An (Original) Lenten Devotion
some thoughts on John 5:1-15
The following is a Lenten Devotion I submitted for this year’s Trinity Anglican Seminary’s Lenten Devotional book. I was given the February 28th entry, for the John 5:1-15 passage. For those who have the 2026 devotional and happen to read today’s entry, you’ll see an edited version of what’s provided in-full below.
Do you want to be healed? It’s a simple question, pregnant with profundity and possibility. The invalid in today’s reading had been seeking healing for 38 years, longer than our Savior’s incarnated life. Yet healing had eluded him. And with a word from Jesus the man was healed after almost four decades of heart-rending hope. Then seemingly as soon as the miracle is realized, along come the ever-present Pharisees, who, never ones to let a good work go unpunished, condemn the man for carrying his bedroll on the sabbath. They, like so many of us, miss the living forest of the Kingdom for the dead rotting tree of their own misguided grasping after institutional and religious relevance.
This Lenten season we remember that ours is a broken world. This penitential season we remember that ours is a broken communion. This season of repentance we remember that ours is a broken church. We play our political games and curry our financial favors as souls are cracked and shattered beneath the wheels of our institutional and episcopal malfeasance. For those who’ve been broken by the failures of our leadership and structures, healing seems impossible. Yet the God of Creation is still the God of the lost sheep. It is his world in which we find the hospitality of existence and it is his world in which “justice roll[s] down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Whether we shattered souls find healing in Christ, or whether like Thornton Wilder’s physician, who in the playlet “The Angel That Troubled the Waters” is kept from the healing waters, being told “In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve,” we are all loved of God and His justice will be actualized, in this life or the next.
Blessed are the church-wounded, for they will be healed. But woe to the institutional gate-keepers, who prefer canon-circumventing and chapel-keeping over the weightier matters of the law and who view the body-count of crushed parishioners an acceptable price to pay for their own denomination.
A Collect for Shattered Souls
Heavenly Father, who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to seek after the one, who lifts his skirts in reckless abandon to run after your broken children, we ask you to heal those who have been traumatized by your people, who have been broken beneath the wheels of institutional machinations, whose souls are shattered and bleeding on the dry and thirsty ground. Give us hearts to seek after your lost sheep. Convict our hearts to see the pain of those who are quietly slipping out of our doors. Bring us to broken repentance over the sins that we have committed against your children. Protect us from religious bad men who prey on the least, the last, the lost and those whom have been left behind. We thank you for the unity that we have in You, in our faith, and in our baptism. In the name of the unified and loving God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.