[Sermon] Yes, Lord

Dr. Kempton Hewitt

March 22, 2026 + Fifth Sunday in Lent: The Sight of the Heart

📺 Watch on YouTube

When Jesus asks Martha if she believes, she doesn't offer a theological argument. She says simply: Yes, Lord. In this Lent 5 sermon, guest preacher Dr. Kempton Hewitt explores that small, defiant word as an act of resistance — a way of holding the center when everything around us insists that hope is foolish and healing is impossible. Drawing on Ezekiel's vision of resurrection in the valley and the community gathered at Lazarus's tomb, Dr. Hewitt calls us to practice hope not as a feeling but as a discipline, claimed in community, empowered by the Spirit, and spoken aloud even when — especially when — we're not sure we believe it yet.

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

Good morning, everybody. Good morning.

Amen. We have before us today two of the magnificent texts in the entire scripture. And let me remind you that these are not simply ancient documents. And when we walk through those doors, we are saying to ourselves — we are confessing — we have come here today to be guided, to be given what we need for the journey. These scriptures are alive, and I think I can demonstrate that.

On Wednesday evenings — and we've had to miss some because we've been away — there's been a wonderful project going on in which little scraps of brown paper people take and write on them the things that concern them, that worry them, that they wish for but can't see fulfilled. And Wednesday evening, we were invited to come and with little tubes of glue begin to glue those shards of concerns and worries and evidences of dry bones onto a long sheet of paper. And as we were gluing those down — by the way, they're not confidential; people had written them to be read — as I was pasting and gluing, I looked and I saw what people's hearts are burning with. And as I have lived with these texts the last few days, it has occurred to me that what I was seeing was exactly what took place in these two scriptures.

And as Jesus gathers this group by a tomb that is daunting and gray and full of death — that is us in that brokenness.

And oh, I love this story in Ezekiel. It's wonderful. You know, in the prophets are usually told to go somewhere and do something. This is the only time in Ezekiel when Yahweh — with the breath of God, the ruach of God — picks up Ezekiel by the scruff of his neck, the way a mother cat would find an errant kitten, and transports him and drops him in the middle of this vast valley of dry bones.

That is what life has done to us — whether by our own responsibility, or something that someone else has done, or the events that surround us. We stand, if you like — either one, take your choice — in that valley of dry bones, or at the face of that tomb. And there we stand, waiting to hear a word that heals.

Now, in recent years, my wife and I have enjoyed watching a show called The Midwife. Now, this is not an ad for PBS, but we fell in love with it — partly because it concerns a very poor part of East London in the early '60s, exactly when we were living there when I was a doctoral student and my wife was teaching in a poor coal mining village. And as we saw the scenes unfold — and what this wonderful group of Anglican nuns were dealing with as they attempted to practice midwifery in these difficult situations when England was trying to recover from the poverty that the war created for them — as scene after scene evolved, it echoed our experiences and we fell in love with it. We fell in love with the characters because it was about life, and life as we had known it and seen around us. And they're about now in the 12th or 13th season.

In a very recent season, there was to be a wedding — one of those miraculous, hopeful weddings when a single mother had met what we would call in England a decent bloke, and there's going to be a wonderful marriage. Now, a recurring character in this is Reggie, a Down's boy who becomes a man. He's beloved, and he becomes almost a Christ figure. And Reggie goes to an institute where he learns skills and then comes home with the shopkeeper family he belongs to. And in coming home, he is carrying with him a vase he has made as a present to this wedding couple that he has come to know. And he gets lost on the way home. Someone was supposed to have picked him up and they didn't. And he's wandering around the foggy nighttime in East London. And then this happens.

[First video, please.]

"What do you think you're playing at?" "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." "Oh, you've done nothing wrong, old chap. Hey, Jeffrey — I've been pressed into service to help cater for a certain hen night. Oven gloves always at the ready. There you go, Lord. But there are some nasty people out there. You want to stay inside with us, helping us with the flowers and decorations for the wedding."

The sack he was carrying — he fell against it, and you saw the broken blue vase. The work, the dedicated work of weeks — hopeful weeks.

Well, the man who rescued him is an artist and a friend of the community of the nuns. And he is in the kind of artist circle where he knows people. And let me fill you in a little bit. There's an ancient Japanese art, and it's called kintsugi — kintsugi. It's nothing new; it's ancient. And it was the art of preparing a golden paste that filled the fissures of broken crockery, making them in the end more valuable than if they were whole.

[And so, the next video, please.]

"Where we were torn, we are mended. And if there are scars, they will be beautiful."

And so there we have the vase — the blue vase — completely repaired with gold paste: kintsugi. And it's more precious than it started out to be.

What we're talking about today is about hope and about redemption. And I want to scotch a couple of rumors about hope. You know, hope is often interpreted as therapy for what you can't possibly imagine happening. Or hope is simply for people who aren't willing to do the work to make things happen.

[Could I have the next slide, please?]

Hope is not that. Hope is a habit of the heart. A habit of the heart. Would you massage that word in your head just for a moment? I want to ask you to pronounce that: hope is a habit of the heart. And the reason it's a habit is because we who live with the hope that is given to us by our faith — when we see something that otherwise would appear to be impossible, or dead, or dry, or shriveled up, or without possibility of hope — we act in ways that are different, because for us, hope is a habit of the heart.

Now, in the little bio you have about me in your bulletin today, it talks about the work I did down in Oregon as a guardian ad litem. In Oregon, I was a legal party — a kind of a lay attorney. And as the judge gave me case after case after case, let me tell you that as I learned the history of the families and the children, if I had not had hope as a habit of the heart — as I learned more and saw the difficulty of recovering traumatized children and families who in two and three generations lived in poverty and addiction — I would have said, "Nothing can be done."

So whether or not we see around us what others call impossible and dead and without possibility of redemption — whether it's personal lives, whether it's the condition of our nation or the condition of the world, or a relative or a child or an alienated family member — we look at those situations with the habit of the heart.

Now, my senior pastor — I said, "Our wives have a lot of wisdom, pastor." And he said, "Yes." And so my lovely wife often says, "When you preach, give us something to take home. Give us something we can keep in our hearts." And fortunately, I don't need to substitute my own wisdom. All the wisdom we need is here in these two stories.

Notice in that long reading from John: look at the cast of characters that are gathered around that grave. We have the disciples — and we know, by the way, from John that there are women there as well, who follow Jesus and care for him. And then the Jewish neighbors are there to weep with the sisters. And of course the sisters are there. It's a gathering. It's an assembly of people at the place of death, hoping that there might be life — beyond the resurrection they believe is coming.

And there's the wisdom. There's the clue. We need to be gathered. We need to be brought together. We need to assemble ourselves. And that's the meaning of church — ecclesia: we are the gathered together. And as we gather, we listen to each other. We sustain each other's habit of hope. We talk about the possibilities of life, not death. We sustain each other as we meet together and talk together and eat together. That gathering of diverse peoples around that tomb is often neglected. That is the source of the habit we call hope.

The second clue is from Ezekiel. Now, it was a good translation they read this morning, but I want to tell you that wind and spirit are the same word. This whole story plays on one single Hebrew word: ruach. Now it sounds like I have a sore throat, right? The ruach Yahweh — it's what picks him up by the nape of the neck. It's what he tells him to take as his prophecy. It is the actual thing that brings the wind. And it is actually the breath that he commands from God to make alive. It's power. It's power. It's ableness. It's the ability to make happen what hope wants to happen. It's spirit. It's life. It's there in all of us, because we believe that when we are baptized, we are granted the spirit. The spirit is with us in baptism. It enables our baptism. And when we confess here, we talk about we believe in the spirit, the gift of life. That spirit is upon us and can be elicited. It can be brought forward into our lives and commanded, just as Yahweh commanded Ezekiel to command the spirit. We can command ourselves to accept the power that is within us, and to speak and to act in confidence and power.

I remember times standing before the judge as an untrained but appointed attorney, with the courtroom filled — the professionals, the psychologists, and the case workers, and the other attorneys — and I'm alone before the judge, arguing on behalf of this child. And there were times when I was shaking in my amateur ability, but emboldened by my role given to me by the state and with a sense that I was there acting out my faith. I had to say, "Your Honor, the attorney is wrong. The state is wrong. This child's needs are different than they are claiming, and I ask you to act — not as they are asking you to act, but to act on behalf of the child for whom I speak."

You see, I'm a Methodist, so when I get going...

We have the power to act if we claim it.

The third thing you can take with you is: mindfulness.

You don't know how hard it is for me to believe sometimes. I'm like Martha. We're learning. We learn the power of allowing ourselves space to be mindful, to meditate, to bring to the present things that are important for us, that sustain us. And one of the wonderful phrases in this long John story is when Jesus directly interrogates Martha. He says, "What do you think?" He said, "Do you believe?" And she says — allow me to quote the story in its original — she says, "Naí, Kýrie." Now, that's a word that sounds a little bit like the British "nay," but it's naí — yes. Yes, Lord.

And there are times for us to recover the center of what all around it seeks to deny. We need to simply — as those negative things float in front of us and intrude upon us — mindfully say, "Naí, Kýrie." I wish we had some music for that, but try it. Would you try it with me?

Naí, Kýrie.

Yes, Lord. I believe.

A final thing. Something odd is going on in this long, beautifully told story in John. John is different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And one of the ways it's different is that Jesus appears as a kind of regal figure — almost a heavenly figure walking on earth — and he is not an emotional person in John. Now in the other gospels, sometimes even Mark will say that one time Jesus was angry. It doesn't happen in John — except one time, here. One time, here, when the narrator looks into Jesus and says what Jesus is feeling. He's deeply moved. He's troubled. Two big verbs. He's troubled.

Now, we all know he wept. But before that, he was troubled. He was deeply moved.

That's the final thing you take with you as you confront these fissures in your life, these shards that intrude upon us: not only are you not alone when we gather — you are not alone in the heart of Jesus, who with us is deeply troubled, is deeply moved.

Amen. Amen.