The 1st Sunday of Lent - Wilderness Times

A backdrop is a painted cloth hung behind the area on a stage where the action in the play occurs. It provides a setting or a context to help us understand what is being acted out in front of us. Sometimes a play can be produced without backdrop and with a minimal stage set.  Then the audience must use imagination to supply context.

However, biblical passages usually have a backdrop of other passages to help us understand them.  We use study Bibles to aid us in seeing what the context of the passage might be.  Sermons should also address such context.  Last week I said that one context for the story of Jesus' transfiguration on the mountain with Moses and Elijah was the story of his baptism we heard this morning. Could the voice speaking from the cloud at the Transfiguration saying to listen to Jesus have been the same voice calling Jesus in today's gospel, “my Son, the Beloved?”  The writer of the Gospel of Mark appears to believe it was.

Today's gospel serves as a backdrop not only for the story of the Transfiguration but also for the whole of Jesus' ministry.  What Jesus saw and heard as he came out of the baptismal water set him on a path that would lead from the waters of the Jordan river back to a ministry in Galilee and finally to Jerusalem where he would be executed by the Romans.  The Roman authorities feared a Jewish uprising and executed anyone who appeared to threaten political stability.

Even though it is Sunday—and we know every Sunday is a feast day of our Lord's resurrection—we can't ignore the backdrop of this penitential season of Lent.  To turn the title of a book by evangelical preacher, Tony Campolo, on its head:  “It's Sunday, but Friday's coming.”  We prepare during Lent for Easter, yes; but we prepare against the backdrop of Jesus' crucifixion.  He willing went to the cross out of love for us so that evil, sin and death could do their worst—and then be defeated.

Yes, it's Sunday, but Friday's coming.  To prepare Jesus for what lay ahead, the Spirit of God drove Jesus into the wilderness.  What happened in the wilderness also serves as a backdrop for the rest of his ministry.  Although Mark does less with this episode than either Matthew or Luke, I believe Jesus’ time in the wilderness was essential to understanding his life.  I also believe it can become an important backdrop for understanding our own wilderness times.

I strongly dislike the concept that God tests us with troubles.  But our lives do provide us with times of feeling empty, times of feeling lost, times of feeling alone and without what we need, times of feeling overwhelmed by troubles or danger. How we navigate those times becomes critical for our wellbeing—for our feeling of being whole or complete.  In them we can learn to accept God's love for us and God's care for us, often given to us through other people—just as Jesus accepted the angels caring for him.  Navigating our wilderness times well, recognizing what we can learn from these times and how we can gain strength from these times, may be a gift to others as well.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, an editorial writer for the New York Times, wrote a short op-ed piece published last Sunday entitled, “In a Lenten Season.”  He asserted that observing a “Lenten” discipline as a time in the wilderness can be life giving, even to those who chose a secular life style.  Here is what he said:

“But what if this were really a season for renunciation, even for non-believers? In the ancestral stories of nearly every culture, wisdom comes from the bare places, from deserts and dry mountains. The season of Lent itself is based on a “wilderness” — the one in which Jesus fasted for 40 days after his baptism.

It’s common to read this story and others like it as though the wilderness were little more than a blank [italics mine] backdrop. I read it a different way. Wisdom comes from the bare places because they force humility upon us. In these Lenten places, where life thrives on almost nothing, we can see clearly how large a shadow modern life and consumption cast upon the earth. In secular terms, Lent seems the opposite of Christmas — “What are you giving up?” versus “What are you getting?” Perhaps it might be a season in which to learn the value of abstention and to consider how to let the bare places flourish, or even simply to exist.”

Yes, it's Sunday, but Friday's coming.  Yet let us not fear the bare places in our lives.  Jesus flourished in the wilderness.  Despite Satan's temptations and the terror of the wild beasts, he became strengthened to face what lay ahead for him, crucifixion on the Friday we call “good.”  We can flourish in our wilderness times as well.  We can learn the humility of saying “no” when we are tempted to act as if fulfilling a certain, specific desire defines our wellbeing. We can learn the humility of saying “no” when we are tempted to believe only we know what is best for ourselves or for others.  In fact, our humble flourishing in wilderness times can be so strong a witness to our faith that, through it, others may discover Christ.

The Last Sunday after Epiphany - Seeking God's Face

The psalmist (Ps. 27:11) wrote: “You speak in my heart and say, 'Seek my face.' Your face, Lord, will I seek.” 

Sunday after Sunday, week after week, year after year—for all our lives long we have a reminder on Sundays of our Lord's resurrection.  Sometimes we are in church worshipping, sometimes we are sleeping, sometimes we are watching or playing a sport, sometimes we are working, sometimes . . . we can add to this list, making it quite long.  But whatever we are doing on a Sunday, we will always know it is the day of  Christ’s resurrection.

This week we will enter the season of Lent—for 40 days, starting this coming Wednesday.  Our prayerbook urges us to observe a holy Lent “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word.”  It's a penitential season Monday through Saturday each week, but not on Sunday—always a feast day—except, of course, in Lent we mustn't sing or say “Alleluia!”

So whether we are feasting or fasting, we are reminded by the psalmist to listen and look for God: “You speak in my heart and say, 'Seek my face.' Your face, Lord, will I seek.”

What does it mean to seek God's face?  When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman at the well in the 4^th chapter of John, he describes God as “spirit.” The Common English Bible translates what Jesus said this way: “God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.” 

So although we often talk about God's relationship with us being a “personal” one, we shouldn't mistake the metaphor of seeking God's face as looking into the face of a person with whom we have a deep and loving relationship.  Rather seeking God's face means searching for the spirit of God, seeking the truth of God's divine and transcendent nature.

For Elijah that meant being forthright to God about his precarious situation and his fear of being murdered.  He had been “zealous” in declaring God's Word against idolatry to the powerful elite.  Now he was on the run, hiding in a cave.  In seeking God, Elijah encountered God's presence in “a sound of sheer silence.”  Entering into that divine and transcendent silence with his face covered, Elijah encountered the Word of God, which pointed him forward to his next tasks as God's prophet.  For Elijah, then the face of God was “sheer silence.”

For Peter, James, and John, the face of God was the dazzling glory we call “transfiguration.”  Jesus walked up the mountain with them as a person—although Peter had previously claimed he understood that Jesus was the Messiah of God.  But on that mountaintop, the three disciples encountered something very different from anything they had ever seen or known before.  God's spirit infused their vision of the two great men of their faith, Moses, the law-giver, and Elijah, the greatest of all the prophets of ancient Israel.  And with Moses and Elijah was the man who just walked up the mountain with them—all transfigured—changed by the radiance of God's glory.  The face of God was the glory that surrounded and transfigured Moses, Elijah and Jesus.

Then came the cloud overshadowing them and the voice from the cloud—just as God had manifested God's self at Jesus' baptism.  Except this time, the command was to listen to God's Son, the Beloved.  The face of God's glory becomes the Word of God:  Listen—to Jesus!

To seek the face of God means to seek a relationship with the divine.  To seek a relationship with the divine involves listening to God.  And listening to God means listening to Jesus!

So how can we listen?  The track record of Jesus’ disciples in listening wasn't that good.  Just a few verses after those we heard this morning the disciples were arguing about who would be the greatest in the coming kingdom. And this argument came right after Jesus had explained that following him meant suffering:  “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” (CEB)

So “listening” to Jesus might well involve doing what our prayerbook commends for keeping a holy Lent: “self-examination and repentance; . . . prayer, fasting and self-denial; and . . .reading and meditating on God's holy Word.”

Yes, God, often we don't do much better than Jesus' headstrong, self-centered, rather clueless disciples.  But we ask for your help as we try once more to listen—really listen—to Jesus and to keep a holy Lent.

The 5th Sunday after Epiphany - The Liberty of Abundant Life

I went to lunch at an Indian restaurant with a friend on Friday.  At this restaurant for lunch there is a buffet and after eating you pay at the cash register. The young man taking our payments asked me with a smile, “Are you excited about the Super Bowl?”  Perhaps that was his stock question for all customers that day, but it seemed an incongruous question to be asking a couple of “ladies” who were lunching.

But if I could reframe his question a bit, it might fit a phrase from our Collect of the Day, which is, “give us the liberty of abundant life.”  “The liberty of abundant life” in the specific context of the collect asks God to free us from the effects of our sins through Jesus Christ—especially as Jesus has shown us what abundant life looks like by the way he lived.

Of course, we don't have Jesus attending or commenting on sporting events in the scriptures.  It was the conquerors and occupiers of Palestine, the Romans, who engaged in sports.  But I think we can expand the scope of the phrase “the liberty of abundant life.”  In the context of the young man's question, I think this phrase could mean this, “Do I expect to find joy and fulfillment in what I may experience in a couple of days?”  Of course, I had no time to do this theological work as I opened my purse and paid him—so I just deflected the question and said I had enjoyed my lunch.

But we certainly have the time to ask this question of the folks who populate our scripture readings today and finally of ourselves.  So let's ask,  “How does each one expect to find abundant life—that is, joy and fulfillment—in what they were experiencing or what they expected to experience.”

Elisha:  As a prophet, his call came to carry on the tradition Elijah had begun of speaking truth or God's word to those in power.  But he came to care about this couple who provided him and his servant with hospitality. When he declared God's blessing on them, he did not expect the trouble that came. When trouble came, Elisha's servant tried to push the woman away from a prophet busy with obviously more important things.  But Elisha found abundant life came not only from his dealing with those in power, but in his aid to those in need.  It also came from exercising the gift of healing God had given him.

The Shunammite woman: Her abundant life appears to come from her persistence in doing what was right, no matter what her social place might have dictated.  She prevailed upon her husband to spend money to show extravagant hospitality to this man of God, before there was any hint of a benefit to her. Then when fate seemed to destroy that abundant life with her son's apparent death, her persistence brought Elisha back to revive her son. She was empowered to act at a time when most women were without power and in doing so experienced abundant life.

St. Paul:  Abundant life for him was serving Jesus Christ.  His conversion experience on the road to Damacus so empowered him that he no longer worried about his reputation or his personal safety.  In another passage Paul said that he can give thanks to God in all circumstances.  In the passage we heard this morning, he told the Corinthians: “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.”

Simon's mother-in-law:  Her illness kept her from what gave her life its purpose—running her household.  In hearing this passage we must be careful not to lay our modern expectations on her.  Rather we should see her in the light of the second part of Proverbs 31's ode to a capable wife who’s clever, entrepreneurial, wise, reverent, and hardworking. Her ability to have an abundant life had been taken from her, but Jesus restored it to her.  Mark's gospel says that Jesus “came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.”  Her lifting up seems both literal and metaphorical.  Her healing by Jesus lifted back to her to where she had been, restored to the abundant life of service.

Jesus:  For him, as for Elisha, abundant life involved both a bigger picture and a smaller one.  Everyone he healed received abundant life, but Jesus' abundant life needed to be balanced between service to others, prayer time along in a deserted place, and proclaiming the message that the reign of God had come and the long awaited Messiah was here:  Repent, believe the good news and follow.  We see in all the gospels that Jesus struggled with balance among service to others, prayer away by himself, and preaching and teaching in his ministry.  For him abundant life meant seeking God's will and balancing the different facets of his ministry—in all situations—even in the face of execution.

And now for each of us and for our parish we can ask—what does “the liberty of abundant life” look like?  Perhaps you are expecting me to give you an answer to that question??  For each of us that answer must be worked out in the context of our lives, as we reach out for God's guidance.  For our parish, it must be worked out in the context of our life together, as we reach out for God's guidance. But as we have seen, there are many examples in scripture.  “The liberty of abundant life” for these holy women and holy men included faithfulness to tasks given them, compassion for the people God has placed in their lives, persistence, thankfulness, and a balance of prayer and action.  Help us, O God, to follow not only these examples in scripture, but also the examples of holy men and women who have blessed our lives.