II Lent – February 28, 2010 - Year C

          The season of Lent is hardly the most popular season in the Christian year.

You don’t necessarily find people busting down the doors to get to an Ash Wednesday service.

And here in St. Andrew’s having to switch from the familiar language of Rite Two in the liturgy to the increasingly unfamiliar language of Rite One, however elegant it may sound, can be a bit of an inconvenience, especially when we’re used to speaking the responses almost without thinking.

Then there’s this thing called “sin” that pretty much all of us are supposed to be prone to, but that pretty much all of us would just as soon not spend that much time thinking about, except that sin is what any faithful observance of Lent seems inordinately preoccupied with.

It’s probably not even necessary to go to that much trouble just to feel bad about yourself.

          Still, it is almost exclusively among a company of faithful people like the Church that the folly of humanity’s stubborn insistence that perfection can be achieved without God will ever be remotely acknowledged, and, in the Episcopal Church, at any rate, principally during the season of Lent that we are made to own up to our shortcomings and our frequent failure to take our relationship with God as seriously as we should.

But if Lent in the Church must start with the acknowledgment of our sinfulness, it need not end there.

Once we are able to acknowledge our sinfulness, Lent brings us face to face, perhaps as at no other time, with a God whose “merciful promise is beyond all measure, [surpassing] all that our minds can fathom,” as the Kyrie Pantokrator, that great Lenten canticle, so aptly expresses it.

Indeed, today’s lessons for this Second Sunday in Lent provide us with some perfectly wonderful pictures of this amazing God—pictures that remind us of just how deeply and completely God loves us, however sinful we may be.

          In our lesson from the Gospel according to Luke Jesus, “the one who shows us God”, as one hymn writer has expressed it, finds himself reflecting on the nature of his mission in the presence of some Pharisees, members of the religious establishment who have often opposed his ministry in the past, but this time in what may or may not be an about-face take the trouble to warn him that Herod is out to get him and that he’d better be on the lookout.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” laments Jesus, refusing to be turned away from the city where he is certain to meet a violent death.  “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

The poignant scene of a mother bird longing to keep her baby chicks from running off in all directions may not find resonance in the experience of every one of us; some of us may want to conjure up a similar situation in another location. 

But can we not feel the intensity, the agony, the selfless devotion of such love? 

Can you and I imagine a God who loves us that much?

          Or what do we do with the picture of God we encounter in today’s reading from the Book of Genesis, the God who chooses to meet Abraham in the “deep and terrifying darkness” and, taking the form of “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch”, passes between the halves of some animal carcasses the way a lesser king of that time would have pledged absolute loyalty to a greater king (though the carcasses the lesser king would have had to pass through would likely have been human carcasses to make sure he got the point).

It is the way that God finally chooses to answer Abraham’s repeated question: “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess [this land]?”

Can we imagine a God who says to Abraham in effect: “If I fail to keep my promise to you, you may kill me.”?

Can we imagine such a God?

          Or the God whose tortured form, hanging on a cross, speaks of unquenchable love offered to every human being down through the ages: “I will always love you, though you reject my love, though you humiliate me, though you put me to death.”

Can you and I begin to imagine such a God?

          Images of God like these are welcome gifts along the way, as we make our Lenten pilgrimage together.

They remind us that the purpose of Lent is a lot more than coming to the realization that God often has good reason to be disappointed with us.

Images like these remind us that no matter how sinful we may be—no matter how often we “miss the mark”—God loves us anyway, not only loves us, but also gives us another chance to make things right, and another, and another.

          Now, this is not the easiest idea for anybody to grasp because it asks us to consider a stark alternative to what might be called “human justice”.

When we think of the mechanics of justice we often think of a set of scales that must be kept in balance; in this particular system we say that the balance has been restored—that “justice has been done”—when someone one way or another “pays” for his or her crime.

What’s missing in the earthly equation is, of course, forgiveness, although it is possible to view the occasional inclination toward leniency or even mercy as perhaps springing from a desire to forgive.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is at the heart of God’s justice; when the scales are out of balance because we have missed the mark, it is God’s grace, freely bestowed, that brings the scales back into balance—God is the one who makes up the difference.

It is God who takes away the sin of the world.

I Lent – February 21, 2010 – Year C

          Diogenes Allen, a recently retired professor of philosophy at Princeton University, wrote a book a good thirty years ago titled Between Two Worlds, which was eventually re-titled Temptation.

The core of the book focuses on the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, which is, of course, the focus of this week’s Gospel lesson, as it is every year on the First Sunday in Lent.

I am indebted to Dr. Allen’s inspiring book for much of what I would like to consider this morning, as well as to insights about the humanity and divinity of Jesus that several of us had a chance to discuss in our last two Adult Forum sessions with Prof. Valarie Ziegler.

          Forty days in the wilderness is a long time to be without food—which is most likely what “forty days” means in this instance: a good long time.

Thanks to up-to-the-minute media reports we all had opportunity to learn of near miraculous survival stories after the earthquake in Haiti—people who were pulled out of the rubble after being buried for hours, days, even weeks; sometimes by chance they had a small amount of food and some water to sustain them; often they didn’t.

Everything points to Jesus’ choosing to eat nothing—choosing to fast and to pray, once the Spirit had led him into the wilderness, in spite of the devil’s temptations (or the impulses within him to do something else).

          It must have been quite a struggle because according to the writer of Luke’s Gospel Jesus was subject to temptation the entire time, however long that was.

We don’t learn anything specific about the nature of these temptations until the long ordeal is over, though if you’ve ever tried to fast you know that the impulse to reach for a snack, especially if there’s anything edible around, can sneak up on you unawares at first, though it soon loses its subtlety and has to be dealt with firmly and directly.

That may well have been what Jesus experienced.

But if the devil thought that Jesus had been softened up sufficiently for the final onslaught, he was sadly mistaken.

          Diogenes Allen characterizes these last three temptations that Jesus underwent as “the temptation of material goods, “the temptation of prestige”, and “the temptation of security”, and Jesus withstood them admirably.

Could you or I have done as well?

Could we have fasted as long as Jesus may have fasted may be a fairer question, but if we’re asking would we have refrained from turning stones into bread, then, yes, of course, we would have had no trouble passing that test, probably a lot less trouble than Jesus had, since we know we couldn’t have done it anyway and we assume that Jesus could have done it if he had chosen to.

But to have chosen to do it would have been for Jesus to deny his humanity—his solidarity with the human enterprise, so he didn’t.

There’s more to life than food, or, as Diogenes Allen might put it, material goods—even an abundance of them—cannot ultimately satisfy the longings of the human spirit.

Later on in his ministry Jesus would choose to feed multitudes of people with bread from the Lord knows where, but now was not the time to see to his own needs.

          On the other hand, what about a short cut to happiness?

If he was already recognized as powerful, as a wonder-worker, a celebrity, wouldn’t that make his entrance onto the world’s stage that much easier, allowing him to pursue his ministry with popular approval and a guarantee of sure-fire success, especially given his rather humble beginnings?

Why settle for being a nobody?

It doesn’t have to be an actual pact with the devil like the one that Jesus was offered or the one that Dr. Faustus was offered or the one that Jabez Stone was offered in “The Devil and Daniel Webster”.

All that glitters is not gold.

Get rich quick schemes as innocent-looking as a sub-prime mortgage or as nefarious as Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion dollar ponzi-scheme do not bring ultimate happiness and often bring disaster.

Again, by brushing the devil off at this point, Jesus embraced the truth of the human condition: There is no such thing as untrammeled happiness in this life and to seek it at all costs is simply to endanger the soul.

          Dealing with the last temptation that Jesus faced, as it is recorded in Luke’s Gospel, is perhaps the trickiest of all, precisely because it threatens to contradict some popular notions about God’s nature and God’s power.

Not only would Jesus have “made a big splash”, so to speak, had he thrown himself down from the pinnacle of the temple and been rescued by angels at the last minute, but he would have proved to himself and to others beyond the shadow of a doubt that God is a God who will rescue you in every emergency, no matter what the circumstances.

What else are we supposed to make of words that come from Holy Scripture itself?

The devil quotes from the 91^st Psalm, which states: “Because you have made the Lord your refuge, and the Most High your habitation, there shall no evil happen to you, neither shall any plague come near your dwelling.  For he shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways.  They shall bear you in their hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

It’s in the Bible, after all!

          “So much religion in our land,” to quote Prof. Allen, “is a religion of ‘God protects us from the ordinary dangers of life’,…  After all, are we so stupid that we would not turn to God—or to anything for that matter—if it were found to pay off?  If all we needed to do was say: ‘Ok I’ll pray to you if I can expect no disastrous illnesses, no accidents, a long prosperous life and everything going well with the kids’.  But God is not a means to our ends—even good ends such as these.  …It is perfectly natural to want to [feel] secure,” Allen concludes.  “But we may without realizing it until tragedy strikes, have made our security a condition for God’s reality.”

Unlike parents who convince themselves that they must withhold proper medical care from their children so that God will intervene or snake-handlers who feel driven to entrust their fate to the words of a single proof-text and an above average immune system, Jesus chose not to put God to the test. 

He didn’t think very long about jumping off the roof of the temple.

He knew better than that.

          “Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was in every way tempted as we are,” reads the proper preface to the Great Thanksgiving for the season of Lent, “yet did not sin.”

If by “sin” we mean “fail to measure up to what God hopes we will become”, what would sin have looked like in Jesus’ case, had he succumbed to the devil’s blandishments after all?

Rather than embodying the very best that a human being is capable of—recognizing that there is more to life than the satisfaction of physical appetites, great danger in striving to get ahead of everybody else at all costs, and grave disappointment ahead if we think of God as some sort of heavenly crossing guard—Jesus could have opted out of the human enterprise from the very beginning and said: “I don’t do wilderness.”

Sin for Jesus would have been opting out.

Except that Jesus didn’t opt out, just as on that grim Good Friday he didn’t come down from the cross and show that taunting mob a thing or two, but suffered in solidarity with every human being, guilty or innocent, who has ever suffered.

And by not opting out, but remaining one of us and going ahead and “doing wilderness”, Jesus showed every other human being the way to God.

And how to recognize a shortcut when we see one and avoid it.

V Epiphany – February 7, 2010 – Year C - RCL

          The kind of stuff that happened to the prophet Isaiah in this week’s Old Testament lesson just doesn’t happen anymore.

Or does it?

If it was a dream—and it could have been because it doesn’t say that it was actually in the temple that Isaiah “saw the Lord”; it simply says that when Isaiah “saw the Lord” the “hem of [the Lord’s] robe filled the temple”, which could have been part of the vision—if it was a dream, that kind of stuff happens all the time.

Of course, some of us are better at remembering what we dream than others, and there are techniques that can be learned to improve our ability to remember them, but all of us dream at some point when we are asleep, and the dreams we dream, whether we remember them or not, can often be as bizarre as the one-act play by Picasso that Lucy and I saw Friday night at DePauw or as surrealistic as Isaiah’s description of his vision of God.

          This is not to say that Isaiah wasn’t in the temple when he had this vision or that he was necessarily asleep when he saw what he saw.

Unsettling things like that can happen anytime, anywhere.

I can remember a Sunday in St. John’s Church, Crawfordsville, nearly forty years ago, when the Bishop—then Bishop Craine—was there for Confirmation, and I had recently joined the choir, and we were singing the final hymn, and all of a sudden I realized that I was in tears, and, thinking that I was letting the music get the better of me, which can happen, I tried to pull myself together, only to find that I had to sit down because I couldn’t stop trembling.

A few hours later, after I had gotten my bearings, it occurred to me that singing in the choir probably wasn’t quite enough and that I had better join the church before something worse happened!

          What makes an inspirational writer like Annie Dillard recommend that Christians wear crash helmets to church if they know what’s good for them?

Probably the hope that church is a place where God just might break through in a new way.

Assuming that that’s what we want.

Somehow you get the feeling that Isaiah wasn’t quite ready for the vision he had, whether he was asleep or in the temple, but that he had no choice, even when he protested that he was “a man of unclean lips”, once God broke through.

It wasn’t in church and it wasn’t in a dream, though it may have felt like one, when Simon Peter gave in and put out into deep water and let down his nets again after fishing all night and catching nothing.

He wasn’t expecting the great catch of fish that threatened to swamp the boats, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he was comfortable with the implications.

“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” was hardly a cry of joy on Peter’s part.

 At least at first, like Isaiah, the reluctant prophet, Peter might have gladly let the opportunity for further adventures pass him by.

But once God broke through (Jesus’ reassuring word: “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” helped a lot), Peter (and the others) had no choice but to leave everything and follow Jesus.

          I guess what Annie Dillard might mean, when she talks about wearing crash helmets to church, is not just a way to be ready should God choose to break through, but also a way of inviting, even daring God to break through.

We all ought to try it some Sunday morning for kicks; maybe give them out at the door; people wear stranger things to athletic events; quite a few bicyclists wear them.

Who knows?

We might get some media coverage.

Who knows?

God just might break through.

          Of course, once the Lord had broken through to Isaiah and Isaiah had answered: “Here am I; send me!”, Isaiah realized that he was being given a dubious assignment.

“Go and say to this people,” he heard God say: “‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.”

Obviously Isaiah felt that there was little hope of persuading the powers that be (or, rather, that were) that the nation was heading for destruction.

Whether Isaiah’s own despair colored what he heard God say is something we will likely never know; it was left to future generations to bring a proclamation of hope and restoration to a nation in exile.       

Far more hopeful and far more welcome was the assignment that Peter and his companions found themselves with, when Jesus told them, “From now on you will be catching people.”

But it would still be a formidable task.

For one thing, they would have to learn how to do it.

“Catching people” is something Jesus did; he had caught them, after all.

But they would still have to learn how to do it themselves.

          What they would have to learn to do was what Christians have been learning to do down through the centuries: learning to catch people with the Good News of God as revealed in Jesus Christ—God’s ultimate breakthrough, if you will—something we all go about doing in different ways, but however we do it, it’s spreading the Gospel; it’s—dare we say it out loud in an Episcopal church?—evangelism.

Evangelism can be a bad word to some, but it doesn’t have to be.

It is, after all, whatever Christians do or say in witness to God’s love for the world and for everyone and everything in it.

That can be anything from inviting someone to church to volunteering to help at a homeless shelter, from dealing honestly in business to dealing graciously with a stranger.

There are as many ways to do evangelism as there are Christians (maybe as there are human beings) to do it, since all we’re doing is witnessing to the love of God by loving the way God loves.

Some days we do it better than on other days, but one way or the other we end up making a difference in the world because the Good News of God in Christ is catching.

And all embracing.

Thanks be to God!