The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 1st Sunday of Lent
18 February 2018
Readings:
Genesis 9:8-17
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15
Psalm 25:1-9
For those who weren’t able to be with us on Ash Wednesday, welcome to the holy season of Lent!
Today we enter into the time of wilderness with Christ. As Jesus was driven into the wilderness for forty days after his baptism in today’s gospel, we too are invited again into this forty day journey of spiritual introspection and growth that will lead us ultimately to Jerusalem, to Calvary, and beyond.
In the overlap of today’s readings, we find a prominent focus on water as an agent of cleansing, renewal, covenant, and identity. Peter bridges the gap between God’s promise after the flood to limit Godself so as to remain compassionate and faithful to the living creation God had made, and the waters of baptism as our promise made back to God about how we will live in relationship with God and the world around us.
In the story of the creation preceding today’s first reading, we hear of how profoundly and lovingly humankind was made for relationship, for harmony, for mutual care of each other and of creation itself, and to work cooperatively with God. When we demonstrated our collective unwillingness to live into this identity, God’s flood initiated a second creation story, re-ordering the chaos which humankind had wrought of God’s beloved creation. However, in this second creation story, God no longer gives humankind a command that limits us. Rather, God limits God’s self and offers us a different approach. In today’s first reading, God offers humankind a plan B, in which God would take on the responsibility for leading us into and teaching us how to live into the identity of being God’s children.
In the fullness of time, after centuries of reaching out to humankind in different ways after promising not to flood us out of existence ever again, God joined us as one of us. The covenant from today’s reading in Genesis, as we took on a new identity in relationship with God after being saved through the waters of the flood, pairs with Jesus’ rising from the waters of baptism and entering into the wilderness. The one who would come precisely to show us and teach us how to live into and claim our identity as God’s children first undertook the transformation of the beasts and the wild of his own nature, as a path back to our first covenant with God in the garden—to be one body, mutually caring for and seeking toward peace and harmony with one another, with all of creation, and to once again work to bring God’s abundance back to life in our world.
Looking around us, in a sense, we have both plans at work in our world. Plan A is our hope in Christ. Plan B is our reality in which we often either can’t or won’t live into our identity as God’s children. Either way, God is with us!
Our Psalm for the day captures this sentiment as the Psalmist gives their whole trust and heart tenuously over to God for care, protection, instruction, and forgiveness. Essentially, it is the encapsulation of the spirit of Lent in just a few short verses.
Peter’s letter also taps into the dichotomy of our Plan A and Plan B world. The letter was addressed to a community that understood the present world as passing away and of God’s saved humans entering into a new paradisiacal world. But the overlap between Genesis and Mark draws us into contemplation of our present world differently—as the place in which both worlds exist. The coming of God’s kingdom is both in the here and now of breakthrough moments where we experience and are part of God’s kingdom coming to life in our world, “coming near” as Christ put it in today’s gospel. And it is also the yet-to-come that is promised as a perfected future fullness. But both the world of intimate relationship with God and mutual care of one another and all creation, and the world of human selfishness, greed, and mutual destruction coexist in the here and now of our lives.
Bridging these two worlds, Christ encounters us in all our humanness and calls us back to community, to relationship, to mutuality, and to life as it can be when we live as our best selves—when we live into our identity as God’s children.
As Jesus comes out of the waters of the Jordan, baptized, he is identified by God’s own voice affirming him as God’s beloved son. Claiming that identity, Christ is immediately driven into the wilderness where he must master his own sense of self, his own human chaos, his own wildness, which he brings back with him into his ministry and mission to help all those with whom he comes into contact to be reconciled to God, to experience God’s kingdom for themselves, and to become a part of it as equal partners. In that Plan A and Plan B world, Christ finds us in our brokenness, where we are unable to claim our identity as God’s children, and shows us the way back to wholeness.
For those who weren’t able to be here for Ash Wednesday, I shared my own struggle with this identity. At clergy conference a week and a half ago, I rather tearfully voiced, reckoned with, and reconciled a small fearful part of myself that has been hiding since I was a child. Having been taught who God could love and who my well meaning mentors believed God couldn’t love, and finding myself not fitting into the right categories, a small part of me had feared they were right and that I couldn’t be a child of God. Although I patently disagree with those who taught me otherwise, it took allowing that voice to speak and to have its fears heard before I could begin to heal and reclaim that child-of-God identity again. It took having the courage to be vulnerable with God, with myself, and with my spiritual director, to hear myself voice my fears, and to feel God’s healing presence in that moment. In Baptism, we make promises about how we will live with God’s help, how we will believe with God’s help, how we will return to God with God’s help. And I think more than its ever struck me before, I realize how much God’s help is the lion’s share of the work. When we hear the familiar welcome to Lent on Ash Wednesday, as a season of self-examination, of prayer, fasting, and repentance, it is a reminder each year that God’s help is never further away than our own deep inner-selves. Taking the time to be vulnerable with God isn’t just what we do in preparation for Baptism. It is an ongoing process of inviting God’s light into the dark and forgotten corners of our own fears and spiritual and emotional wounds, and finding healing, wholeness, and reconciliation with both God and ourselves.
As we begin our forty days together in the wilderness, we are called into a time of learning who we are again through God’s eyes. It is a time, like going into the wilderness was for Christ, of being willing to be vulnerable with God, of reencountering the wild and untended depths of our own being, and of not only finding God there, but of learning who we truly are in the process.
The kingdom of God has come near. So near, in fact, it is within each of us, just waiting for us to awaken to our true identity as God’s beloved children, and to start living into who we were created to be. May our time in the wilderness together this Lent be a time of healing, reconciliation, and renewal—with God’s help.
Amen.