drama and risk being labeled as sinners by the Pharisees.

   So, the Pharisees ask the guy who was healed about this “sinner”, Jesus, the one who worked on the Sabbath when he had healed him, and he answers, in verse 25.

²⁵He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 

   That’s a good answer, and the Pharisees argue with the man born blind, now healed, about his healing, but the man holds his ground and they drive him out.

   Jesus hears about what happened and finds the man, in verses 35-38,

³⁵Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” ³⁶He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” ³⁷Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” ³⁸He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.

   There’s the miracle! Again! It’s the miracle that is happening every day all over the world, including right here, right now, in your life, right in front of you!

   You can see a miracle today! Share your faith. Ask someone, “Have you heard about Jesus? Really heard about him?” Share the good news of forgiveness and salvation for them and invite them to open their heart to receive the transformational gift of Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, to become a new Creation, to become a Christian.

   Invite them to turn away from their old lives, to start over, to receive a new life, seen in 2 Corinthians 5:17,

17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

   We are not the light of the world. Jesus is.

   But we can be reflectors of the light.

   Robert Fulghum, in his book, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, told the story of a modern Greek philosopher giving a lecture who answered Fulghum’s question on the meaning of life with his story about living on a Greek island during the Nazi occupation.

   One day, he said, he came upon a wrecked German motorcycle. He picked up the broken pieces of the rearview mirror and, unable to put them together, kept the largest piece, which he filed down to a circle with a stone. He played a game with that mirror, seeing what deep pocket of darkness he could illuminate by reflecting light into it.

   He said that he still had that mirror in his wallet and believed that it was the key to the meaning of life: that he was not the light or the source of the light, but that he could be a reflector, bringing light into the dark places of life, and that though he didn’t have the whole mirror, he had a part of it, and could do what he could with what he had.

   How do we help people see this, to see the Light, with what we have? The story of the healing of the man born blind concludes with its lesson, in John 9:39-41,

³⁹Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” ⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” ⁴¹Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

   Tricky. Sin produces our separation from God, our lack of the relationship with the one true living God for which we were created. Jesus says to the Pharisees that if they were blind, it would not be because of their sin. But by saying “We see” while not “seeing” the presence of God at work right in front of them, they reveal that they are still in their sin. They don’t see God, which is worse than any physical blindness.

   And they’re not alone.

   Think about all the people who physically saw Jesus do a miracle. Thousands! How many of them stuck with Jesus to the end? Zero. I think it was because they didn’t “see” Jesus.

   Martin Luther, the 16^th Century Church reformer, said, “I have covenanted with my Lord that He should not send me visions or dreams or even angels. I am content with this gift of the Scriptures, which teaches and supplies all that is necessary, both for this life and that which is to come.”

   The Bible is our source for everything that is good in this world and the next. It is the primary means by which God speaks to us. The Bible reveals to us the power of the cross to restore that for which we were created: a living relationship with the one true living God.

   The Bible both describes miracles and enables us to see them. It enables us to see ourselves as we really are and to see our Savior for what He has really done.

   We cannot reinvent ourselves. We are sinners. But, at the cross, we are sinners who have been reinvented by God.

   We are participants in God’s greatest miracles. We tell our stories. We point people to God’s intention for human beings when he created them, and to the power and agency of God to give them a new life, to make them into a new creation. We point to Jesus as the agent by which a living relationship with the one true living God for which we were created was made possible through faith alone, by grace alone.

   Maybe you’ve heard of the popular musician who changed his name to a symbol and became known as “the artist formerly known as Prince”?

   The man formerly known as blind from birth became the man known as the one whose eyes were healed by Jesus. He told others what Jesus had done for him.

   He who was formerly known as blind became the one who could say, “I was blind but now I see.” He told others what Jesus had done for him.

   We who were formerly known as no people are now God’s people.

   We who were formerly known as cut off from God by our sin are now restored to God by God’s amazing grace, forever.

   We can tell others what Jesus has done for us and show by our love for one another and for the world that the new life that God gives to all who will receive it is God’s greatest miracle.

   And that, ultimately, everything and everyone who believes and is baptized will be healed! 

402 How to Tell If It's A Scam

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “How to Tell If It’s A Scam”, originally shared on March 4, 2026. It was the 402^nd  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   There are lots of ways that you can get scammed these days. How can you tell when an offer is real and when it is a scam? Today, we’re going to find out.

   People say that you can’t cheat a cheater. They already know all the tricks.

   People also say that you can only cheat a cheater. Because scammers are blinded by arrogance, while honest people know that they can’t get something for nothing.

   People say that they have learned from experience. “Once bitten twice shy.” Or, “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

   People say lots of things.

   H. L. Menken once said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

   People get scammed for lots of reasons, simple and complex. They are desperate. They think that they are smarter than everyone else. The possibility of good fortune blinds them to everything else.

   Or, maybe they were raised to believe that everyone is out to cheat them, so they can’t tell a grifter from a go-getter. Maybe they have had bad experiences in life that lead them to think that everyone is out to take advantage of them, so they cheat themselves out of good experiences.

   It’s not easy for anyone to tell if they are being scammed.

   So, a reasonable person couldn’t be blamed for thinking that the woman in the Gospel reading that will be shared in the vast majority of churches in the world this coming Sunday, John 4:5-42, would have thought that she was being scammed. By Jesus.

   What if someone offered to give you a kind of water that would make it so that you would never be thirsty again? Would you accept it? Would you think it was a scam? It sounds like the guy offering magic beans to Jack for the family cow, doesn’t it? How would you respond to the offer of that “living water”?

   We’ve had two significant rainstorms this season. Both brought floods to the burn areas and snow to the mountains. The melting snow brought more floods, following the pull of gravity and flowing down in streams. It cascaded into culverts, control channels, and fields and catch-basins, percolating into aquifers. And some flowed into the ocean.

   That’s what people in Bible times called “living water”.

   “Living water” means water that is moving, like rapids, like fast-moving rivers. “Living water” is found in both the Old and New testaments of the Bible as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit in places like the Bible’s book of Jeremiah, where God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah to the southern kingdom of Judah, just before it falls to the Babylonians, in Jeremiah 2:12-13,

¹² Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
    be shocked, be utterly desolate,
says the Lord,
¹³ for my people have committed two evils:
    they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
    and dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns
    that can hold no water.

   Jesus speaks to the people gathered in Jerusalem for a religious festival at the Temple and we see, in John 7:37-39, Jesus’ use of “living water” as a metaphor,

³⁷ On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, ³⁸ and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” ³⁹ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

   We can still see a little snow in the foothills, waiting to melt and become living water. “Living water” is untamed, not bound by our expectations, like the winter wind, like the melting snow.

   It’s like the third person of the Trinity, the personal presence of the one God transforming, challenging, calling, equipping, and sending us through turbulent times on the course that leads to receiving eternal life.

   When the pandemic got to the point where we were pretty much confined to our homes in 2020, Sally and I decided to produce videos of encouragement that would provide a means to reflect on what it meant to be a Christian in the LA area and beyond. We called them “Streams of Living Water”, because we were never alone in the Holy Spirit and, well, the videos were being streamed, get it? 😊 Those developed into a blog, “Words of Living Water”, and a podcast, “Living Water Radio.” Do we see the common theme there? We are doing our 402^nd episode of each this week.

   In today’s main Gospel reading, John 4:5-42, Jesus speaks to a Samaritan woman, a follower of the Samaritan religion, at a water well, about the nature of the Christian faith, and specifically about living water.                          

   Samaria was a foreign nation in the middle of Israel. It had been formed, mostly, by the Assyrian Empire when the Assyrians conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.

   The war that is going on in the middle east right now has been going on in one form or another for several thousand years. Our war with Iran has been going on, in one form or another, for 47 years.

   Conquest and colonization have been going on for a long time everywhere, sometimes self-destructively, as with Assyria’s conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel more than 700 years before Christ.

   Assyria had mixed the populations from throughout its conquered territories to prevent unity and rebellion, but many were no longer Assyrian. The result in Israel was “Samaria”.

   The Samaritans had retained enough of their Judaism to look a little bit familiar to the Jews, but they were not Jews. They were Samaritans. They were a hodgepodge of religions. They were a temptation to the Jews to be something else.

   Observant Jews were not supposed to even set foot in Samaritan territory. Jews traveling from Galilee, where Jesus was based, to Jerusalem, where the Temple was, were expected to walk to the other side of the Jordan River and then walk around, the long way.

   Observant male Jews were also not supposed to speak with a woman in public, not even with their wives.

   So, what is Jesus doing in Samaria, talking to a woman who we find out later has a questionable reputation, in a public place, with no one else around?

   Let’s take a look at the beginning of the passage, in John 4:5-8,

5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)

   We know that our current rainy season, such as it is, will be followed by a dry season, and that all these green hills will soon be brown. Oops, sorry, I meant “golden”. That’s what we say in California, right? 😊

   Israel has a climate much like that of Southern California, though it didn’t have irrigation back then. People had to draw water from cisterns in which they had stored water under their homes during the rainy season and from wells during the really dry season.

   Women usually went out to the local well to draw and carry water to their homes early in the morning, while it was still cool. This was a time when they could be with other adult women and exchange information and the news of the village.

   We find later in this reading that the Samaritan woman who Jesus has been speaking with at the well has been married five times, and that the man she was with is not her husband. Now, we don’t know the circumstances behind these marriages. She may have been divorced by each of her 5 husbands or widowed 5 times. But, given that she’s out at the well by herself in the middle of the day, there may be something to say for her not being very popular among the other women in the city.

   So, this particular Samaritan woman came to the well and unexpectedly found Jesus there alone as his disciples had gone into the city to buy food. He was tired, and Jesus spoke to her and asked her for a drink of water. What was he thinking?!

   The drama continues with John 4:9-14,

9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

   The woman wanted that water. I’m guessing that she did not like going to the well at noon by herself, and that she was starting to realize that Jesus was offering more to her than avoiding shame and inconvenience. Much more.

   That well, Jacob’s well, is still producing water. I drank from that well when I studied in Israel. Back then there was just a bucket and a ladle that everyone who wanted could drink from. I’m sure it’s different now, but it does give us a strong image for what’s happening with Jesus’ revelation to the Samaritan woman.

   Jesus is in Samaria to show that God’s living water, the Holy Spirit, is for everyone. Everyone. Not just the Jewish people, but for gentiles, even for Samaritans and people like us.

   In the course of their conversation, Jesus asks the woman to go and get her husband, and when the woman says that she has no husband, Jesus tells her that he already knows about her marital history.

   Was that awkward for her? Yes.

   Have you ever lived in a place where you were a religious minority. Well, I suppose that we all have if we are living today, as Christians, in an increasingly non-Christian, even hostile, world. To cope, we often seek to be blindly inclusive and accepting, even to the point of being reluctant to share the good news of the living water that gushes up to eternal life for fear of appearing “unwelcoming”. We go along to get along.

   That’s why I think that this exchange between the Samaritan woman and Jesus is so shocking to our 21^st century ears as well as to the Samaritan woman. The woman deflects attention from herself and changes the subject. She calls Jesus a prophet. She points to their religious differences  and Jesus does nothing to accommodate them.

   Jesus replies, in John 4:21-26,

   21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

   We sometimes hear from people with a vague sense that they need to be more than they are, but don’t want to change, that they are “spiritual but not religious”.

   Jesus doesn’t give us that option. In fact, Jesus doesn’t give us either option.  Christian faith is not about us.

   Gas is selling at around $5.00 a gallon here. At the same time, you can buy a gallon of diet coke for between $4.00 and $7.00. Of course, you can’t run your car on diet coke, but I’ve known people with serious diet coke needs, even addictions. 😊

   What we are willing to pay for something depends upon our needs, and on what’s going on around us. Some people think that they are poor if they don’t own what were considered luxuries a generation or two ago. Many people’s expectations for a minimally acceptable material life has grown to owning things like a cell phone, a home computer, and a big screen TV with lots of streaming services, things that people didn’t know that they needed for thousands of years.

   Others are just hustling for a dollar. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They seek more things for no other purpose than to fill the emptiness within them that they cannot name. But that we can. And that Jesus paid to fill when he paid for our sins on the cross.

   The Samaritan woman had been defined by her failed relationships. Some of us are ruled by our failures. We have not been the people we want to be, both in what we have done and in what we have left undone.

   And when we have messed up the devil says, “You failed! What a hypocrite! You aren’t a Christian. Why pretend? Give up!”

   But that’s not the Word of God, that’s the word of the devil. That’s the word of the forces that defy God.

   God’s answer to us and to the Samaritan woman is that we have been given a Savior, the Messiah, Christ the Lord.

   The Good News, the Gospel, the Word of God says, “Jesus died for you. Jesus overcame temptation, sin, death, and the power of the devil, for you.”

   Some others are ruled by their fears

   Why don’t they turn to God’s perfect love that casts out fear, to the living, eternal relationship with the one true living God for which they were created? I think that the reason is “sin”, what Martin Luther called being “curved in upon ourselves.”

   Most people in this world are focused on themselves, on their pleasures, on their material security. They are worried about the economy, that our country seems to be coming apart at the seams, that we are devolving into conflicting tribes, that we can’t talk with each other anymore, that A. I. will take away their jobs and their dignity as human beings, that their health or their health insurance coverage will fail, that the zombie apocalypse is inching closer and that they are powerless against what they fear is coming. And now we are facing the possibility of another world war!

   They might remember the bumper sticker that said, “Even paranoids have real enemies.”  And they look at the world and they realize, “Yes. We have real enemies.”

   Like the Samaritan woman, we are now at a crossroads. We are in the season of Lent. Lent is a time to reconsider the necessity of the things we can’t buy.

   Instead, some of us are being ruled by false beliefs about God, like the Samaritan woman. Jesus doesn’t talk to her about inclusion here. Jesus offers her an alternative in the truth. Jesus himself. Jesus is the truth.

   Our salvation has been paid in full at the cross! There is nothing more valuable than that, and it’s free. It casts out our failures, our fears, and our false beliefs forever and puts Jesus Christ in their place. It is revealed by the Holy Spirit, the living water at work within us!

   How do we convey that message to people who walk in the darkness of false belief every day and don’t know it? Jesus is pretty direct with the Samaritan women, even offensive to our ears. Why?

   We say that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a transformational relationship. It is personal and it is particular.

   It doesn’t come to people and nations from the West, or from the East, or from the North or from the South. Christianity comes to all people from above.

   Jesus does not mince words about what truth is. It isn’t a proposition; it is a person.

   But suddenly the disciples return from their shopping trip, and their first reaction is that they are astonished that Jesus was speaking with a woman.

   The woman, an outcast among outcasts, living a separate existence within Israel, and a seemingly separate existence within Samaria, pays no attention to them and returns to her village and fearlessly shares what she has encountered in Jesus, and that he might be the Messiah.

   Jesus’ disciples seem to be concerned only with Jesus’ immediate physical needs.

   Jesus refocuses their attention toward Jesus’ mission, and that of his disciples (and ours), and what was happening right in front of them.

   The Samaritan woman is telling her community about Jesus! She is evangelizing!

   Our Gospel reading concludes in John 4:39-42,

³⁹ Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word. ⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

   I saw on the news once that 6” of moving water can knock a person over, and that 12” of moving water can sweep away a motor vehicle.

   Living water is powerful, and the streams of living water within us, that is the Holy Spirit, is powerful. It transforms lives. It endures forever.

   It’s how we know when the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are scamming us. When they tell us that we are not enough, that we need more stuff, that we should fear what, in fact, has no ultimate control over us. None.

   God has always known everything we have ever done, and yet he has died on the cross for us. The Holy Spirit opens the hearts of all who will receive the living presence of God, the living water, and makes us a new creation by the water of baptism and the Word of God.

   This Lent, seek this water, this living water, gushing up to eternal life, the power of the Holy Spirit within you that opens your heart to receive the gifts of faith and the water of baptism and tell people you know, people who trust you, about what Jesus has done for you. He is truly the Savior of the world. 

401 Making it Fresh

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Making it Fresh”, originally shared on February 25, 2026. It was the 401^st  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

    What is old and stale to the world is new and fresh to us. How can we make the gospel of Jesus Christ fresh for those in darkness? Today, we’re going to find out.

   The Milan/Cortina winter Olympics are over. They went out with a bang last Sunday, not with the closing ceremonies, which was a quasi worship service with pagan overtones, but with the men’s hockey game. What a firecracker!

   And now, we’re in Olympics withdrawal, except that we in the LA area have the World Cup to look forward to this year, the Super Bowl next year, and the LA Olympics coming the year after that, in 2028 That’s just two years from now!

   My wife Sally has many happy memories of the last time the Olympic Games were held in LA, in 1984, as she was a chaplain for the games. She still has her Olympics uniform and shoes and a variety of souvenirs. We were newlyweds then, and we remember her bringing home the box lunches they provided and sharing them together for dinner most days.

   We’ve thought of applying as a husband/wife team to be among the chaplains for LA28, because we’d be adorable, but, you know, we’re old people now, and they’ll probably be looking for a different demographic. 😊  

   This week’s reading from the Gospels that will be shared in the vast majority of churches in the world this coming Sunday, John 3:1-17, contains the Olympics, the World Cup, the Super Bowl, and more, wrapped-up into one great, exciting, world-altering, mind-boggling, life-changing ball of Good News!

   And, for many of us, it’s just one big yawn! Why? Because it’s become background noise. It’s what 16^th century Church reformer Martin Luther called, “the Gospel in miniature”. It’s the verse of the Bible that, if you only knew one by heart, that’s the one you would know.

   It’s a verse that we’ve heard for as long as we’ve been Christians, and for some even before we became Christians. It seems so common to us that we would not be faulted if we believed that everyone knew it.

   They don’t. And the numbers that do are getting smaller every day.

   It’s John 3:16,

¹⁶“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

   It’s about hope, but so many people are filled with fear. Why don’t they turn to the living relationship with the one true living God for which they were created, and for which they can be saved? I think that the reason is “sin”, what Martin Luther called being “curved in upon oneself.”

   Most people in this world are focused on themselves, on their pleasures, on their material security. They are worried about the economy, that our country seems to be coming apart at the seams, that we are devolving into conflicting tribes, that we can’t talk with each other anymore, that their health or their health insurance coverage will fail, that the zombie apocalypse is inching closer and that they are powerless against what they fear is coming.

   They might remember the bumper sticker that said, “Even paranoids have real enemies.”  And they look at the world and they realize, “Yes. We have real enemies.”

   And today’s Gospel reading is focused on the answer to all those concerns.

   Here are four ways to make the Gospel fresh again, a bed sheet, a young woman losing her faith, signs of faith all around us, and the context of John 3:16 in today’s Gospel reading.

   First, be the bridge. Be the bridge to someone you know who is struggling or indifferent spiritually. You are believable to people who trust you. You have the ability to change lives forever, as Jesus did for Nicodemus.

   Sometimes, I have put a sheet over a chair before a worship service where I am preaching and placed it someplace where it can be seen. During the sermon, I ask for a volunteer to come forward. I say that I’m looking for someone who is willing to risk public humiliation and personal injury while getting no reward at all. A volunteer comes forward. I tell them that there is a chair under the sheet. I ask them to sit down without hesitation. Eventually, they do. They do so because I am a credible witness to them.

   Second, Jesus welcomed Nicodemus. Make your church a specifically Christian community,  focused on the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ for all people, and have a plan for bring people from Zero to Christian. Be strong in faith in order to support the weak in faith.

   Maybe you are struggling with belief yourself, or you want to believe but are not sure, or you know someone like Nicodemus who is.

   Pastor Will Willimon is a Methodist pastor, who has also been a seminary professor, a  university chaplain, the Methodist equivalent of a bishop and is a fine preacher. He tells the story of a young woman who was a member of a congregation he served who made an appointment to see him during the week. She came by his office and said, “Pastor Willimon, I just wanted to say that I won’t be coming to church anymore. I’ve been struggling with my faith for a while, and I just realized that I can’t do it anymore. I appreciate everything that you and the church members have done for me, and I didn’t want to just drift away. I just came to say goodbye.”

   Pastor Willimon tried to address her struggles and encourage her to continue, but she was having none of it. And the next Sunday she was back at worship. And the Sunday after that. And the Sunday after that.

   Finally, Pastor Willimon asked if she could stop by his office again, and she agreed. Pastor Willimon said, “Aren’t you the same person who came by and said that she no longer had faith and wouldn’t be coming to worship anymore?” She smiled and said, “Yes.” “Well then, I’m happy to see you, but could you tell me what happened?” he said.

   “Well,” she answered, “It came to me that sometimes, if you can’t believe for yourself, you have to be with people who will believe for you.”

   Sometimes, we just have to lean on the community when we are feeling weak. That’s why we are here.

   Third, point to the fact that we are not alone in our culture. Point to the presence of the Gospel all around us, like the wind, like God’s faithfulness to God’s people, Israel.

   Contemporary Country artist Jelly Roll gave a powerful testimony to the grace of God in his acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards this year. Savanah Gutherie has maintained a stalwart, explicitly Christian public faith in the unimaginable horror of her mother’s unexplained abduction.

   In-N-Out burger president Linsi Snyder has maintained the presence of Bible verses on 11 of their products, in spite of calls to make her products and packaging  more broadly community friendly. I once did a mid-week Lenten series on them. Turn over a soda cup, for example, and guess what’s printed on the inside rim? John 3:16.

   Finally, make the Gospel a lived reality. You can’t give away what you don’t have. Jesus marveled that Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, didn’t understand what it meant to be born again from the heart and to live the transformed life by God’s grace.

   Suppose you heard that Jesus was hanging out at a home in your neighborhood, and you went there, and they let you in? Suppose you got to see Jesus face-to-face, and you could ask him anything you wanted? What would you ask Him?

   We waited for the clouds to lift this week, and then they did. And we had a spectacular view of the snow up in the mountains. It was like being in Switzerland!

   There are times in life, too, when the clouds lift, and we see things as they are.

   Nicodemus had that experience because he asked questions.

   Nicodemus was “a Pharisee” and “a leader of the Jews,” a member of the ruling Sanhedrin. He appears two more times in the Gospel of John, once to appeal for due process for Jesus, and again to help prepare Jesus’ body for burial.

   He was a man who had earned the respect of his people. Jesus, on the other hand, was unknown to most of them, a poor itinerant teacher, a miracle worker who some were saying was the One, the Messiah, the deliverer for whom the Jews had been waiting for 1,000 years.

   Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but he had a reputation to protect, after all.

   So, he came to talk with Jesus at night. Yes, Nic at night! 😊

   The reading begins with verses 1 and 2,

¹Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” ³Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

   Have you ever seen any of the “Back to the Future” movies?

   O’Reilly Auto Parts sells, well, auto parts. If you go to their website (oreillyauto.com) and search for “121g” you’ll be taken to a page with a picture of a flux capacitor, some product information, and then this:

 

Detailed Description

• Time Travel at your own RISK!
• Plutonium is required to properly operate the flux capacitor
• Plutonium is used by the onboard nuclear reactor which then powers the flux capacitor to provide the needed 1.21 gigawatts of electrical power.
• Plutonium not available at O'Reilly Auto Parts. Please contact your local plutonium supplier.
• Flux capacitor requires the stainless steel body of a 1981-1983 DeLorean DMC-12 to properly function.
• Once the time machine travels at 88 mph (142 km/h), light coming from the flux capacitor pulses until it becomes a steady stream of light at which point time travel begins!

   Oh, the page also says, at the top, “This item is not available for purchase.”

   It’s kind of funny because we know it’s not real.

   That’s what Nicodemus wanted to know about Jesus. Is Jesus the Messiah or some kind of joke? Is he real, is he the One?

   He recognizes Jesus as “a teacher who comes from God” because of the signs he has done, which require the power of God.

   Jesus’ miracles are often referred to as “signs” in the gospel of John. Do you know what a sign is? It’s something that points to something else. Miracles in the Bible are signs that point backward, to the way God intended the world to be in Creation, and forward to the way things will be in the new heaven and the new earth that is to come.

   In this situation, Nicodemus thinks, they point to God in some way. But Nicodemus bases his respect for Jesus on what Jesus has done, not on who He is.

   Jesus rejects that explanation and takes the conversation in a totally different direction.

   He tells Nicodemus that no one can “see” the circumstances in which God reigns without being “born from above” or, in some translations, “born again,” or “born anew”. What is he talking about?

   The questions and replies continue in verses 4-8,

 ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

   Nicodemus responds with an image that I think must be a horror show to any mother (“Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”)

   Jesus describes the necessity of birth, but in terms of the transformational relationship with the one true living God that comes from the gift of faith, the new birth.

   Being born from above, or again, or anew is being born of the Spirit.

   It is the new birth that comes from God alone.

   Both the Greek language, in which the New Testament was written, and the Hebrew language, in which the Old Testament was written, have one word with the same three meanings.

   “Pneuma” in Greek (from which we get the words pneumonia and pneumatic) and “Ruach” in Hebrew can each mean “wind”, or “breath”, or “spirit”.

   The Spirit is like the wind. You can’t see it, but you can see its effect on things. You don’t see wind, you feel it when it hits you, you see the trees move and the dust in the air. When speaking of God, it’s important not to confuse one with the other, the effect with the essence.

   That’s what the Pharisees, like Nicodemus, had done. They had confused the letter of the religious law with the spirit of it. The Law had become an end in itself and not a means to an end. It had become something to be accomplished, not the belief, or “faith” that makes us a new creation in a new birth, born from above, that then produces what we do in life.

   The Christian faith is not achieved, it is received.

   Confused? So was Nicodemus. We see Nicodemus’ confusion and Jesus’ response in verses 9-15,

 ⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? ¹¹“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. ¹²If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? ¹³No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

   Here comes the main point. The people of Israel wandering in the wilderness after their liberation from Egypt had been experiencing a plague of poisonous snakes and were being bitten and many died as a consequence of their rebellion against God and then they repented. God told Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and fasten it to the top of a poll. The serpent was lifted up on the poll and everyone who looked at it was healed. It’s described in Numbers 21:4-9.

   In the same way, Jesus said, he, the Son of Man, must be lifted up. Healing hadn’t come to the children of Israel because they had been good. Healing came because the people had repented and trusted and been obedient to God, and God was merciful to his rebellious people.

   Jesus would be lifted up in the same way, on the cross, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. A symbol of death became a symbol of healing.

   Why?

   Nicodemus gets his answer in verses 16 and 17,

 ¹⁶“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. ¹⁷“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

   John 3:16 is the one verse, if someone knows only one verse from the Bible by heart, that they know.

   It is what Martin Luther called the Gospel in miniature.

   But I think that the next verse, John 3:17 is almost as illuminating.

   God didn’t send Jesus into the world to condemn it, but so that the world might be saved through him.

   God’s desire is that the world might be saved.

   We make the Gospel fresh by its lived reality in us.

   So, don’t be afraid that someone might ask you uncomfortable or even hostile questions, or that you’d be embarrassed if you didn’t know the answers. You’re ready. The Holy Spirit has made you ready.

   And don’t be afraid to ask your own.

   If we can’t answer the technical questions, we carry all of the world’s knowledge right in our pockets on our phones, or we know someone we trust who we can ask.

   For the most important questions, God the Father lives within us. Jesus is present with us at worship. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes and ears to understanding.

   Look at the questions Nicodemus asks and the responses that come from Jesus.

   Jesus’ answer is about God’s character: love. It is the kind of love that is selfless. It is oriented to the world. It may sound kind of flakey, but that kind of love is the answer, it is the hope of the world in the sacrifice of Jesus. Jesus is the answer to all our fears, and Jesus is trustworthy.

   One of the most important lessons that I learned in college was to be fearless in asking questions. God is real and, if you are honest, the answers to your questions will always take you back to God.

   Lent is a season to prepare for the impact of Easter, to anticipate what is coming while walking in the wilderness, to ask, to grow and to experience the love of God made plain to us on the cross. Don’t be afraid. Be like Nicodemus. Ask and listen. Even if you come to Jesus in your life’s dark places to do so, light overcomes darkness, and Jesus is the light of the world.