| Rector’s
Sermon
|
||||||
| You get a choice this morning. Would you like me to preach on Noah’s Ark or Jesus and Satan in the Wilderness? Those for Noah’s Ark, raise your hand. Those for Jesus and Satan in the Wilderness, raise your hand. Oh, I forgot to tell you, this isn’t a democracy, but I was still curious. I haven’t counted, but I’d be surprised if Noah’s Ark wasn’t the winner. All those animals, two by two, Noah and his wife safely surviving the flood, the rainbow in the sky signifying all is well…That’s a lot more fun than forty days of fasting in the wilderness, the Devil’s temptations, spiritual struggle and turmoil…No, Noah’s Ark is much more fun. I suppose it’s also a bit like asking which season of the Church Year we’d prefer or got to vote on: Easter, or Lent? I’ll confess that if it were left to me, Easter would win every time. It’s not just the “giving up” or “taking on” of Lent that’s such a downer, it’s the dreariness, the seriousness, no “alleluias,” and then outside snow or mud or sleet, whatever. It’s depressing. One good thing is that next Saturday night we get to set our clocks ahead one hour so as to create the illusion that there’s one more hour of sunlight in the day. Actually, there isn’t because all you’ve done is to delay the morning light by an hour on the clock. So I’m not a lot of fun this morning as we stare down these forty days of Lent, days the Prayer Book tells us are to be observed by “self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial;…” Add to that a very unhappy funeral yesterday and all that’s going on with the disastrous economy. Perhaps it’s just as well our purposes are more serious and introspective in any event. So Jesus in the wilderness gets the nod. Mark’s gospel account of Jesus in the wilderness is very spare. In order to find out how exactly Jesus was tempted, you need to look up the story in Matthew or Luke. All we have this morning, however, is that this business of forty days in the wilderness was a time of temptation, and I suppose we could say that Jesus was struggling with the shape of his public ministry following his baptism. This was a time when Jesus, being human in addition to his divinity, was tempted to say “No” to God. This was a time for Jesus to find some clarity about what he was meant to do and to be. In fact you might say that Satan is especially interested in those of us who are upwardly mobile spiritually, and that in the case of Jesus if the Devil could create some doubt or some diversion or some distraction from God’s plan then he’d better get at it in the beginning. Now while you and I are smaller fish for Satan, we are no less vulnerable to doubt, diversion, and distraction. The kind of clarity Lent can provide for us can be an enormous source of goodness that could fulfill God’s purposes for us and for those communities in which we live and serve. God knows that distraction can keep us from realizing that clarity, and I remember the story of the wonderful African bishop whose name was Festo Kivengere who lived in Uganda under the horrific regime of Idi Amin. Despite the brutal persecution of Christians in that African country, the Church was growing and new Christians were being formed by the thousands every week under the leadership of those like Bishop Kivengere. When he came to the United States for a preaching mission he was asked why evangelism was so successful in Uganda and so limited in this country. He answered simply, “In America, you have too many distractions.” Perhaps a Lenten discipline for all of us could legitimately skip fasting and self-denial and instead think and pray about those doubts, diversions, and distractions that keep us from knowing God as fully as I am convinced we are capable. Frankly, the current economic climate would be a great time to ask ourselves what we are called to do and to be, just like Jesus had considered what he was called to do and to be. Someone once put it as simply as this:
Now the doubts, diversions, and distractions that keep us from realizing who we are created to be often come in the form of expectations that others have of us and expectations that we may have of ourselves. Recently I talked to a mom who was concerned that her sixth grader was expected to do two hours of homework. If we want to follow that expectation up the food chain, it would probably go something like this: It’s a good idea to have two hours of homework in sixth grade because students need to be prepared for the amount of homework they’ll have in just a few more years when they’re in high school. And homework in high school, especially in the all-important sophomore and junior years probably averages what? Three hours? Four hours? And that’s because those students need to be prepared for a habit of study college will require. Of course, colleges are also impressed with service projects, teams, sports, choir and band, all of which are in addition to homework. And then, of course, there is the college essay. It needs to be original, well-constructed, serious, but a sense of humor doesn’t hurt. I wonder how far anyone would get by writing their college essay on the subject “We need only be human, a simple matter of being in relationship with God and other human beings.” Going further down the food chain from those two hours of sixth-grad homework are a dizzying array of opportunities for our children that include soccer, hockey, musical instrument lessons, to name a few. Old fogey that I am I can remember going out to play after school. Today play is scheduled, monitored for safety purposes, and ideally useful for some higher purpose. Do we wonder why Church serves any other purpose than as a, hopefully, attractive alternative among all the other options we have at our fingertips on Sunday mornings. Let me offer a different measure of success by repeating, “All we are called to do is to be who we are created to be. We need only be human, a simple matter of being in relationship with God and other human beings.” That observation is so simple in its sentiment, but so profound in its counterpoint to how many of us perceive ourselves either through the lens of our own expectations or the lens of others. Knowing who I am as a child of God, created by God to love and serve one another and in so doing to love and serve God, is sufficient. There’s no question that I want to be the best that I can be, that I want to do the best I can do, but unless I know that I am loved and valued by God it will be an elusive and frustrating journey. So insofar as we are able, let’s give up doubts, distractions, and diversions during Lent. Let’s take on believing in ourselves because we know that God believes in us. That’s the biggest temptation we’ll ever need to face: to doubt that truth, to be diverted and distracted from that truth—but God wants us to know that fundamental truth, and as Jesus says, that truth will set us free.
|
||||||