Genesis 9.8-17; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-15
+ As I said in the announcements, I have been overwhelmed. Overwhelmed
in a very good way. Overwhelmed by the
love, the concern, the absolute and wonderful care and concern of everyone at
St. Stephen’s, of the wider Episcopal community, of my many friends and close
family members in these three weeks since my mother died.
I don’t even know how to
process the kindness and the love. It’s just that amazing and far-reaching.
I’m grateful to know how loved my mother was. And I am truly
humbled to feel loved by so many people.
And the condolences keep rolling in! Almost every day I keep receiving more and
more cards from friends, from distant relatives, from friends of my parents. It’s all very mind-boggling, especially when
your mind isn’t working like it normally does.
At one point in the real hard and brutal days of grief—and there
were and still are quite a few of them—I received a card from my parents’’
former pastor. She was the first woman
pastor at my parents’ church, which was a daunting role to take on 30 years
ago. My parents absolutely adored her (so did I). And my mother especially
supported her and was proud that a woman was serving in that capacity.
In her card, this pastor friend shared stories I never about my
mother, about how quickly she volunteered for working at the homeless shelter
and other types of ministry that no one else wanted to do. I honestly didn’t
know about many of these ministries my mother did.
But the real kicker for me in her card was how she closed her
comments. At the very end of her card, she wrote that she knew it was a hard
and difficult time in life right now, but remember, she said, “Easter’s coming.”
“Easter’s coming.”
That has been my life preserver through these dark weeks. Lent is
kind of like those difficult days of grief and sorrow. It is a season that, if
we had a choice, we probably wouldn’t readily observe.
As we enter this season of Lent, many of us are probably groaning
about it. I’m already hearing on Facebook people bemoaning the fact that it is
Lent.
To be honest, I get it. It’s a bleak season. It’s a time in which
we do things we don’t normally do, or even like doing.
We fast.
Many of us give up things we usually like.
We make sacrifices.
And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it’s not going to
get better any time soon.
But it helps when we remind ourselves that “Easter’s coming.”
However, before Easter, we still have to wade through some
unpleasant waters. And of course, there’s
also Holy Week before we get to the glory of Easter. And look at what awaits during Holy Week.
Betrayal.
The whipping.
The carrying of the cross.
The crucifixion.
Death.
So, yes, here we are—in this season of Lent. And I know you
probably came to Mass this morning thinking, “it’s going to be doom and gloom
and sadness” all morning at church.
But, guess what?
No.
If we were expecting doom and gloom and sadness in our scripture
readings, well, we don’t get any of that.
Ah, no. Instead, we get… water?
We get Noah and the ark?
We get a rainbow.
And baptism?
Now, this is my way to begin Lent!
We begin Lent as we begin any important step as Christians—with
solid footing in our baptismal understanding. We begin Lent with a remembrance of our
baptismal covenant—that covenant that we formed with God at our baptisms—a
covenant that is still binding on us, even now.
This covenant is a covenant very much like the covenant God made
with Noah after the waters of the flood that we hear about in our reading from
Genesis.
I wasn’t expecting to do it, but here we are on this first Sunday
of Lent, and I am preaching about, of all things, baptism. And we don’t even do
baptisms during Lent!
As if that wasn’t enough, we also get another special treat. In our Gospel reading, we get, in a very brief
scripture, an upheaval.
What?
You missed the upheaval in our Gospel reading?
You missed the reversal?
You missed, in that deceptively simple piece of scripture, a
mirror image of something?
It’s easy to miss, after all. Our Gospel reading is so simple, so sparse. But then again, so is haiku.
But let’s look a little
closer at what we’ve just heard and read.
In today’s Gospel, we find three elements that remind us of
something else.
We find the devil.
We find animals.
And we find angels.
Where else in scripture do we find these same elements? Well, we find them all in the Creation story
in Genesis, of course. The story of Adam
is a story of what?
the devil,
animals
and angels.
But that story ends with the devil’s triumph and Adam’s defeat. In
today’s Gospel, it has all been made strangely right. Jesus—the new Adam—has turned the tables using
those exact same elements.
We find Jesus not in a lush beautiful Oz-like place like Eden. Rather we find Jesus with wild animals in that
desert—animals who were created by God and named by Adam, according to the
story. We find him there waited on by
the angels—and let’s not forget that these same angels turned Adam and Eve away
from Eden. And there, in that place, he
defeats the devil—the same devil who defeated Adam.
I have found this juxtaposition between Adam and Jesus to be a
rich source of personal meditation, because it really is very meaningful to us
who follow Jesus. In this story of Jesus
we find, yet again, that it is never the devil who wins.
It always, always God
who wins.
God always wins.
That is what the story of Jesus is always about—God always winning
in the end.
If we lived with the story of Adam, if we lived in the shadow of
his defeat, the story is a somewhat bleak one. There doesn’t seem to be much hope. The relationship ruined with Adam hasn’t been
made right.
But today we find that the relationship has been righted. The story isn’t a story of defeat after all.
It isn’t a time to despair, but to rejoice. The devil has been defeated. And this is very important.
We, in our baptisms, also defeat the devil. Now, by the devil, I am not necessarily
talking
about a supernatural being who rules the underworld. I’m not talking about horns, forked tail and a
pitchfork. I’m not talking about Hot
Stuff the Devil. Remember him? (I was once, back in my twenties, going to get a
tattoo of Hot Stuff after someone jokingly said that Casper the Friendly Ghost
would not look so good on my very white skin).
By devil I mean the personification of all that we hold evil. In
our baptisms, we renounce all the evil of this world and the next, and by
renouncing evil, we are assured that it can be defeated. By renouncing the devil and all the evils of
this world, we turn away from the evil inherent within us—the evil that was set
upon us from the beginning—from the story of Adam being turned away at Eden. Our baptism marks us and in that mark we find
the strength to stand up against evil.
This time of Lent—this time for us in the desert, this time of
fasting and mortification—is a time for us to confront the demons in our lives.
We all have them.
In our wonderful collect for today, we prayed to God to
“come quickly to help us who
are assaulted by many temptations.”
The poet that I am, I love the traditional language of Rite I
better here.
“Make speed to help thy
servants who are assaulted by manifold temptations.”
We all understand that term “manifold temptations.” We all have
those triggers in our lives that disrupt and cause upheaval. Sometimes this upheaval is mental and
emotional, sometimes it is actual. We
have our own demons, no matter what name we might call them.
I certainly have my own demons in my life and sometimes I am
shocked by the way they come upon me. I
am amazed by how they lay me low and turn my life upside down. They represent for me everything dark and evil
and wrong in my life and in the world around me. They are sometimes memories of wrongs done to
me, or wrongs I’ve done to others. Sometimes they are the shortcomings of my own
life—of being painfully reminded of the fact that I have failed and failed
miserably at times in my life. In these
days of mourning, I’ve found myself kicking myself for all I should’ve’ done
for my mother.
They are reminders to me that this world is still a world of
darkness at times—a world in which people and nature can hurt and harm and
destroy. And that power and influence of
evil over my life is, I admit, somewhat strong.
We need to look no farther than the evil and destruction of
Parkland, Florida and he white supremacist who opened fire on those students!
Trying to break the power of our demons sometimes involves going
off into the deserts of our lives, breaking ourselves bodily and spiritually
and, armed with those spiritual tools we need, confronting and defeating those
powers that make us less than who we are.
For me, I do find consolation when I am confronted by the demons
of my life in that covenant I have with God in my baptism. I am reminded by that covenant that there is
no reason to despair when these demons come into our lives, because the demons,
essentially, are illusions.
They are ghosts.
They are wispy fragments of my memory.
They have no real power over me despite what they make think
sometimes.
Because the demons have been defeated by God.
Again, returning to our collect for today, we prayed,
“as you know the weaknesses
of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save.”
God has been “might to
save” us. The demons of our lives have been defeated by our Baptismal Covenant
and those baptismal waters. The real
power they have over my life has been washed away in those waters, much as all
evilness was washed away in the flood in Noah’s time.
So, as we wander about in the spiritual desert of Lent, let us
truly be driven, as Jesus was. Let the
Spirit drive us into that place—to that place wherein we confront the demons of
our lives. But let us do so unafraid. The Spirit is the driving force and, knowing
that, we are strengthened.
Let us be driven into that place.
Let us confront our demons.
Let us confront the very devil itself.
Let us face the manifold temptations of our lives unafraid,
knowing full well that God is “mighty to save.”
After all, “Easter’s coming.”
Lent is not eternal.
Easter is eternal.
This time is only a temporary time of preparation.
So, let us wander through this season confident that it is simply something
we must endure so that we can, very soon, delight in the eternal glories of a morning
light that is about to dawn into our lives.
“The time is fulfilled,” we can say with all confidence. “The
kingdom of God has come near.”
It is time to repent. It is time to believe this incredibly good
news!
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