DAILY REFLECTION FOR LENT: SUNDAY MARCH 9TH (SERMON) We have a - TopicsExpress

DAILY REFLECTION FOR LENT: SUNDAY MARCH 9TH (SERMON) We have a lot going on this morning. It’s the First Sunday of Lent, with the Penitential Exhortation at 8am and the Great Litany at 10am, and it’s also Girl Scout Sunday, which in the spirit of inclusion we’ve expanded to include the boys, and also the other members of the various troupes to which our own kids belong to, and so we (may) have some guests with us (later) who I would like to bid “welcome”. There is an interesting phrase in our Proper Preface for Lent, which we’ll only actually be praying at the 8am service where we’re using Eucharistic Prayer A, because there is no Proper Preface in Prayer C, which we’re saying at 10am. Still, it speaks of Jesus, and says, “By his grace we are able to triumph over every evil, and to live no longer for ourselves alone, but for him who died and rose again”. When it says “live no longer for ourselves alone” it certainly seems like a potent way to describe selfishness, and it seems to convict an entire society that many of us think has gotten a bit too egocentric and narcissistic. However, in our bible study on Wednesday St. Paul seemed to suggest that we’ve been tricked. In our self-absorption we only think we’re doing our own will, only what we want, taking care of number one. Instead, Paul said, “You are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience (to God), which leads to righteousness”. We immediately noticed that this bold statement seemed to leave no room for us to serve ourselves. It seems to be either sin or God. That made us sit up and take notice, and so we followed Paul’s train of thought. He said, “Had it not been for (God’s) Law, I would not have known sin. I would have not have known what it is to covet if the Law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’. But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness’ … ‘it was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin’”. Paul is saying a number of things here. First, he is personifying sin. It has goals, which are not in our best interest, and it has methods. Second, those methods include deception by using the good Law of God against us. And third, we seem to have been created as serving beings. Paul said “I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations”, implying that we are made to need and therefore serve a god; the question is, whom shall we serve? Now you may think this is just St. Paul’s opinion, just his way of making an allusion to encourage his people. But we must remember who St. Paul is. The writer of over 2/3 of the New Testament, the one chosen by the Risen Jesus to bring the Gospel to the wider world. The only trained theologian of the original disciples, St. Paul is, if I may be so bold, next the Jesus himself (and by extension perhaps our Lord’s mother Mary), the most important person to have ever lived, more important than Christ Matthews, Rush Limbaugh, Oprah Winfrey, and Judge Judy combined. So when Paul uses an image, we might want to at least pay close attention to it. Sin is personified. It has happened before. Once upon a time, sin was personified as a snake. If a snake can talk, certainly sin can talk through a snake. And notice that the snake used the Law to deceive. Paul noticed this, writing in today’s section from Romans that “sin was indeed in the world before the Law”, meaning the Ten Commandments, which weren’t given for many centuries after the Garden, yet there already was a prototype of the Law in the Garden. It was quite simple. The Lord God commanded the man, “… of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat”. Consider that the Law for them at that moment. And along slithers sin, dressed up as a snake, with the question of deception. It asks, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?” You may ask, “Where’s the deception?” It’s just a question. Ah, but notice that the Lord’s command was to the man, not the woman, and notice that the serpent approached the woman, not the man. The deception, or as our bible translates it, the craftiness, is on the emphasis, “Did God say YOU shall not eat?” Therein laid the primeval example of divide and conquer, which has led to enmity between men and women for centuries, and which we’ll have more to say about shortly. And we find that the snake’s goal was simple. Make the man and woman choose to be obedient not to the Lord God, but to him through his suggestions. If that’s too mythological for you, or if it’s all too theoretical, Jesus himself would relate to his apostles what happened when he went out into the wilderness after his Baptism. There he encountered sin again, although this time there was no need to act, no need to pretend, no need to dress up in snakeskin. Sin showed his true face, horns, beard, and all; and the question no longer needed to be couched in crafty language designed to trick anyone, because here the veil was dropped and the offer was stated plainly. The devil himself, Satan the Adversary, Lucifer the fallen angel, said to Jesus, and I’ll quote Luke’s version because it adds a phrase that makes it even clearer, “Behold all the kingdoms of the world. To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours”. Notice that Lucifer is saying that people gave over everything to him. They gave over their dominion, their birth right, their first gift from God, to fill the Earth and to take care of it, by giving obedience to him, most likely when they thought they were just serving themselves. And notice that Lucifer goes right at Jesus by attacking the Law, in fact the most basic temptation is to break Commandment #1. But Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and his obedience to God changes everything. So he answers the Evil One by quoting the Law of the Lord God his Father, “Away with you Satan, for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’”. When Paul was considering all this, and acknowledging his own failures and need for Jesus, he reached a point of what sounds like despair, saying, “Wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death (with its sinful desires)”. Then he proclaims, “thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Paul then sees Jesus as fixing sin in a way no one else had ever considered. You may not know this, but in the first century, Jewish thinkers did not regularly think about Adam as the one who led us into sin. There is very little, indeed almost no writings in the later Old Testament scriptures and the intertestamental writings about Adam bringing sin into the world, but rather there is a whole lot of writing focusing on Genesis chapter 6, blaming the Watchers, otherwise known as the fallen angels, the demons, the servants of Lucifer himself. Surely they played their part, but the question goes back to our obedience or disobedience, and so Paul, seeing Jesus as the perfect human, likens him to the new Adam. This then serves as the backdrop for these words in Romans, “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin”. We should perhaps not miss the fact that Paul does not blame Eve, that wouldn’t happen for a few centuries when the Church was run by celibate men, but rather Paul places the blame on the one to whom the Lord God spoke when he gave the Commandment in the Garden. Neither “she made me do it” nor “the devil made me do it” were acceptable excuses. Yet we Christians continue to shout that Jesus has healed this catastrophe; and so Paul could then write, “If the many died through the one man’s sin, much more surely has the grace of God and the free gift of grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many” and “… just as one man’s sin led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of obedience leads to justification and life for all For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” and “having once been servants of sin, you have become servants of righteousness”. I want to go back to our original thought. As creatures of God with free will we seem to have only two options, to serve God or to serve sin. Serving ourselves seems not to be an option, except as part of the deception laid on us by sin personified. What then does it look like if we serve God?? What example can we find? Well, thanks be to God for God’s tendency to use coincidence as a way of seeing if we’re paying attention, because whatever else the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts have done over the years, and whatever other benefits and circumstances may surround the cause of scouting in today’s day, the Scout Promise is the perfect illustration of the opposite of serving sin. If serving sin or God are the only two options, and if serving self is a way of serving sin, then serving others is by parallel a form of serving God. And so the essence of the Scout Promise, which is 1) to serve God and by extension the country or dominion in which God has placed one in which to live, and 2) to do one’s best to help others, regardless of the cost, and 3) to know the scout law and be obedient to it is about as healthy a prototype for life in Christ as one can imagine. We are constantly challenged to find ways to bring holiness into the places where we are, our homes, workplaces, and the market squares. We live in a place and time where the mere mention of God or his Son Jesus can cause argument to the point of rage. That is because sin is still out there trying to deceive. Thanks be to God that we have been given the victory through Jesus Christ, and so it is with great joy that we will later pray in his name asking his strength and blessings upon those in our midst who are Scouts. Amen.