Second Sunday of Lent 2021

 

Second Sunday of Lent 2021

 

‘For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

‘For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’)—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations’, according to what was said, ‘So numerous shall your descendants be.’ He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.’

Romans 4:13-25

 

‘Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

‘He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

Mark 8:31-38

 

Notes:

 

For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

Material wealth? Political power? Environmental crisis?

kosmos: the whole created order.

Emphasis on balance, harmony. Our world is currently out of balance: coronavirus outbreak, perhaps being brought back into balance; human impact on environment?

psuché: life breath, which comes from God; also, the seat of the heart and mind, or what holds our constituent parts together, in an ordered whole.

To put it another way, what benefit is it to receive a re-ordered world, if you yourself remain dis-ordered?

Which is also to say that your life being ordered is not dependent on the world around you being in order, but on God’s promise, and on aligning our lives to that promise.

This is not to say that Christians do not, or should not, experience dis-ordering; but that we are invited to repent and believe: to return to, and stay close to, the one from whom our life breath comes.

What practices help you to draw near to God? Lent is an opportunity to take them up again, or to try a new thing. Some traditional Lenten practices, such as solitude and fasting from the hospitality of communal eating, have in fact been our extended pattern since Lent last year; and it will be good to bring them back into harmony with the shared disciplines. But, what is life-giving for you right now? What practices remind you of God’s promises?

Ignatian examen? Evangelical quiet time? Charismatic sung worship? Celtic appreciation of the world around us?

Peter, representing the Church, had his mind set on human things, not divine things. What good is the Church if it is not listening to Jesus? As we begin to re-gather, how will we ensure that we do that?

 

First Sunday of Lent 2021

 

First Sunday of Lent 2021

Lectionary reading: Mark 1:9-15

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, that time of year when we recall and enter-into the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, immediately following his baptism and in preparation for being sent to proclaim the good news—the good news that we are also sent to proclaim. These days spent in preparation are, therefore, a pivotal episode in Jesus’ life. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include them in their telling the good news. Matthew takes 184 words to do so [in the Greek]. Luke takes 203 words. Mark, whose account we are offered this year, takes only 30.

Thirty words. Not even one word per day! Mark distils Jesus’ wilderness experience to its very essence. Even so, he records something that neither Matthew nor Luke note: that Jesus was with the wild beasts. And here, Mark uses a diminutive form of the word for beasts, and in particular, though not exclusively, venomous creatures: these are small and likely venomous. Desert snakes and scorpions, for example.

Let me step back, and ask, what was Jesus doing in the wilderness, those forty days? In Mark’s account, he is ‘done to’ by others: the Spirit drove him; Satan tempted him; the angels waited on him, or, ministered to him. It is left to Matthew and Luke to give us a clue as to how Jesus passed those days: meditating on scripture [possibly the scrolls of the Essene community at Qumran]. Three times, they record Jesus declaring, ‘It is written…’ Two of those times, he is citing Deuteronomy chapter 8, which references ‘the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous snakes and scorpions’ and the other time he cites Psalm 91, which, to the poisonous snakes, adds the lion and its young for good measure (in the words immediately following on from Jesus’ quote). In other words, the wild beasts are Mark’s shorthand for Jesus’ confrontation with Satan, signposts that Matthew and Luke follow.

Why would Jesus be in the wilderness, reading and meditating on this particular passage from Deuteronomy? Well, it is a passage in which Moses is preparing the people to enter into all that the Lord their God has planned for them, without those very blessings becoming a snare. And Moses’ words get to the very heart of our annual Lenten discipline. I’m not going to read them out now, but they are well worth getting to know. And so, my first invitation to you this morning, as we step into Lent together, is this:

Read Deuteronomy chapter 8 every day for the next week.

Read it slowly, prayerfully. You might want to keep a journal, of anything in particular that strikes you as you read, to track, and map, the journey the Lord your God leads you on. You do not need to share those thoughts with anyone else, other than God in prayer; but, trust me, it will help you to observe a holy Lent, to your benefit.

My second invitation to you is this: to take a stone with you.

On Monday, I painted ash crosses on little stones; they have not been handled since. Take one with you as you go, and let it be a reminder of the wilderness: of God’s faithfulness and provision. If you are getting out a bit more these days, carry it with you in your coat pocket. If you are still, for the most part, staying at home, place it on your hearth, or your windowsill, or somewhere where you will see it, regularly. Hold it in your hand: feel its weight, its roughness and smoothness; trace the cross with your finger; call to mind God’s blessings, in good times and bad, and how they have smoothed—and are smoothing—your own rough edges. Keep the stone throughout Lent; and then, on Easter Sunday, when the stone that covered the entrance to the tomb is found to be rolled away, throw it aside, in your garden, or the park, or at the beach.

These two invitations are to you all. I have a third, perhaps not for everyone, perhaps for someone here. The little creatures are often the ones people have phobias about. Did it ever cross your mind that Jesus may have been afraid of spiders? After all, he was fully human. Mark tells us that Jesus was with the creepy crawlies, and angels came to his aid, gave him the strength to face those human fears, pressing deep into God’s loving, parental, training for living life to the full. It may be that this Lent, the Holy Spirit wants to set you free from some phobia that has held you captive. If that resonates with you, I would be glad to pray with you.

A text to read, a stone to hold, and, potentially, a fear to overcome. That will do, for now. Lent is rigorously life-giving, not burdensome. May God give us the grace to say ‘Yes!’ to life. And may our lives, so shaped by God, hold that life out to those around us. Amen.

 

Appendix 1: Mark 1:9-15

‘In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

‘And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

‘Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

 

Appendix 2: Deuteronomy 8:1-20 (with the words Jesus cites in italics for emphasis)

‘This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you. Therefore keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.

‘Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord is destroying before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.’

 

The Transfiguration 2021

 

‘Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

‘As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.’

Mark 9:2-9

If I may be honest, I have been finding recent weeks hard going. I know that I am not alone in this. There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but in the meantime, to press that analogy, the railway carriage is claustrophobic. I am not taking in the mountain air. I cannot even watch the mountains drawing ever nearer through the window: only the ghost of the carriage reflected back at me. How do I meet with God, in this airless box?

The gospel reading for this Sunday is truly astonishing. It takes the seemingly ordinary, and reveals something extraordinary, as we shall see. And that might be exactly what is needed, today.

Our passage is set in a time when nothing has happened for six days. ‘Six days’ echoes the six ‘days,’ or epochs, of creation; and so, six days is more than the inside of a week: these days, in which nothing creative is recorded, sprawl on and on, outside of time. These days could just as well describe the insubstantial days I have ghost-walked through since last Sunday. And six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John.

In recent days, various combinations of our household have gone out for a walk around the block. But this phrase Mark chooses, took with him, is more than a record of who came along. It is the same word Matthew uses when he recounts an angel telling Joseph do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. It means to actively, intentionally, join another person or persons to yourself. In this action, Jesus brings Peter and James and John into covenant relationship with himself, to the effect that from here-on in you can read ‘Jesus and Peter and James and John’ as ‘Jesus-Peter-James-John,’ or ‘Jesus = Jesus + Peter + James + John.’ An ordinary little phrase, took with him, that transforms all their identities.

Next, Jesus led them up a high mountain. Again, the phrase ‘led them up’ means more than simply that they were out for a ramble with Jesus out in front. These words are used to describe offering something up a sacrifice, and also to bring something through a sequence of stages to a consummation or goal. In other words, Jesus joins his friends to himself as one common identity—later described as the Body of Christ—and presents that new being to his heavenly Father, in order that it might reach its ultimate purpose.

And this is revealed in what happens next. Jesus was transfigured before them. Now, unlike ‘took with’ or ‘led them up,’ ‘transfigured’ is not exactly an everyday word to us. And yet, it describes something absolutely familiar. It is the same word from which we get ‘metamorphosis,’ where something changes form in keeping with its inner reality. It describes the process by which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly; or an acorn, an oak tree. Acorns don’t look anything like oak trees; but they are one in substance. We can confidently say that acorns don’t become butterflies. We can also observe that oak trees produce new acorns, and so the lifecycle carries on.

When Jesus is transfigured on the mountain, what we are seeing is the Church, embryonic in Peter and James and John, as it will be in maturity, once the Son of Man (a communal term Jesus borrows from the prophet Daniel to refer to himself as representative of his followers) had risen from the dead. We are beholding the acorn and seeing the oak tree. We are observing the caterpillar and imagining the butterfly on the other side of the traumatic death-and-rebirth of the cocoon tomb. And there to witness this vision are Elijah and Moses, both of whom had solid credentials in witnessing God pass by them on a mountaintop, neither of whom had directly seen that divine glory revealed in this life.

Despite being terrified, the three friends grasp the significance of this fairly well. In suggesting that they build three tabernacles, for Jesus and Moses and Elijah—no mention of themselves—they have understood that they are now one with Jesus. But—nod to Moses and Elijah—the mountain itself, with its clefts and caves and cloud covering, is the place of meeting with God on the mountain; the tabernacle is the place of meeting with God in the valley. Go down, Moses, Elijah. Go down, Jesus-plus. Go down, press on to death and the tomb, trusting in love that is stronger than death and in the new life that springs from that love.

And what of us, in our confinement, acorn buried in the hard winter ground awaiting the spring? What about us in the shabby reality of our present circumstances, a Church that is so far from all that God would have us be, her clothes stained by scandals and injustices so ingrained that no launderer on earth could bleach them clean?

Even here, Jesus takes the initiative; comes and takes us to himself, not to a place but into the closest imaginable lifelong relationship; lifts us up, presenting us before the Father, into their shared delight; and brings us through to maturity, not back to how things once were but to where they are heading, to an altogether greater glory. That is where we are going, together. To be honest, some days I identify more with Elijah, with Moses, with seeing only in my minds eye what others will experience in their bones. And yet, Jesus. And yet, Jesus.

Perhaps we might make three dwellings after all, not on the mountaintop but in the valley of the shadow of death; and learn to embrace the now-and-not-yet—the kingdom at hand, breaking-in, and the kingdom yet-to-come—as Jesus brings us through the sequence of stages that end in the consummation we long for? Before we get to Eastertide, we must journey through Lent. May God grant us a vision of that glory, to strengthen us to endure these days.