First Sunday in Lent, rcl yr b, Sunday, February 18th, 2024
GENESIS 9:8-17; PSALM 25:1-10; 1 PETER 3:18-22; MARK 1:9-15
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.
(Mark 1:15)
Each year, the clergy and deacons of the Niagara Diocese and the Eastern Synod meet at the Carmelite monastery in Niagara Falls for a four-day spiritual retreat. The retreats started 40 years ago as Lenten retreats, but at some point were moved forward in the calendar to the last week of Epiphany to make life a little easier for parish clergy with added Lenten responsibilities.
The character of these retreats, even though they now take place in Epiphany, remains Lenten. For example, most years, we meet four times each day for worship. There is a retreat leader who offers theological insight and direction each day for all who have gathered. There is a day or a day-and-a-half of silence. There is an opportunity to meet one-on-one with the bishop. There are healing services, and there are eucharists in which we affirm both our baptismal and ordination vows. There is free time for individual prayer and study as well as conversation, fellowship, and time to enjoy the natural surroundings of Niagara Falls. In many ways, these retreats provide for the very things all of us, clergy and lay, are invited to undertake each Lent: self-examination, penitence, prayer, and reading and meditating on the word of God. And yes, at least once every retreat and often daily, we sing a litany, similar to the Great Litany we prayed this morning.
Why do we do this? Why is it so important to our life in the Spirit to have these times, these seasons of quiet, penitence, and prayer? Why is it so important for us to turn to God in supplication as we did in the Prayers for Deliverance at the beginning of worship today? Why do we focus so intentionally on the interior life in this time before Holy Week and Easter?
Here are two answers. The first is about my friend Neil Alexander, once my liturgy prof at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, now a retired Episcopal bishop.
The most memorable Ash Wednesday sermon I have ever heard was based on the caution Neil received as a teenager every time he went out with his gang of school friends on a Friday night. His mother knew about teenage boys and the temptations they would encounter when they were away from their parents and family. As he was going out the door for a fun night out with his friends, his mother would say to him, “Remember who you are!”
It was a short but powerful admonition. It didn’t take him to ground, but it helped him remain mindful of his moral centre and of his accountability for his actions. It was a reminder concerning his values and his relationship to his parents and siblings. “Remember who you are!”
In his Ash Wednesday sermon, Neil said that for him “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” was not unlike his mother saying to him, “Remember who you are!”
The original context of “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” is the disobedience of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. When they succumbed to the temptation to become like God, they fell from the grace that they had enjoyed. According to the story, losing their immortality was the greatest consequence of their disobedience, summarized in God’s words to them “you are dust and to dust you shall return”.
The temptation to become like God remains part of the human condition. In the so-called Developed World, we all enjoy privilege and power; we love the leg-up on immortality that science and technology provide; we talk about having creature comforts, among them the safety and security money can buy. Think about the high cost of policing in Waterloo Region. love safety and comfort and the security money can buy. None of these things is genuinely of God, but they all remove some of the unwelcome limitations we experience as humans. And so, the Ash Wednesday call to remember who we are is an affront to much of what we have come to value and hold dear.
But it is not just offence we experience from the words “remember you are dust,” it is also their power to trouble our conscience and then force us to find a place for them in our self-understanding. When this happens, we open the door a crack for the call of Lent to reorient ourselves to life in the Spirit, the marks of which are self-examination, penitence, prayer, and reading and meditating on the word of God.
A second answer to Why Lent? is the opportunity Lent provides for us to remember who God is, and this morning’s psalm serves us well. It is a magnificent prayer which, interestingly, ends with something like a hymn in which God is praised as One whose love is steadfast, as One who keeps covenant with those who keep covenant.
Covenant is an old-fashioned word to our ears. Perhaps the only time we use the word these days is in reference to marriage when two people make solemn and lifelong vows of love and faithfulness to one another. Our covenant with God and God’s covenant with the people of God are much the same – love and faithfulness.
Interestingly, covenant is the essential end-point of the Genesis account of the Great Flood in this morning’s First Reading. Covenant is essential, because if the story had not been resolved with God’s repentance before Noah and the other survivors, our understanding of God’s faithfulness, mercy, and forgiveness would always be qualified by the memory of how God’s anger at human sin could result in our annihilation.
But those who crafted the Noah story wanted to repair a general misconception concerning God, the misconception that humanity is kept on a short leash, that exercising freewill will inevitably lead to our destruction; that God is the divine punisher; that every flood, tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, eruption, avalanche, and wildfire is God’s little reminder to humanity that God is not to be trifled with.
But the story ends quite differently. God says to the survivors, to us, “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And then, the sign of the covenant, the rainbow, which, in a sense, bridged heaven and earth, was chosen as a mutual reminder of God’s repentance, of human sinfulness, of God’s promise of steadfast love and mercy, and of the permanence of the covenant itself.
This story still appeals to us. We can look up into the sky after rain, admire the magnificence and beauty of a rainbow, which really is other-worldly, and remember how it is a symbol of covenant. It is an excellent example of how myth and truth are interwoven: the Noah story is fanciful, but the truth concerning God’s faithfulness, mercy, and forgiveness transcends the story and establishes a life-giving rather than a life-destroying relationship with One who is our beginning and our end. We can remember who God is when we read and meditate on the story of Noah on the First Sunday in Lent.
For Christians, Christ is the sign of God’s covenant, the new covenant we call it. And Christ is our sign because we are people formed by God’s word and in the power of that word we become those who follow and betray him. The gospels live among us and within us, and we love Jesus, we follow him, we hail his entry into Jerusalem. And the power of story is made even more powerful by the testimony of the early church – the saints who died as martyrs; those who risked everything to pass along Jesus’ words of life. They lived and died, and now we are baptized and live, because God’s new covenant in Jesus Christ, his incarnation, his life, ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection sound deep within us as God’s new covenant. In Christ, God is proclaimed anew as steadfast, faithful, loving and merciful, and we understand to our very depths his power to destroy the power of sin and death.
Mark’s telling of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness is bare-bones when compared with Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts. Mark is not one to dwell on things; Jesus is always on the move in Mark’s gospel, and this morning’s reading benefits from this urgency because it brings us to Jesus’ own answer to our question Why Lent? Mark writes, “Jesus came to Galilee…proclaiming, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near” – an incredible claim when we think of it, that all of human history is brought to the moment of Jesus’ proclamation of the loving, merciful, covenanting, sin-destroying, death-destroying God. How can we respond? Jesus tells us: “Repent, and believe in the good news.’
Remember who you are. Remember who God is. Observe a holy Lent.
JFB