The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 2nd Sunday of Lent
25 February 2018
Readings:
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
Psalm 22:22-30
As we received the ash cross on our foreheads ten days ago, with the reminder that we are dust and that to dust we shall return, seventeen people at Margery Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida died. Alyssa Alhadeff, Scott Beigel, Martin Duque Anguiano, Nicholas Dworet, Aaron Feis, Jaime Guttenberg, Chris Hixon, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Alex Schachter, Carmen Schentrup, and Peter Wang, each in turn fell as the fragility of life echoed in our Ash Wednesday liturgy played out in yet another school shooting that has many of us feeling helpless and outraged.
Earlier this week, we also lost Billy Graham, who, at 99 years old, had lived a full and rich life, and yet, who also reminds us that the journey from ashes to ashes and dust to dust both begins and ends with God.
Our Psalm for today is the final portion of Psalm 22, which we’ll hear in its entirety on Good Friday. It is a lament for the fragility of life, the calamity of persecution, and suffering, the dark pit of God forsaken inner darkness and deep despair. It is a cry to God from the midst of that pit for help, a lifeline, a ray of hope—for salvation. Yet in the midst of this despairing lament, it is also a psalm of hope. It is a Psalm that recognizes even in the darkness of feeling forsaken by all and weary to the bone, God is with us. The portion for today reaches out from that hope to praise the one who hears the cries of God’s children, lifts them up, and restores their hope. No matter what may happen, it seems to say, God is still God, and God is still with us. In the midst of despair, our Psalmist somehow still glories in the steadfastness of God’s love and presence to all the generations of Abraham’s descendents, and, in response, our Psalmist pledges both their faith and to carry God’s love to the next generations so that they too may bring the sacred stories, and the abundance of God’s love to future people’s yet unborn—a faithful foreshadowing that includes us—countless generations removed and yet still learning how to praise even from within the tears of our helplessness and outrage.
Last week, God’s covenant with all of creation after the flood was one of God’s limiting of Godself, to be in relationship with us as one who would teach us how to live into our identity as God’s children.
Today, God covenants with Abram, also 99 years old, granting him and Sarai what will be a second life as Abraham and Sarah—parents of Isaac and first in the generations of Israel leading to King Saul, King David, and eventually to Jesus.
In this relationship, Abram and Sarai are transformed in their identities, signified literally by God changing their names to Abraham and Sarah. And God is transformed in a name used for the first time for God in this new relationship—God Almighty. Not only will God limit Godself to remain faithful to all of creation’s care and sustaining, but God has bound Godself to the human family as our God, our sustainer, sanctifier, and savior. God’s faith in us is such that no matter where we are, or how far we wander, God will be with us. Abraham’s faith, as Paul puts it, is reckoned to him as righteousness, and is the birthplace of the journey that has continued in all the generations of Abraham and Sarah’s children down to today, including Judaism and Christianity through Abraham’s son Isaac’s line, and Islam through Abraham’s son Ishmael’s line.
As Paul summarizes, the journey was one in which Abraham’s faith was tested from the start, but which only grew through all the trials of his life, drawing him ever closer to God, in whose promise of accompaniment and favor Abraham trusted faithfully.
In the midst of the trials of life, God’s accompaniment follows us even to the darkness of hurt, violence, desperation, and despair.
Owning the darkness that was to come, recognizing it for what it was, and neither turning away from it nor denying it to his followers, Christ models the courage to love even when it hurts, the courage to love heedless of the consequences, the courage to stand up to all the powers of fear and domination seeking to corrupt and dispel the abundance of God’s love that he came to share with us and to teach us.
Peter’s rebuke, coming from a place of Peter’s own fear, offers the temptation to Jesus once again to use his power for his own purposes. As in the desert, faced with the wild beasts, with hunger, thirst, and seeking to master his own human nature, so too with Peter, Jesus’ response is to address the stumbling block rather than stumble over it. It is also a wake up call for a dear friend whom Jesus knows will suffer emotional wounds as deep as Christ’s own physical suffering in the days ahead. It is an invitation to accompaniment rather than denial.
In the teaching that follows, Jesus calls on his listeners, in no uncertain terms, to let go of the image of themselves as disconnected centers of their own lives, walled off in safety from their vulnerability in a world of uncertainty and expectations. To come out from behind their walls of safety, and to risk facing death itself if that is what loving without condition and without compromise means.
For those who seek their own security risk losing themselves, cut off in isolation and alienation from the relationships and communities that allow them to come to know, to be, and to live their true and authentic selves.
And for those who live, hiding their true selves out of fear of the judgment of others, hiding their faces from the God who knows them more deeply and intimately than they know themselves, and who live hidden even from themselves, what does it gain them? What does it gain us?
There is darkness in our world. It has been there in every society since society began. Last week in God’s second creation story, after the waters of chaos in the flood were again ordered, God’s recognition of this darkness was to never again seek to wipe it out, but rather to be with us in the midst of it. Forever. Calling us out of it, seeking for our path back into the light, and pining for our return so passionately that God finally came into the darkness itself to find us in human form. Today, God’s promise to Abraham is the promise to all of humankind to be with us, to be our God, and to make something of incredible beauty and world-shaping significance of us if we will allow ourselves to be loved and to love in return—even in midst of the darkness that sometimes threatens to swallow us up entirely.
And so our Psalmist today says, Praise God, you who have lost your children, your spouses, your parents, your teachers… in the midst of your darkness and despair, sing praises to the One who is with you in the depths of your despair, holding you, cradling you, weeping with you, and who will be with you to accompany you back into the light at the end of the present darkness. It is a praise that isn’t to be confused with thanksgiving, but one of recognition and gratitude, knowing that no matter how deep into the darkness we fall, we will never be left to deal with it alone.
This coming Wednesday and Thursday, Billy Graham will be honored as the fourth private citizen whose body will lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. The seventeen private citizens shot down decades before the fullness of their own lives will each also be remembered and honored, no less, in the hearts of those who have been pitched into the darkness of despair by the actions of 19 year old Nicolas Cruz.
So what do we do with it all?
If we can take Christ as a guide, we honor and own the feelings we have without shying away, without denying the darkness, and without disengaging. We address them—be they fear, despair, outrage, disbelief, sadness, malaise, or even relief that it wasn’t “one of ours.” Whatever our response is to this and so many other tragedies of our contemporary world, we are encouraged to acknowledge our authentic state of mind and heart, and to respond in love and hope—to ourselves and to those around us, each of whom is dealing with their own darkness in the best ways they can. And if we must sit in the darkness of this moment for a time, we are also reminded that we are not alone.
In this wilderness journey, we approach the cross only through forty days of walking the path in prayer, introspection, fasting, and faith. Perhaps this time may serve as a model and a reminder that approaching, processing, and rising from our darkness takes time. Whether it is the events of the past ten days, or other areas of our lives that have wounded us, may we be mindful that the path to healing and wholeness takes time. It is a journey. And we are not alone. Praise be to the One who will never forsake us—no matter how long the journey takes.
Amen.