Lent 5: Ordered in Will and Purpose

Lent 5 (2012)
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

Almighty God,

you alone can bring into order the unruly wills
and affections of sinners:

Grant your people grace to love what you command
and desire what you promise;

that, among the swift and varied changes of the world,

our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When it comes to the human condition, what exactly are unruly wills, dis-ordered affections? The collect assumes our human wills and affections – that is, our emotions – to be in fact unmanageable; indeed that it is these unmanageable wills and affections which cast us as sinners. I don’t need to tell you that none of this has much truck among “modern, forward-thinking” people, many of them Episcopalians who have fled to the Episcopal Church from other more censorious denominations. Like the proverbial “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” many of us have come to the Episcopal Church in order to rid ourselves of deprecating theology that labels human wills and affections unruly, identifies us as sinners off the bat. And then we come across a collect like this one. What are we to do? Well, as Anglicans have always done, we look at our hsitory, we examine the tradition.

Like most of the collects we have been looking at during Lent, this one has a long history, coming to us from the Gelasian Sacramentary to the Sarum Missal, from which it was translated by Archbishop Cranmer for the very first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. At the 1552 revision of the Prayer Book it continued to be included as the collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter, as it had been in the Sarum Usage and in the 1549 BCP. It remained in that place in subsequent Prayer Books, and only in our 1979 revision was it moved to the fifth Sunday in Lent. However, it didn’t make it unchanged down through the centuries, and the preamble we know today – “Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners” – is not the original from the ancient sources, neither is it that which Cranmer translated and included in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, or that which appeared in the revisions of 1559 or 1604. In all of these the prayer’s opening read, “Almighty God, which dost make the minds of all faithful men to be of one will.” The words were revised in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer – the one book that has never known a revision in the Church of England. The reason for the change to what seem much harsher words is unclear. However, the context of that last revision – the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the eventual restoration of the monarchy in the person of King Charles II – may have gone some way in shaping the revisers’ work to mention specifically the “unruly wills and affections of sinful men.”

All this being said, the collects’ particular preambles need not be understood as opposed to each other. In fact, both express in their own way the reality that it is only through God’s action in our lives that we human beings find order and unity. Now, the word order may have some pretty uncomfortable connotations for us living in the post-modern world. It may have militaristic connotations, or conjure up images of repressive regimes, dogmatic institutions. But, it is not helpful here to understand it in this way. Order as used in the collect is about the proper balance of things, about a situation “in which everything is in its correct or appropriate place”. Order is what God observed in creation when he declared “it was very good”. In God’s order everything and everyone has its place, and hence all things are one in will and purpose. What order hints at in the collect, and in religious thought generally, is the unity of all things according to God’s plan for creation.

It is on account of the brokenness of creation – best exemplified, perhaps, in the “unruly wills and affections” of a sinful humanity – that perfect order has been disrupted and undermined; and we sometimes forget that the entire Judeao-Christian enterprise, the one over-riding narrative arch of Scripture is the story of a return to that order, that balance, that unity of will and purpose among the Creator and the created – from the calling of Abraham to the Book of Revelation – chronicling the process of God’s revealing the divine will to make all things new (cf. Revelation 21:5), while the whole time knowing that as human beings we cannot do this by or for ourselves. In the face of people’s broken covenants and disloyalty, we see how God still takes the initiative to fix their hearts “where true joys are to be found” by putting his law within them, writing it on their hearts and re-establishing order when he says “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” In Jesus, in his life and teaching and death, among “the swift and varied changes of the world”, God enacts his will for unity and order as Jesus proclaims “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:33) But it is in the resurrection of Jesus that is definitively inaugurated God’s renewal of all things, in which God’s desire is vindicated and a new creation established. Yes, the resurrection is nothing less than that, the beginning of God’s re-creation, and in baptism we are joined to this new creation, we are made part it, we are caught up in God’s will and purpose to make all things new.

However, we may be gettng ahead of ourselves. Easter is – seasonally at least – two still weeks away. We are now only in Lent, and we know that for something new to arise, something old must die. It’s usually that part of it we don’t like, or are unwilling to face. You see, you can have the old order, the present order, or you can have the new one, but you can’t have both; and only by dying to the old one can we enter into or allow ourselves to be born into the new: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) We die to the old by first accepting our brokeness, coming to terms with the truth that our wills and affections are indeed often unruly. Yet, this does not require of us breast-beating or self-loathing, but rather acceptance of the reality into which we have been baptized, that even in our brokeness God has begun a new creation in us and daily, daily through his grace and love God is completing what his work has begun. We are daily gifted with his grace so that we might be able love what he commands – peace, justice, compassion – and desire what he promises – our re-creation and renewal into God’s image and likeness, that we may be joined in will and purpose with him and with all creation, that we may find our place in God’s vision and God’s order. This week’s collect – far from being simply a bit of antiquated theology or a deprecating assessment of humanity – strikes at the heart of Christian faith, pointing to its central mystery, the Resurrection as sign of God’s desire to create us anew, indeed to make all things new. The collect draws us back to the purposes for which we were created: to take our appropriate place in God’s sacred order of creation and to there be fixed where true joys”, true happiness, “are to be found”.

Lent 4: Relevance and Resonance

Numbers 21:4-9

Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Gracious Father,

whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven

to be the true bread which gives life to the world:

Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him;

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,

now and for ever. Amen.

As you listened and prayed today’s collect, what was it you heard in the echoes of its words, the shadows of its images? What pictures were drawn in your mind’s eye, what sounds were made within the ears of your soul? Chances are there was something about Holy Communion, and perhaps some half-remembered passages from scripture – something about Jesus being the bread of heaven and something about life; maybe something came to mind about the feeding of the multitudes, or even words from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer: “…that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.” For me, I will admit, the words “came down from heaven” have always raised images of Christmas and the incarnation. The collect bears all these echoes and more. While a relatively modern composition – it is “a revised version of a collect written by F. B. McNutt” in the mid-20th century – it draws not only on central images of the Christian faith, but also of Christian life and the Church calendar. Some of you may remember when today was popularly known as Refreshment Sunday. In his commentary on the 1979 Prayer Book, Marion Hatchett writes that “when Lent began on the Monday after the First Sunday in Lent (rather than on Ash Wednesday), this day marked the half-way point in the season and was observed with feasting.” The fact the gospel reading on this Sunday was always John’s narrative of the feeding of the multitude only emphasized or perhaps informed this practice. The collect gives rise to those remembrances as well.

What we are talking about here is the power and importance of resonance. Some years ago I heard Mark Oakley, the then vicar of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, speak about the Church’s engaging with the world. He said the Church goes around desperately trying to relevant, when in fact her task ought rather to be resonant – resonant with real human experience, with our collective past, with the things we hold most dear. He is right – undoubtedly. When the Church tries to relevant, it usually ends up pandering to the least common denominator or the spirit of the moment, the demands of immediacy – “groovy”, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend worship songs projected onto nine-foot high screens, come to mind. Only when she is resonant does the Church strike at the deeper chords of who we are, of who we have been, of – dare I say it – truth, as far as we are able to grasp it, at least. Let me unpack this a little. When we talk about something being relevant, we mean that it is somehow closely connected or especially pertinent to a particular matter at hand, and usually in a pretty specific way. The word finds its origin in the Scottish law courts of the 16th century, and, in fact, its meaning then was incredibly precise. It meant that something was “legally pertinent”. Resonance, on the other hand, is something that happens deep within us. As a physical property, to resonate is “to produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound.” At the psychic level, it means to “evoke or suggest images, memories, and[/or] emotions.”

Powerful liturgy, effective God-language, transformational religious language are such on account their resonance. Think about it for a moment, good liturgy and prayers – those we remember as touching us – do in fact fill us with a “deep, full, reverberating sound” that in turn evokes images, memories, emotions. It is one of the reasons that we must be so very careful with liturgical and religious language. If it has no foundation in – no echoes of – the tradition or of genuine, lived human experience it can feel trendy at best, cheap at worst at best, or it can simply just fall flat. Certainly, we must have new language to speak as the Church moves through history or as she encounters new contexts, but such language can never be so detatched from the tradition that its only frame of reference is the new context. As you know our Lent study course this year is centered on the Prayer Book, and inevitably issues surrounding tradition, liturgical language, images and resonance have come up. I was minded to think of the tradition like a relay race, in which the participants of each team run their part and then hand over (the literal meaning of tradition, tradere) the baton to the successor in the race. Perhaps resonance occurs in that moment when both runners are touching the baton – just a thought.

Certainly the issues surrounding resonance find expression in today’s Gospel reading. The passage is only part of a much longer conversation that Jesus is having with Nicodemus. Now, you will remember that Nicodemus was one of the Jewish leaders who was becoming increasingly curious about Jesus, and the writer of John tells us that Jesus visited him at night. We can only assume this was in order to avoid making their relationship conspicuous. Nicodemus knew there was something true, something real about Jesus – indeed he said to Jesus at the start of the meeting, “Rabbi, we now you are a teacher who has come from God”. (John 3:2) But Nicodemus also knew there was something profundly new about Jesus’ message, and he had trouble getting his head around it. Jesus did not offer him relevance – the immediately contextual argument, he offered resonance grounded in the tradition, the communal experience of the Jewish people: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15) Jesus talks about the “new” (for lack of a better word) by making it resonate – filling it with the “deep, full, reverberating sound” of the tradition known so well to Nicodemus. In highlighting the image of the serpent Moses raised in the wilderness, Jesus effects in Nicodemus – and the writer of John in his readers – a resonance with the entirety of the Passover experience, the Hebrews’ wandering in the wilderness, God’s salvation and his forging of a new people.

Resonance is not always easily describable, sometimes we cannot fully give words to its effects. We simply know that something rings true, rings consonant, rings right. Resonance does not carry with it definition, neither may it bring conclusion; but perhaps may be only the resounding of a far-off echo that suddenly makes present and profound sense, or even the gentle suggestion of an only half-remembered story which at this moment brings with it the invitation to see everything afresh. It is the office of good liturgy, of well written prayers, to provide for and effect resonance. Cranmer knew this – so much of what is in first Book of Common Prayer carried with it echoes and reverberations of the Church’s tradition and the people’s communal experience; the collects particularly, but now exclusively. The compilers and editors of subsequent Anglican prayer books have used his skill as a benchmark, and in many cases been faithful imitators. Personally, I believe in the case of our own prayer book the compilers and editors have been exceptional, and current additional material produced continues to be.

We are coming soon to the end of Lent, but perhaps you may want to spend some time in the next two weeks with some of your favorite collects, or with some new to you, and attend to their resonance, allow them to reverberate deeply in the chambers of your heart, the corridors of the your mind, listen to the far-off echoes to which they hint. You may just find something deeper than the immediate, or the merely relevant, you may even find given to you bread come down from heaven.

Gracious Father,

whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven

to be the true bread which gives life to the world:

Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him;

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,

now and for ever. Amen.

Lent 3: Disclosing our Powerlessness

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves:

Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls,

that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body,

and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

“We have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” What a statement. Think about it – “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” Certainly, the words of this week’s collect reveal a particular understanding of human nature and of the human condition; attributing to humanity a fundamental depravity which we would normally associate with more extreme forms of Protestantism. Yet the collect far pre-dates the 16th century, and first appears sometime before the 8th century in the Gregorian Sacramentary as the collect for the second Sunday in Lent. It continued as the collect for the second Sunday in Lent when it made its way into the Sarum Missal; and in the first English Book of Common Prayer it remains in that place, as it does in our 1928 Prayer Book. Only for the 1979 does it shift to the third Sunday.

Chances are the collect was originally composed, at least in part, to combat lingering trends towards Pelagianism. Now Pelagiansim was a heresy denounced by Church councils in both the 5th and 6th centuries, and which held that we human beings did in fact have power in ourselves to help ourselves. It was actually a family of beliefs; among them, the belief “that original sin did not taint human nature and that mortal will is still capable of choosing good or evil without special Divine aid”. By condemning Pelagianism the Church was attempting to safeguard God as the only good and source of good, while at the same seeking to express humanity’s absolute dependence on God. Presently it seems helpful to appreciate the Church’s stance on Pelagianism as a condemnation of self-justification through rule-keeping; that is, a condemnation of the idea that by doing all the “right” things we find our salvation, and moreover that our inisght is unclouded enough that we are able always to know what the right thing is. In condemning Pelagianism the Church is, in large part, trying to affirm that the Christian life is at its heart about a relationship with God, not a series of actions we take or rules we keep.

Today we are invited in the Hebrew Scriptures to reflect on the Ten Commandments, and I am sure that many of us here remember having to memorize them as children in Sunday School. Certainly, one of the darkest aspects of the English Reformation was the denuding of English churches and cathedrals of traditional decorations and devotion. In many churches these were replaced with large wooden plaques upon which were painted the Ten Commandments. This practice was translated to churches in the American colonies, and tcontinued well into the 19th century. So, as Anglicans we have a particular relationship with the Ten Commandments. At the same time, as Americans we have been raised on the mythos of the pioneer and the ethos of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We have been weaned on the idea of achievement through sheer effort and works. These two realities can give to us a Pelagian cast, because while in themselves rules and a sense of self-sufficiency can be beneficial, at their extremes they can create in us an inflated sense of pride in our own efforts, as well as a callous attitude towards others who cannot seem to “get it together”, as it were. They can undermine relationship and the reality of our inter-connectedness. At their worst, they keep us from confronting how really dependent we are on God and on each other, how short-sighted we can be about the simple good fortune that comes our way, while pandering to our very human inclination to manipulate. They allow us to hide from our essential powerlessness – as Jesus reminds those who listened to him: “Can any of you…add a single hour to your span of life?” (Matthew 6:27) – and more importantly from the truth that in our powerlessness we are all equal one with another.

Nevertheless, we take inordinate pride in our achievements; and our confidence in them becomes a way to hide from our brokeness. But, worse still, when we use those achievments to look down on others who for any number of reasons have not “made the grade”. Equally our pride in doing the right thing, following all the rules quickly becomes a way to keep up the façade of order and control. Worse still, we learn to the manipulate situations in order that we can still feel superior in our rule-keeping, and still get our way, as it were. How many of us have sat and considered how we can stay just within the remit of a particular rule, while breaking it in spirit. How many have used the technical demands of a specific law to benefit our own self-interest at the detriment of someon else? Look for a moment at the Gospel. Ever wondered why there are money-changers in the Temple? Well, the Law allowed only for Jewish money – shekels to be used in the Temple precincts, so the money changers provided an importance service. They would take your Roman money, and change it into shekels – for a price, of course – and they made a tidy profit. What a great way to help your fellow keep the law and fleece him at the same time. On the other hand, how often do we appeal to simplistic regulations in order to hide from what we know to be our inherent powerlessness? Things didn’t go exactly as you expected them to, people or circumstances exposed your powerlessness, then just find, or have someone find for you, precisely the right law that will allow you to sue. It’s the American way, after all.

If you are anything like me, think for a moment of the many little lies you tell yourself, the many little delusions you hide behind, the inordinate amount of work you do, the petty excuses you make, the complicated manipulations you contrive in order to hide your powerlessness: your powerelessness over situations, over other people, over your health, over your financial circumstances, over the weather, over what others will think of you, over job security, over personal safety. It can all become a dizzying dance that can leave us literally exhausted, certainly spiritually bankrupt, and in its midst we may find ourselves saying with the Apostle Paul: “Wretched [person] that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” And his answer is our answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Of course, there certainly things over which we have a modicum of control, things which we can do to enable our well-being, but the truth is that we are powerless over much of day to day existence, and that we are powerless over much of ourselves. In Lent, we pray that our powerlessness will be exposed, as frightening as that feel for us. We pray also that the devices and manipulations we use to hide and to hide from our powerlessness will be exposed too; that we will recognise in our powerlessness our inherent equality with everyone, that we are in the same boat – in need of God’s power by which to be kept safe, and in need of God’s goodness in which to find our own.

It is not easy to face the extent of our powerlessness, and so undoubtedly it is easier to assert our capacity for self-determination or to take refuge in following rules, both in order to hide the uncertainties of life to which we are subject and over which we indeed have no power. And yet, only by accepting the truth of this situation, can we learn the real freedom that comes only with the life of grace: that we needn’t control, that we needn’t manipulate, that we needn’t justify, that God is in charge, and that our wholeness, our salvation and our protection lie in God’s plans and God’s hands. At the end of the day, the problem with raw Pelagianism is that it replaces God’s love, care and mercy – God’s grace – with our own half-hearted and damaged efforts, which even when well-intended we must admit are can never really be enough.

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves:

Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls,

that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body,

and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Lent 2: Facing Truth in the Face

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy:

Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways,

and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace

and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son. Amen.

It is a striking and difficult thing sometimes to be confronted with truth; to be made to stand in the presence of reality, and hold fast to it without turning away. At times, we may discover truth to be so difficult we find ourselves flinching away from it as if from the heat, light and danger of fire. And for all of us, whether we choose to admit it or not, life is an ongoing process – even a dance – of looking away from and looking towards truth; a constant turning and re-turning. Today’s collect brings all this to mind as it prays for God to recall his mercy, and thus be gracious to those who have “gone astray”, that is, turned away from truth; and in so doing it reveals something of its origin. The collect from which our present one is derived is actually one of the Good Friday solemn collects found in three of the most ancient of service books: the Missale Gallicanum, the Gelasian sacramentary and the Gregorian sacramentary. All of these date from well before the 8th century and represent liturgical use from places throughout mainland western Europe. The Commentary on the American Prayer Book notes that “in these books [the prayer] follows a bidding to pray for heretics and schismatics that they may be delivered from their errors and recalled to the catholic and apostolic church.” Placed where it is in our present Prayer Book during the Lenten season it refers to those who have abandoned the practice of the Christian faith; but coupled with the readings, the collect highlights more immediately this issue of our encounter with truth.

This morning Peter and the rest of Jesus’ followers are confronted with truth – the truth of Jesus’ eventual end, of his betrayal, suffering and execution; and, as the writer of the Mark describes, Jesus says “all this quite openly” (Mark 8:32), almost in contrast to the secrecy which pervades his identity throughout the gospel. There is no secret here, nothing hidden. Now he confronts the disciples with truth, plain and simple. And what is the reaction, of Peter at least? He takes Jesus aside and “rebukes him”. Peter – who only four verses earlier (verses not included in this morning’s gospel reading) proclaims Jesus to be the Messiah – finds the truth of what that really entails too difficult to look in the face, and so denies it, rebukes it. After confessing the truth of Jesus’ identity, he immediately turns away from that truth, goes astray, as it were, from it. Then, on the Mount of Olives shortly after the Last Supper when Jesus predicts that his followers will desert, Peter declares, “Even though all become deserters, I will not.” And we all know what happens, he turns away from what he knows to be true by denying he ever even knew Jesus. Truth and the consequences of truth can indeed be very difficult to countenance, to look in the face and so Peter turns away, and so do we.

Now we can think of Lent as a time when we meditate on our failings, a time to worthily lament our sins, as the Ash Wednesday collect says, but I am not not completely convinced as to the helpfulness of that language. Words like sin, failing and sinfulness have come to carry so much cultural and religious baggage, that I am not sure they completely speak to us effectively, without a whole lot of complicated unpacking; and perhaps, it might be more helpful to talk about Lent as the time when we discipline ourselves by facing truth, when we hone our senses to engage with naked reality. Certainly Lent begins with one of the starkest and most naked truths of all: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In more colloquial language, perhaps we can think of Lent as the time for a “reality check”, as it invites us to look truth in the face. Lent, well observed, challenges us to mark the times when we have “gone astray”, that this, the times in which we have settled for the cheap comfort that comes from self-delusion and denial, from flinching away from reality. A large of the part of Lenten prayer is the prayer of today’s collect: that God will grant to us “penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast” to truth. The invitation to the observance of a holy Lent in the Prayer Book speaks to this also, when it reminds us that Lent was originally the time “when those who…had become separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church”. Again, if we can approach this in ways more accessible and immediate for us, we might understand Lenten prayer and the discipline of Lent resolving themselves in a return to the way of truth, in our turning to face truth unflinchingly – the truth about God, certainly, but also the truth about our world, the truth about others, and perhaps most importantly, the truth about ourselves. So often like Peter we may want to proclaim certain things – “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” – and yet, doing so without facing the reality which their truth may imply. Or we may want to believe certain things about how we would act or behave, certain things about our character – “Even though all become deserters, I will not” – without facing the truth of our propensity to give into fear, cowardice and willing ignorance. While God in God’s mercy knows how difficult it is for us to engage constantly with the difficult truths about ourselves and our world, the Lenten call is not to fool ourselves into believing that we are engaging with reality, when in fact we are simply deluding ourselves by looking only at what is comfortable, or engaging with only a very narrow patch of reality, and usually one which confirms with what we already want or believe. Again, we can talk in the language of sin or failings, but even over-spiritulized and over-theologized language about these can be ways to avoid the truly difficult, but ultimately transforming, encounter with truth. And in the end only truth will do, whatever it is, whatever its consequences, whatever its cost. After all, we might paraphrase Jesus’ words and say, what will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit the truth of your life? (cf. Mark 8:38)

Many of you are familiar with the work Richard Rohr. I remember him once saying that the greatest ally of God is what is. So, whatever the truth is, whatever reality is, it follows that only by engaging these square in the face can we ever arrive at anything meaningful. Sometimes, we want things to be different, we even create situations so that we can ignore that they aren’t different, but ultimately that will not do. Look at Peter, he seemed to think that by rebuking Jesus, that is, by a creating a narrative about Jesus separate from the truth of Jesus’ words, he might be able to avoid that truth altogether. Jesus responds sternly and openly in the hopes of getting Peter and the other disciples to look truth square in the face: “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.” (Mark 8:33) It is hard indeed to face naked truth, and undoubtedly we will flinch away from it at times, we may even take a break from it –“I can’t think about this today, I’ll think about it tomorrow” – but Lent calls us to take stock, make that “reality check”, in order that we may turn our faces, hearts and minds towards the truth and to hold fast to it so far as we are able.

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy:

Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways,

and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace

and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son. Amen.

Lent 1: Entering into the Desert

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan:

Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations;

and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

This Sunday’s collect is one of the few that makes specific reference to the Gospel reading of its day. This is rarely the case as the collects run on a one year cycle, and the lectionary runs on a three year cycle. Therefore, matching directly the theme of the collect with that of the gospel is very difficult indeed. However, in this the first Sunday in Lent all three years of the lectionary feature as the Gospel reading Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, and the collect draws on the resonances of this story to create its imagery; and so because of this, from the very start of the Eucharist, we are already taken into the wilderness with Christ; into the wilderness of the desert, into the wilderness of our desires and into the wilderness of temptations. It is here that we are called to begin Lent, in the knowledge of our nothingness, in the knowledge of our weakness and dependency, in the knowledge that we are, after all, dust and that to dust we shall return – but for the love and mercy of God.

It was Archbishop Cranmer who originally linked the collect for the first Sunday in Lent to the narrative of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness: “O Lord, which for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights; Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness, and true holiness.” This collect came into the first American Prayer Book unchanged in content or placement, and continued so throughout various Prayer Book revisions right up to and including the Book of Common Prayer of 1928. So, it isn’t surprising that the present collect should take as its starting point the image of Jesus’ temptation as highlighted in Cranmer’s original. However, its bulk and greatest force is from an original composition by a 19th century English clergyman and Church historian, William Bright. His collect reads “Merciful and faithful High Priest; Who didst deign for us to be tempted of Satan; make speed to aid Thy servants who are assaulted by manifold temptations; and as Thou knowest their several infirmities, let each one find Thee mighty to save…” We can begin to discern how today’s collect takes its imagery from a combining of these two. Yet, whether we are meditating on Cranmer’s original collect, on that of William Bright, or more specifically on the revision written for our present Prayer Book, what they all highlight is our need for God and for God’s grace if we are to overcome the interior dangers and brokenness of our lives, the “many temptations” by which are “assaulted”. Together with the narrative of Jesus’ temptation, they point to our utter dependence on God, not only as our life-source – a term most modern Christians are very comfortable with, but also how very desperately we are in need of salvation, an idea modern, sensible – certainly Episcopalian – Christians are not as comfortable with.

As we enter into Lent, and enter with Jesus into the desert, we enter also into the place in which the regular devices and artifices we may use to construct and defend ourselves must be laid aside if any good is to some from the journey. We must bring ourselves to that place in which we know ourselves, as another of Cranmer’s collects says, “to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that for [our] frailty we cannot always stand upright”. For modern, competent people that is a difficult thing to admit, a difficult place to be, and certainly not a place into which we would enter willingly; and yet it is exactly what Jesus calls us to by the example of his going into the wilderness and by his exhortation: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15) We may pretend we are in control, we may live as if the goods that come our way are merely are well-earned just deserts, or that the good that comes our way is simply the result of careful planning on our part, but Jesus in the desert calls us to remember who really is the source of all these things. His call to repent (repentance means literally to turn around 180 degrees) is the call to re-orientate lives, desires and ambitions rightly and according to the orientation of the good news. The Gospel call for repentance is a recognition that much of what passes for normal and even beneficial in our world is dis-ordered, and that we can lose our order, our direction and even ourselves as we navigate through it. It is the admission that we are indeed “assaulted by many temptations” in a world whose principles are sometimes rather off kilter, or in some cases completely off the mark. Repentance is really coming to terms with an order different than what we may have become accustomed to, one in which God and the kingdom are the only norms; at the end of the day repentance is to admit our weaknesses but to do so joyfully because we can trust in a God who re-orientates us rightly, a God who “is mighty to save”. William Temple, a 20th century successor of Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury lived during one of the most dis-orientating periods in Christian history, the second world war, but he understood this joyful aspect of repentance. He once wrote: “To repent is to adopt God’s viewpoint in place of your own. There need not be any sorrow about it. In itself, far from being sorrowful, it is the most joyful thing in the world, because when you have done it you have adopted the viewpoint of truth itself, and you are in fellowship with God.” (I have included this quote in today’s Red Door)

To acknowledge our dis-ordered lives, the “many temptations” by which we are assaulted; to accept our weakness in judging things aright and orientate our lives towards wholeness and towards the One who is “mighty to save”; all of this is at the heart of Lent and of Christ’s call to repentance. Jesus entered into the wilderness for forty days and nights in order that he could place himself completely dependent on his Father – for his food, his well being, his identity; he entered into the wilderness in order to accept fully the re-orientation his life was to take for the rest of his life, and because we have been joined to him in baptism he calls us to the same, and we have committed ourselves to the same. And so, journey into the desert is the continual work of the Christian life as we continually live within the re-orientating and saving love of God, and see through the dis-ordered temptations bywhich we are assaulted.

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan:

Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations;

and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.