The Rev'd Jane Bearden
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom then shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
Of whom then shall I be afraid?
Let us pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, open our hearts and our minds as we encounter your word, that through your revelation our lives may be transformed. Amen
This past week about 14 of us met in Houghton Hall for our Lenten reflections on God’s call to discipleship and our baptismal covenant in response to that call. I was reminded of a quote that I love from one of Verna Dozier’s books, The Dream of God. Verna Dozier was a lay theologian in Washington DC who taught in public schools for most of her life, but who in her retirement years became a passionate advocate for empowerment of lay ministry and wrote several books that have become central to our understanding of vocation. Until her death in 2006 she led workshops and taught across the US and overseas. She says…
“The Bible is the testimony of two worshipping communities, Hebrew and Christian, about their faith. It speaks most profoundly to us as we step into that faith view of reality. The opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear. Faith implies risk. I will cast my life on the possibility that God is for me. I do not claim to have any proof except my commitment.”
Our lessons today are about faithfulness, trust, and covenant, and therefore our lessons today imply an element of risk. Abram had faith in God as a promise keeper, but Abram needed more clues than he was getting from God. Things were not adding up, so he asked God very directly what he needed to know. And when God responded with a promise that seemed almost too good to be true – Abram believed and Abram and chose to risk familiarity and safety to seek God’s call in the desert. And God reckoned his belief as righteousness.
There are two important pieces to our interpretation of this passage. One is to understand that Abram did not think like we do in our Western culture. We might see the promise to Abram as a very personal one. Abram saw it as a promise to the family or the community – not necessarily to himself personally. The second is the meaning of that word righteousness. Again our Western culture does not serve us well. Christians are more likely to place righteousness in a negative connotation as in self-righteous or righteousness that comes from good works. But the Hebrew connotation would have been closer to something akin to justice or to being a just person. It is a relational term. It implies the fulfillment of the demands of a relationship in which one has a part or commitment. To be righteous then is to seek God and to seek to live the kind of life that God intends.
Paul in the letter to the Phillippians urges them to stand firm in their faith. Two things were playing against the church in Phillippi. First, Phillippi held the enviable status of Roman colony, and so there was an ever present danger of allegiance to Rome over allegiance to the Cross of Christ. Their minds were clearly tempted toward earthly things. Secondly, within that fledgling Christian community there were teachers who believed that Christians had to practice circumcision and other aspects of Jewish cultic law in order to be faithful to Christ. Paul passionately tells the Phillipians, No!. He encourages them to follow his lead and to “press on to the call of God in Christ.” Salvation will not come by earthly means – it cannot be earned by adherence to the Jewish law – salvation is through following Christ. Jesus has the power to change our human body to be like the glorious risen body of Christ. Paul is asking the Christians in Phillippi to take the risk – to step out and to stand firm in faith.
And then we come to our Gospel reading.
It is not a very comfortable reading. Jesus is confronted by some Pharisees who remind him that he is no great friend of Herod Antipas. Jesus calls Herod a fox, a term that would have been associated in Jesus’ Hellenistic world as tricky and unethical – not a person to look up to. He laments the fate of a Jerusalem who continues to reject God’s justice and mercy and who has a long history of unfaithfulness. Jesus calls the people to repentance. Indeed in the passages just before this one Jesus tells the people that they must enter the Kingdom of God through the narrow door and that the those who think they are righteous in their practice of ritual are in fact missing the boat all together and those who are willing to help a stranger, even when it violate the religious rules are the ones who are doing the work of God. He tells us that some who thought they had found the key that would open the door to salvation will find that their key is not recognized, but others who thought that they had not a pea turkey’s chance in Hades of getting in - will find the door wide open and the owner of the house welcoming them with open arms. Jesus grieves over the loss of those for whom righteousness is more about power and being in control and less about the vulnerability of unequivocal love. He leaves us with the mystery and ambiguity of a life lived outside the norms of a society built on power, control, and self-importance – he asks us to embrace a life that requires discipline, vulnerability, faithfulness, generosity, acceptance, and RISK.
I remember once in Mississippi when I was approached by a young man who asked a question that was burning on his mind. He told me that he had become a Christian two years before. He had not known Christ before that time. He understood that God had revealed everything necessary for salvation in the words of scripture, but he wanted me to write down for him - in a sentence or so - just what it was that he needed to believe - or to do - in order to be saved. If I put it in the context out of which this lesson from Luke is taken, he was asking; “What is the one thing that I need to know in order to be among those chicks who are embraced under the wings of God”? I just stood there for a minute, dumbfounded by the simplicity and yet the complexity of the question. While Jesus talks of striving for entry into the Kingdom and grieves that those who are called keep on rejecting God, we also know that God's love, God's Grace - is unconditional and welcomes even the worst of sinners. But grace is not simply the infinite supply of forgiveness upon which hopeless sinners depend. Grace is also the mysterious strength that God gives to human beings who commit themselves to the work of transformation, to the work of being faithful, the work of being righteous. To be transformed in this way is to follow Christ into the place of risk, to commit our lives – our very being – to God and to do so trusting that by turning back to God, we might not be the one left outside because they stoned the very Word that would save them.
Abram believed - and God found that in believing he was righteous. He was living into the life that God asked of him. The answer to the question posed by the young man does not lie in a set of rules for the road that defines who is in and who is out – it lies in being willing to struggle each day of the journey to imitate Jesus. It lies in the accepting and the giving and acting out of love. It lies in the day-to-day struggle of responding in faith to our relationship with God, with God's creation, and with our brothers and sisters of all shapes, sizes, and colors.
The narrow way is about loving unconditionally and giving unconditionally. It is about opening our hearts completely and treating others as we want to be treated. It means going a little bit farther than comfort allows in our stewardship of time and talent and treasure – both within the faith community and outside of it. It means recognizing and confessing that sometimes we have missed the mark and yet knowing that somehow the mystery of God's love overcomes even our greatest weakness. We are afraid to do these things, and rightfully so. Being vulnerable before God might just change us. Actions born out of faith involve risk.
And so we hesitate and draw ourselves back into that façade of being in control. But when we hold back, when we cheat ourselves out of that essential, life-giving relationship with God and with others, we are the ones who suffer most of all in isolation, in emptiness, and in despair. We cheat ourselves when we take the easy way, when we avoid the narrow way of turning to God with truth and integrity and love. Those are the only things that matter, and when we try to live without them, it is no life at all. Then- it is us that Paul calls to task, it is us over whom Jesus weeps. Lent reminds us that we have fallen far short of the narrow door, that we are humans wrought with human frailties. Too often we have depended on what we can see and feel and touch and control – our possessions, our skills, our intellect - rather than on faith in God's abundance. But we are called to abandon our fear and mistrust and open our hearts to God's love. Lent reminds us to turn back - willingly - to the one place where we are loved just as we are – under and within the loving embrace of God, who gathers her brood under her wings.
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom then shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
Of whom then shall I be afraid?
Amen