Sunday, March 1, 2009

1 Lent B - 1 March 2009

1 Lent B - 1 March 2009
Genesis 9:8-17; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15
James V. Stockton

Each of the readings for today reminds people that Christianity is something robust and challenging. Noah and his family suffer the deluge of the world. They suffer the angst of trying to warn their neighbors and friends to turn from their selfish and silly ways and be reconciled with God, and of meeting only with disdain and ridicule, but knowing that there simply is nothing more that they can do. Peter reminds the early Church, particularly those about to be baptized into it, that Christ Jesus suffered persecution and death for their sakes personally as much as for the sake of the world. He reminds them that their continuing relationship with God in Christ means continuing to confront their own proclivity for getting it wrong even when they are trying to get it right. The gospel reading reminds people that Jesus himself must endure a time of testing in a wilderness both material and spiritual in nature; that he must endure the pain of knowing that when John, his cousin and fellow seeker after God’s truth, is imprisoned, the corruption of the authorities who put him there ensures the worst possible outcome. Lent continues today with these reminders that Christianity is a robust and challenging enterprise by which God challenges the people of God in order that the people of God may continue to express God’s challenge to the wider world around them.


Many people will engage the season of Lent as a season of new or renewed spiritual discipline, and rightly so. The tradition of self-denial during Lent goes back to the earliest Christians. They practiced a day-long fast on the Fridays of the season recalling the grief of Jesus’ death and burial prior to celebrating Jesus’ resurrection on each of the following Sundays. On Sundays still today people’s self-denials are suspended in order that they may celebrate fully and without reservation the blessing of their freedom in the new life won for them and given to them in Christ’s resurrection. So, if people here are denying themselves that bit of chocolate or that Diet-Coke, that favorite television show or that hobby that pleases and satisfies, please either let go the spiritual discipline for today in order to experience the joy of your spiritual liberty; or, if you must continue your discipline today in order to sustain your resolve to continue it tomorrow, then please recognize that today, and on all the Sundays of Lent, your spiritual discipline is, paradoxically, one more reminder of your share in humanity’s inability ever to get it completely and finally right. And that’s okay, because that is much of what the season of Lent is all about.

I read a poem someone wrote anonymously. You’ll recognize that is based on poet Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”. “I think that I shall never see a church that’s all it ought to be; a church whose members never stray beyond the straight and narrow way; a church that has no empty pews, whose rector never gets the blues; a church whose leaders always speak, and none are proud and all are meek. Such perfect churches there may be, but none of them are known to me.”

In his day, Noah and his family are reminded more profoundly than many of us can imagine of humanity’s inability ever to get it fully and completely right. I think you and I can hardly imagine the connection to this reading today for people who experienced the storms and floods last year in Galveston and the surrounding areas. But thanks be to God, there is a dramatic difference between their experience and that of Noah and his family. In Noah’s day, when the rivers rose at the wrong time of year and flooded out the mature crops and wiped out the village nearby, people interpreted it as a punishment from the gods, a sign that the people had somehow offended them.

Think about it. Humanity has had little if any reason to interpret misfortune in any other way, until this day when Noah and his family step from the ark and learn of God’s meaning for them of the rainbow in the sky. Here, on this day at the conclusion of disaster, God says, “Never again! Never shall you experience such calamity as this again.” “Never again,” says God, “will I allow you to interpret disaster and calamity, devastation and despair, as my will for you.” “For when you see the rainbow in the clouds you will know I am reminding not only you but also myself that I am not your destroyer but your Creator, that I bring you all not to death and nothing, but to life and to fullness of being.”

Lent does indeed remind each of us of the gravity of our respective relationships with God, of the seriousness of choosing to follow the movement of the Spirit of God, when it might mean being different from the rest, of answering the call of Jesus when it may mean rejection or embarrassment. Lent does remind us of the seriousness of choosing instead to indulge a self-centered impulse ‘just this once’ or ‘for just a moment,’ even though this means denying someone else just a tiny bit of what you may have to offer them, and even though it means denying yourself just a bit of what God has to offer you. And then that rainbow in the sky, or that rainbow of a smile on someone’s face who knows us at our best, in someone’s voice who loves us at our worst, does indeed remind us of God’s Love, and of the gravity of holding onto it in our good choices, and of returning to it after our bad ones. And so Lent reminds us of those deeply personal aspects your relationship with God and of mine.

Christ’s time in the desert away from family and friends even away from the comforts of a familiar religious environment for his own relationship with God the Father was time away for the sake of all humanity and was time and suffering offered for your sake and for mine. But Lent is not intended to create in you or me a sense of guilt or shame, beyond anything helpful for drawing us back to God. Lent is a reminder for us that the cost of our salvation is paid by God’s self in the person of Jesus Christ.

It is a call to us to ponder not the absence a price for it, but the value of what we have been given. It is God’s invitation to us to celebrate not the bargain that we got, but the inestimable treasure that God has entrusted to us. It is God’s companionship with us on a journey toward a joy that we simply cannot contain within ourselves, that we cannot hide from the world around us.

So, in your Lenten disciplines these next forty days or so, please do follow your disciplines into the depths of your personal relationship with God, as each of us is called to do. But also let the experience not just of Noah but of his family with him, let Peter’s letter not just to one but to several, let Jesus’ proclamation not just to the one or the few, but to the many and to all, call you, me, each of us to depths of relationship with God beyond our individual selves.

“Such perfect churches there may be” the poem goes on, “but none of them are known to me. “For when I find one and go in, with me enter error and sin. So, still we’ll work and pray and plan to make ours, with God, the best we can.” Through its history, ECR has endured its own unique struggles, and not first as persons of God, but always as God’s people. Over the years ECR has discovered those unique blessings with which God has entrusted it, and has nurtured them not only as many persons, but first as a people of God.

Let us, then, make it our collective spiritual discipline for this year’s season of Lent that each of us shall deny himself or herself, an exclusively private and personal journey through Lent. Instead, along our personal journeys, let us also seek together whatever it is that God has for us at the depths of our collective relationship with God. And then let us find those challenges there that we will meet together, those blessings there that we will celebrate together; ‘as those who know that perfect does not matter; as those who try only to do it better; to share God’s Love that brought us all this far, God’s blessed imperfect people here at ECR.’

And so may Christ our Savior who sought not the joys of heaven without temptation, and entered not into glory apart from cross, grant that we may follow and find his to be the way of life and peace; who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and for ever. Amen.

© 2009, James V. Stockton

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