Two Lost Brothers

Today I am at The Episcopal Church of the Atonement in Westfield. I'm about to get to know them better, as their rector will be retiring later this spring and they will be one of our congregations in search of a new rector. But today's sermon is focused on one of the most extraordinary of Jesus' parables - which can be found here.

Notice who is in the crowd as Jesus tells the familiar story we just heard from Luke’s Gospel. There are the tax collectors and sinners who have been coming to Jesus to hear a word of healing and of “good news.” We can almost see in our mind’s eye, however, how their mere presence causes the scribes and the Pharisees to grumble and squirm a bit. They are the religious folks. And they practice a piety of separatism. They’ve been taught not to hang out with sinners because if they do, it might rub off on them. The way to remain “pure” is to steer clear of “this sort.”  So Jesus tells them all a little story…

Actually, he tells them three stories. As you may have noticed we skipped over Luke 15:4-11b. All of them are what we might call “lost and found” stories. The first is about a shepherd who has 100 sheep: one gets lost and so the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go after the lost one. The second story is about a woman with ten silver coins. (A little note in my Bible says each coin is worth the equivalent of a day’s labor—so these aren’t dimes—but more like $100 bills; I bet if you lost one you’d turn the house upside down, too!) She does lose one, but after looking diligently she finally finds it, and she’s so happy that she throws a party.

Story number three is the one before us today: the story most of us know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I imagine that second son as a restless soul who lives for the moment. He can’t wait to leave home. But as soon as he does, he finds trouble in dissolute living. Or maybe trouble finds him: there was also a severe famine in the land. In any case, it doesn’t take long before he’s on a downward slide. When I reflect upon those gathered around Jesus as he tells this story, I imagine that most of those “sinners and tax collectors” could immediately identify with this character in the story. They encountered in him a kindred soul.

But I also think we misunderstand the story if we are too literal about applying the lessons of the two previous stories, the one about the lost sheep and the one about the lost coin. People are more complicated than sheep or coins. I do think the first two stories invite us to think of that second son as more “lost” than “prodigal” but I also think that in this story there is more than one lost brother. It may be far more subtle (and perhaps less obvious to both of them) that this is true. But it’s not less real.  

The older brother is also lost and he also needs to be found. He’s lost because he’s an overachiever and an overfunctioner and yet as often happens, there is no joy in that for him. He’s grown resentful about carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. It’s pretty exhausting. I suspect he’s at least a little bit envious of his little brother, imagining what it would be like to be far from home, living the good life. (There’s a lot of projection there, of course, because as hearers of the story we know that is hardly the case; the younger brother is fighting the pigs for something to eat.) But the grass is often greener on the other side, and resentments often mar our vision. In any case, clearly the older brother has very little compassion for the brother who has taken his inheritance and left. Good riddance!

I suspect that most of those scribes and Pharisees listening to Jesus (and perhaps some of us here today as well) identify with the older brother and are lost more in the way of his choices than those of the younger one. Lost more to resentments than to lust. Lost more to measuring our lives in teaspoons than in reckless abandon. But lost nevertheless and in ways that, if left unexamined, can lead to self-pity and self-righteousness, traits that don’t leave much room for joy.

All families are complicated and birth order always plays some part in shaping who we are, maybe even more than gender or Myers-Briggs Type or generational differences. Over the years I’ve kept an unofficial tally and noticed that more often than not, oldest children partner up with other oldests, and youngers with youngers and middle with middle. Birth order leaves a mark, for sure. And it is so easy for petty sibling rivalries and jealousies to push aside love, as if love were a commodity, as if there isn’t enough in a family to go around. We can find ourselves forced into roles that leave less space for the person we are really meant to become. And if we hear too often at a young age: “he’s my shy one” or “she’s the responsible one” or “she’s the one who is going to give me gray hair”  those labels can stick. They can become tapes that play very often long after they are even true.

So back to our story: at the end of it, the younger brother has been found and he is celebrating. His story is like the hymn, “Amazing Grace:” he once was lost, but now he’s found; he was blind, but now he sees. He is the recipient of an abundant outpouring of grace that helps him to see the wideness of God’s mercy as he  encounters a dad with open arms who runs out to meet him. This is good news to all who feel lost and afraid and ashamed.

But the jury is still out on the elder brother as the story ends. Will he uncross his arms and join the party or not? Even if he does, will he be able to let go of his anger and hear the words of his father? The fatted calf awaits him, too, after all. There is enough veal piccata for everyone. No one has excluded him from the party. But to enter he must let go of that sense of entitlement; the belief that his brother is undeserving. (Or more accurately, I suspect, that he is more deserving.) Like the scribes and Pharisees who listen to Jesus tell the story (and perhaps like some of us here today) he needs to let go of the false notion that he’s “holier than thou” and risk embrace. That amazing grace is for him too.

Whether or not we know how lost we are, Christ desires to find us all. We are all beloved of the Father/Mother of us all and there is plenty of room at the Table. If we are more like the younger brother then this Lent might be a time when we need to “come to ourselves” by getting up out of the pig pen and making our way back home again. If we are more like the older brother then we may need to “come to ourselves” by letting go of old resentments and grievances and remember God is God and we don’t have to be. The truth is though that these two have far more in common than either realizes and not just because each is lost in his own way, but because both are children of a compassionate father. They are blood brothers. And so are we my friends: we are siblings loved by God who have been claimed and marked and sealed as Christ’s own, forever. Lent is a time to remember that truth. We are invited to the Table, invited to come and taste and see. And all are welcome. And all means all.

We are invited to sing and to dance and to live. But once fed, we are also called to get up and then to “go and do likewise.” We are called to become more like the God who loves us, as we love our neighbor. Or as that former Pharisee, Paul, puts it in today’s epistle reading: we are sent out as “ambassadors for Christ.” We are given this same ministry of reconciliation to share with others. We who have experienced reconciliation with God are sent out into the world as reconcilers who seek out all who are lost in the various ways people can get lost by sharing with them the good news that they are God’s beloved. Our mission, our vocation, is not to remain children but to become more like the father: instruments of peace willing to risk embrace as the defining posture of our lives. Both of these brothers are in need of grace and of healing and of love. But as the story ends, only one of them has recognized that fact and received that gift. Only one has allowed love to heal and transform him, and to unleash the peace that passes all understanding.

Now it’s just a story, right. Jesus was a great storyteller. There is no historical older or younger brother or father here to interview. Jesus made it up to make a point, to sinners and saints, to all of us across the centuries. Yet I think of people he did spend time with, like those two sisters, Mary and Martha. Their stories and personalities were different too, and they also had a little sibling rivalry going on that they tried more than once to triangle Jesus in on. It’s just how families are. Complicated!

We can do what we want with stories like this, including the invitation to write our own endings. I like to believe that while it may have taken him a while longer, eventually the older brother joined the party, that he also “came to himself.” Maybe he tentatively walked toward the party and hesitated at the door. Maybe his younger brother sees him and runs to embrace him, mimicking the role that the father played for him. And the tears began to flow. That is how the world is made new and that is how Easter happens in our real lives and in the real world and I bet you can tell stories like that. Hopefully the veal piccata and wine have not run out by the time that older brother comes to himself and those two brothers find a way forward. Hopefully it’s before they have to stand at the grave of their old man.

I have also, however, seen stories that sadly do not end that way. Siblings who never do end up speaking again. Cousins who never get to meet each other until grandpa or grandma dies, if then. Because the story ends where it does, it forces us to at least consider the possibility that the two never do reconcile and that the betrayal the older brother feels causes a permanent rift in this family. That older brother’s pain is real, whether or not it’s justified and it can also get reinforced every time he tells the story of how hard he worked for his old man’s love and how unfair the old man was in the way he treated that prodigal brother. We are free—all of us—to refuse love. We are free to convince ourselves that being right is more important to us than to love or to be loved.

Well, it's just a story. But it is a story that leaves so many questions hanging in the air, stories those first hearers surely took home with them: those sinners and tax collectors and those scribes and Pharisees. What kind of lives would they live, after hearing such a story? The story took hold and Luke remembered these three lost and found parables – only Luke, by the way. They don’t appear in Matthew or Mark or the Fourth Gospel. Thank God that Luke remembered!

The story confronts us where we are, in the middle of this Lent, each of us with our own unique ways of being lost. It leaves us pondering whether or not we dare to take the risk of being found before we get to the empty tomb. Like so many of Jesus’ great parables, the story lingers in the air and across the centuries, still haunting us: we oldest children and we middle children and we younger children; each of us lost in our own ways. We sinners and saints. God’s love is deep and broad enough to scoop us all up. We are all welcome and all really does mean all. When we begin to grasp this reality, it changes us for good. 

And it invites us to grow more and more into the full stature of Christ until we see that compassion transforms our lives and our posture in the world is not crossed arms that hold people at a distance, but open arms like those of Jesus on the cross, that are stretched forth in love, ready to embrace all who are lost.

The Third Sunday in Lent

Today, on the Third Sunday in Lent, I am at Christ Church Cathedral The readings for this day can be found here.

Before we take a closer look at today’s gospel reading, I want to say just a few words about Pontius Pilate. We will see him again, soon enough, so consider this a preview of coming attractions and I ask the Dean to indulge me and not to count it against my sermon time today. It’s more of an aside. Or perhaps a prequel…

By all accounts, Pilate took his job very seriously. And his job was to enforce the Pax Romana in Palestine. Sometimes that meant reminding people who was in charge. A few slaughtered Galileans here and a few murdered Samaritans there was simply factored into the cost of maintaining the Empire. That’s how Empires work. Pilate was neither a nice nor a weak man. And to be on the receiving end of imperial power is always dehumanizing and we have way too many historical examples to point to. Turning human beings into “pawns” for their game on an international chess board of Realpolitik goes against everything our Baptismal Covenant stands for, especially respect for the dignity of every human being.

Pilate was good at his job. This is important to say as we approach Holy Week, because as I said, we will see Pilate again. But the Gospel writers, including Luke, had to be very careful about how they told the story of Jesus’ Passion and particularly how they characterized Pontius Pilate. By the time the gospels get written down, those early followers of the Way of Jesus were just beginning to show up on the radar of the Roman authorities as distinct from Judaism. They had to be politically savvy. They had to be “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” It was only a matter of time before they’d be facing the lions in public arenas.

So Pilate’s role is subtly down-played in the passion narratives for precisely this reason. But make no mistake: it would have been crystal clear to anyone living at that time that crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one and that Jesus was executed primarily because he was perceived as a political threat far more than as a religious threat. So don’t be fooled by the whole “what is truth?” thing that is coming or him washing his hands of it all: Pilate was a cold, calculating, manipulative operative who depended for his paycheck on the Roman Empire remaining intact. If keeping control of the situation meant that a few Jews needed to die, to show who is in charge; well, so be it.

The point is that in today’s gospel reading, those who come to Jesus assume that Pilate is ruthless and they aren’t shocked by it. We shouldn’t be, either. The questions posed by Jesus in this text appear to be “ripped from the day’s headlines.” While we don’t have any confirmation from outside the Bible about the particular incident of Pilate mingling the blood of slaughtered Galileans with the blood from their sacrifices, we have plenty of references to confirm his barbarism. One example, recorded by Josephus, is about a group of Samaritans who were climbing Mt. Gerizim that he had killed. So in today’s gospel reading, Jesus seizes on current events to ask the theological question that is raised whenever bad things happen to innocent people. The first of those two incidents is a ruthless act ordered by Pilate on behalf of the Roman government. “Do you think that this happened to the victims,” Jesus asks, “because they were worse sinners than others?” The second is a tragic accident, the collapse of a tower over at Siloam that raises the very same question every collapsed tower in every time and place raises: “Do you think those who died were worse sinners than others?”

Notice that it is Jesus who asks and then answers both of his own questions. And that he is clear: no, they were not worse sinners. Those two events were not some punishment from God. Jesus rejects the notion that tragedies like this are connected to moral behavior. Those people did not deserve to die. Full stop.

Yet behind such questions is always another question, usually buried under some amount of anxiety and uncertainty. Sometimes we ask such questions because we already know deep down that the answer is “no.” But that can be a terrifying reality to confront. If the answer is “yes”—if those people were in fact worse sinners, then our world can remain a tidy and ordered place. If bad things only happen to bad people and good things happen to good people, there is some comfort in that. We can keep ourselves safe by behaving. By showing up in church on the third Sunday of Lent.

But of course that isn’t how the world is. And if it might just as easily have been you or me who was among those Galileans or in that tower in Siloam, or in one of those World Trade Center towers or one of those apartments in Miami, then the world turns out to be a whole lot more complicated. Sometimes people never smoke a cigarette their whole lives and they get lung cancer and die. Sometimes people get all the aerobic exercise they are supposed to and eat a low-fat, healthy diet, and then they drop dead of a heart attack. Sometimes chaos is unleashed, and things happen for no good reason. Ask Job. (Phone a friend!) Sometimes life is uncertain, and brutally unfair.

So Jesus is clear: no…they were not worse sinners. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t important things to ponder after such tragic events. Precisely because the world is not always tidy and predictable, we can take such moments and reflect on them. Moreover, they can become for us occasions that invite true repentance. That’s where this journey of Lent began, after all: remember that you are dust. Remember we will all return to the earth. So repent now, and live.

Repentance. In Greek, it’s meta-noia. Meta- is the prefix we know from metamorphosis; it means “to change.” The root word is the same as in the English word, paranoia. Para-noia is when you are, literally, “out of your mind.” Noia, in other words, is “mind.”  So metanoia means, literally, “to change your mind.”

Repentance isn’t a feeling of being sad or ashamed or even guilty. Repentance is about changing our minds and amending our lives.

Most people I know, including myself, don’t like to have to consider changing our minds about much of anything. Most arguments are more about stating our case than listening. We try to keep things in order, holding onto the “way we were raised” or the “way we were taught” as if that settles the matter. People were taught for centuries that the world was flat, though. People were taught for a very long time that black people were property and that women must never be ordained, and that the first European settlers and the native Americans got along just swell and that gay people should stay in their closets and keep quiet.

The story is told from the desert tradition: once upon a time a visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life. The Teacher said to the visitor, If what you seek is Truth there is one thing you must have above all else. I know, the visitor said. To find Truth I must have an overwhelming passion for it. No, the Teacher said. In order to find Truth, you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.

Faith is not a security blanket to keep us snug and warm. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says that the Bible isn't there to give us easy answers; it's there to help shape better questions that keep us moving in the right direction.

At the heart of Lent is this notion that true repentance is not about stability, but about being shaken up from the inside-out. It demands that we learn to live with contradiction and ambiguity; that we learn to encounter “the other” as a gift and not someone to be feared. We are commanded to love the stranger and not fear her because that person sees things from a different angle than we do and therefore can help us to change for good.

It is of course easier to just shout louder than it is to listen and easier still to make our world smaller and smaller until it is filled only with people who tell us what we already know to be true. We can make echo chambers that assure never allow us to question what we know. The problem with that way of being in the world, however, is that we stop learning and we stop growing. And when that happens, repentance becomes nothing more than spiritual narcissism.

The Christian journey is about growth into the full stature of Christ, and there is never growth without change. Jesus invites us to true repentance. He seems to be suggesting in today’s reading that the uncertainties of life can become an opportunity for spiritual growth. It isn’t always about big national tragedies. Sometimes it can happen when a person who is very dear to us dies. Or when we encounter failure. Anything that helps us to see that we, too, are mortal; that we, too, will one day return to the dust.

The parable of the fig-tree comes at all of this in a way that speaks more to “right-brained” people. A fig tree that doesn’t produce figs isn’t doing what it’s meant to do. The owner of the vineyard says to the gardener that he may as well cut it down; it’s just wasting soil. The gardener, however, buys the tree another year by digging around it and fertilizing it in the hopes that it will still bear fruit. The tree gets a second chance, another year to see if it might do what it is meant to do.

Jesus invites us to see our lives in the same way. What if when tragedy strikes, we ponder the implications long enough to ask the question, “what if that was me?” And what if in the very asking of the question we discover the seeds of change and become willing to dig around the ground of our lives and to fertilize our souls? Such things offer us an opportunity for real change, for new possibilities, and therefore for authentic spiritual growth. What happens when we hear God giving us a second chance, another year “to bear the fruit that is worthy of repentance.”  How might your life change if you were told you had one year to live?

What needs to happen for you to tap into the creativity God has given you, the gifts God has given you to use in service to others, that make you more fully alive? If your present life bears no resemblance to the way you answer that question, and you begin to make some real changes in order to get closer (even incremental ones) then this will indeed by a truly holy Lent that leads to the joy of Easter morning and to new and abundant life.

So, those Galileans who were killed by Pilate…those eighteen who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them…were they worse sinners than anyone here today? No, of course not. But may the very asking of such questions be for us an invitation to reflect on the fragility and vulnerability of our lives, and in so doing to reevaluate our priorities and get real about what is important. May the asking of such questions remind us that we are all dust and become an opportunity to make some changes that allow us to return to God with all our heart and with all our mind and with all our soul. And then bear fruit that is worthy of repentance.

Temptation

I had the day off and so I did not preach. Instead I sat in the pews at an 8 am service in Worcester - which is, for me, a real gift. We prayed The Great Litany and the sermon was terrific. (And I was on my way by 9 am!) The reflections offered below are a very lightly edited version of a sermon I preached at St. Francis Church in Holden a dozen years ago for anyone who may be interested. (RMS)

We don’t talk a lot about the devil in the Episcopal Church. And to be honest, I think it’s a little creepy when Christians become more focused on the devil than on God. But if your theology doesn’t include some awareness of evil (and the Evil One) then not only will today’s gospel reading not make very much sense, but at some level the entire Christian gospel doesn’t make much sense either. If all was right with the world and in our own lives and we could just pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, then we wouldn’t need a Savior and the forty-day season of Lent could be replaced with a week-long self-help seminar.

It is our practice on the first Sunday of Lent to begin with The Great Litany, one of the most ancient prayers of the Church. That prayer assumes the devil’s existence. We pray to be delivered from “all evil and wickedness…from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil and from everlasting damnation.” (BCP 148) We also pray that it might please God to raise us up when we fall and finally to give us strength to “beat down Satan under our feet.” (BCP 152) 

What does all of this mean?

If you think of the devil as a guy in a red suit who sits on your shoulder to tempt you to do things you aren’t supposed to do (as opposed to the little angel who sits on the opposite shoulder to encourage you to eat your vegetables and get plenty of rest and exercise) then it’s pretty easy to dismiss the devil. In fact such talk starts to sound ridiculous. We need to let go of such images. 

Yet if we aren’t careful we may be left with no language or images to wrestle with some of the hardest existential and theological questions. "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist,” wrote the French poet, Baudelaire.

I’ve quoted before the line from the film Broadcast News as one place to start in finding a way to put a name to this—the scene where  the character played by Albert Brooks turns to Holly Hunter and says:

Come on, no one's going to be taken in by a guy with a long red pointy tail.  [The devil] will be attractive, he'll be nice, and helpful, he'll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He'll never do an evil thing, he'll never deliberately hurt a living thing - he'll just bit by little bit lower our standards where they're important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash  over substance. Just a tiny little bit.

Another place to turn is to C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. If you’ve never read it, then I commend it to you this Lent. But be forewarned: it’s not an easy read. Over the years I’ve recommended this book to many people and most of them, when they finally do sit down and read it, experience it as more than a little bit disconcerting But I’ve been hanging around here long enough now so that every now and again someone will say something to me like this: “I read that book like five years ago and hated it; I couldn’t believe you wanted me to read it. But over time I’ve really come to appreciate it and am glad that I read it.”

Part of what that book does is to provide us with a way to think about the devil and the insidious nature of evil that is more serious and Biblical and less cartoonish. And along the way, that can lead us to a deeper understanding about temptation, as more than simply being tempted to do some terrible thing. Sometimes the greatest evils are committed by people who believe they are acting from the purest of motivations. Screwtape is about how the devil can use even good things and our best intentions (including Christian congregations) and twist them into that which hurts and destroys the creatures of God. The point that Lewis is making, I think, is that evil is real and the devil relies on half-truths and naïve motivations to cause the greatest harm.

This raises a very subtle but important point about temptation. Sometimes we are tempted to do things that we know instinctively are wrong. Like many of you I watched Tiger Woods make his public confession on Friday. It’s not up to me to judge whether he was sincere or not, or whether or not his wife ought to forgive him. But taking him at his word, his temptations were in one sense the easiest kind to identify: he said that he was tempted to do what he knew in his heart was wrong. I have little doubt that most of us here today can identify with that kind of temptation—the temptation to act in ways that we know instinctively are wrong. Sometimes, by the grace of God, we are able to resist such temptations and other times we succumb. When that happens we again rely on the grace of God; confessing our sins and asking for forgiveness and trying to make amends to those whom we have hurt.

But what I hope you will notice today with me is that this isn’t the only kind of temptation that people face and in some ways it isn’t the hardest kind either. In today’s gospel reading, we see that the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness are quite different: he is not tempted to do things that are so obviously wrong. In fact, none of these things are bad things: feeding the hungry, becoming king of kings and lord of lords, putting his whole trust in God.  The problem here is not in the actions themselves, but in taking shortcuts, in wanting Easter without Lent, in wanting holiness without suffering.

The temptations aren’t about the things the Devil is offering Jesus but about how to get there and on whose terms. What is brilliant about this gospel narrative is that it reminds us that evil isn’t always (or even mostly) black and white. It’s not like an old Western where it’s obvious who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Very often the devil relies on subtle manipulation of the good and co-opting the truth; lowering our standards and inviting us to take short-cuts. 

So as Luke recalls the story, Jesus is destined for great things. He has just been baptized by John the Baptist at the Jordan River and the voice of God has claimed him as “beloved Son.” On the heels of that holy event, we now see him in the Judean Desert, fasting for forty days to ponder the meaning of his Baptism. The wilderness and his resistance to temptation becomes a pathway to discernment and discovery. Jesus is there to ponder the meaning of his life, his call to serve God, and how best to use his gifts to do the work God has given him to do. He is there to listen for the voice of God among the many competing voices vying for attention:  the voice of his own ego-needs, the voice of the devil, the voices of the various expectations other people have of him. Sorting through all of that requires some awareness of what is of God and what is of the devil, what is holy and what is demonic. Or if that language scares you then try this: discerning between those actions that will bring life and those that will distort reality and lead to death.

It’s important that we not let our images of the devil get in the way of seeing that this is what is happening for Jesus: he is led into the wilderness to be tested. He isn’t being tempted to be something other than messiah: the devil agrees with him that this is his calling. The question Jesus faces is not whether or not he is the messiah but about “what kind of messiah” is he called to be? That isn’t an easy question to answer because within the Jewish tradition there were many different answers to that question. Discernment is about sorting out that truth, about interpreting Scripture and tradition in a new and unique context. It becomes clear early on in Luke’s Gospel where all of this is leading and the temptations that Jesus faces in the Judean wilderness are the same ones he’ll face right up until the very last night of his earthly life; the devil just waits for opportune times to return. Bu as Jesus resists the devil’s temptations he grows stronger and clearer. (I think our experience is similar.)

The temptations that Jesus faces are unique to his own vocation. You and I aren’t going to face those same temptations because we aren’t called to be messiahs. But asking such hard questions is wilderness work that Jesus models for us. And that is, I think, what Lent is for and the reason why the Church devotes roughly 1/10 of the liturgical year (forty out of 365 days) to asking these kinds of questions. We are here once again to consider the meaning of our own Baptism by listening for the voice of God in the wilderness. We do well to notice that sometimes it is not our weaknesses but our strengths that the devil uses against us.

If we find ourselves this Lent in the midst of a time of trial, our temptation may well be to try to find the quickest way out of that place. But what if we can ask a deeper question: “how might this time of trial that we are facing become a pathway toward clarifying who we are and who God is calling us to become?” If we can do that, there are gifts to be received in this holy season. When we do face temptation and times of trial, can we allow them to lead us—as they clearly led Jesus—to spiritual growth and a more discerning spirit and a new sense of resolve and a more mature faith? Is it possible that hidden inside of temptations there are opportunities to gain clarity around what our Baptism requires of us and then begin to live more fully out of that reality, with God’s help?

I think that at least one way to engage in that process more deeply is to immerse ourselves in the study of Holy Scripture, one of the disciplines of Lent that we were invited to on Ash Wednesday. Notice in today’s gospel how well the devil can quote Scripture! That’s a reminder that merely quoting the Bible is not genuine discernment and can even be rather dangerous. Because Scripture is complex and multi-faceted, we can no doubt find a verse in Scripture to justify just about anything we want to do.  But we are called to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest God’s Word—to wrestle with Scripture—which as you know ultimately points beyond itself to Christ. The “Word of God” for Christians is not the words written on the pages of the Bible, but Jesus himself, the Word-made-flesh.

Today’s Old Testament reading and all of the verses that Jesus himself quotes from Scripture to resist the devil come from the Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah. That great book is set in the eleventh month of the thirty-ninth year of Israel’s forty-year sojourn through the Sinai Desert. Moses is doing a retrospective on all of the lessons that the people of Israel learned from their forty years wandering around the Sinai Peninsula. The main thesis of that entire book is that the wilderness was a place where Israel learned who God was calling them to become as they left the patterns of slavery behind in Egypt and prepared to live as a people after God’s own heart in the Promised Land. Jesus goes into the Judean wilderness for the same reasons: to wrestle with big questions and to emerge on the other side stronger and wiser and clearer about his purpose. My prayer is that this season of Lent may do the same for us—not only as individuals but as a congregation committed to serving Christ in this time and place.

Now

The forty-day season of Lent that begins today, on Ash Wednesday, draws as a primary metaphor the wilderness journey of a band of slaves out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land. Except it took them forty years, not days, to reach their destination. These next forty days in the wilderness remind us that we, too, are somewhere between slavery and freedom. We are moving toward the Promised Land of new and abundant life. If we dare to look at it in this way we begin to see Lent not as a punishment, but as a testing of our resolve. And there is a difference. 

We do well as we begin this journey to remember that our forebears received many gifts in the wilderness, including water from the flinty rock, manna from heaven, the gift of Torah that later poets would realize is “sweeter than honey.” (Psalm 19:10) All of these gifts in the wilderness were given so that this stiff-necked people might learn to put their trust in God rather than in the pharaohs of this world. 

Many centuries after the Exodus, Jesus of Nazareth comes to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. From there he is immediately driven into the Judean Desert (aka the wilderness) where he is tested for forty days. One of the gifts he receives during that time is that he is ministered to by angels. 

Like God's chosen people, Jesus also seems to gain a sense of clarity around his vocation in that place of testing. Specifically, about the kind of messiah he will be: not a super-hero who jumps off tall buildings and is miraculously rescued; not a miracle worker who turns stones into bread; not a power-broker who builds empires; but rather a “suffering servant” who reveals in his death and resurrection the wisdom and power and love of God.  

So we, too, should be prepared during these days of self-examination to find some gifts along the way. We, too, may find bread for the journey. We, too, may find some clarity around what our own vocations are about as followers of this Jesus. We may, by God’s grace, find more passion and courage and strength and hope than we knew we had as we go about the work of ministry. We may learn (or remember) that the living God is indeed merciful and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, because that is at the very heart of what both Israel and Jesus discovered about God in the wilderness.

In the epistle reading appointed for this day, from St. Paul's Second Letter to the Church in Corinth there is a verse quoted by Paul in this new context that was first offered to God’s people by the prophet Isaiah during the Babylonian exile (See Isaiah 49:8). St. Paul writes: “see, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.” 

This is a rare occasion when I prefer the older translations to the NRSV. There, instead of "see" we read, behold, Behold is a far more interesting word than see! “Behold” is like a trumpet blowing. It’s more like, “hey, look over here!" It's as if Paul is writing in all CAPS. Behold! Now is the acceptable time! Behold! Now is the day of salvation!

This one verse may be enough to carry us through the next forty days, all the way to Easter. Perhaps it is a prayer we might offer as we begin each day of Lent, and then try to live at least that day more fully aware of the presence of God in our lives. Yes, forty days. But always one day at a time. How would our lives be changed if we read and heard, marked, learned, and inwardly digested this single verse over the course of the next forty days?

First, I think it would make us far more intentional about getting “unstuck” from the past. Too many of us spend too much of our precious time in the past. It may be because of some trauma, from which we need to be healed. But it can just as easily be because of something wonderfully nostalgic. Glory days! It may also simply be easier to get a handle on the past than it is on the present. We play it over and over again, thinking about “what if we’d said this” or “done that.” But “yesterday” is not where life is lived! What has been done has been done, and one important aspect of faithful discipleship is in learning how to “let it be." Learning to “let go and let God,” in order to live more fully into this day. Behold! Now is the acceptable time!

Similarly, “tomorrow” can be as dangerous as “yesterday.” Sometimes we worry and fret, painting worst case scenarios about global warming or nuclear war or the cancer that will surely come from eating the wrong foods.  I am not suggesting we practice denial; only that worst case scenarios can paralyze us. At other times we imagine that “tomorrow” is where the rainbow leads: that all will be well when we finally receive that degree or get that promotion or find that true love or the children are born or the children go off to college or retirement finally arrives. But I’m not sure it matters all that much here as with the past whether we are pessimists or optimists. If all of our energy put into a future that is beyond our control, we miss today. Behold! Now is the day of salvation! 

I think this word is offered again and again to God’s people in every generation. To that band of slaves in the Sinai Desert, when they started to think that the melons and figs of Egypt were better than manna in the wilderness; to those Babylonian exiles when they started to think that God’s best days were the good old days under King David; to those Corinthian Christians when they started to focus so much on the future return of Jesus that they forget their mission in the present. These words also speak to us, as we begin this Lenten journey. God speaks through this text to each of us: 

You cannot change the past and you cannot control the future. So live this day, putting your trust in me. It will present enough challenges of its own! Live this day gratefully and mindfully and faithfully, seizing this moment to love God and to love neighbor. Behold! Now is the acceptable time! Behold! Now is the day of salvation!

This day is no doubt more somber than the joyful alleluias we will sing on Easter morning. But the meaning of this day is still very much at the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ: it is a word of “good news.” I think that is what the ashes are all about. They are an outward and visible sign of our mortality and our humanity; not of humiliation nor of shame. The ashes are there to insist that every single one of us will one day die. We will die because we are not God. We are creatures, not the Creator. 

We live in a culture that does it’s utmost to deny that and it gets us all into trouble. But the saints of the church have always known that it is not death itself, but the fear of death (and the denial of it's reality) that prevents us from full and abundant living. We deceive ourselves when we think we have all the time in the world. We are called to be disciples in this time and this place, with God’s help. Now. 

So remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Those are not words of punishment or threat, but of hope that call us to tend to our precious lives. They call us back into our skin and back to the meaning of Holy Baptism. They implore us to live this day more boldly and more creatively and more interdependently. This is the time. This is the day. Now. 

There is a beautiful and in my view way underutilized hymn in The Hymnal 1982 (page 333) entitled "Now the Silence." I think it speaks to the meaning of this day, and of the forty days that lie ahead. 

Now the silence. Now the peace. Now the empty hands uplifted. Now the plea. Now the Father's arms in welcome. Now the hearing. Now the power. Now the vessel brimmed for pouring. Now the Body. Now the Blood. Now the joyful celebration. Now the wedding. Now the songs. Now the heart forgiven leaping. Now the Spirit's invitation. Now the Son's epiphany. Now the Father's blessing. Now. Now. Now.