by CCW | 13 March 2011 14:17
The land is the place of worship. Abram comes into the land which God has given him and builds there “an altar to the Lord.” Jesus comes to his own city. And there is healing and forgiveness. The land is the place of forgiveness and new life.
This morning’s first lesson[1] is part of a whole theology of the land that unfolds in the witness of the Scriptures. That theology of the land begins first with the story of Creation and the Fall. Creation is the paradise in which God has planted us but has become the wilderness of our disobedience in which we have to learn the truth of God and his will through suffering and work, through the forms of our wilfulness made visible to us, and through the forms of divine love revealed to us.
In way, the Book of Genesis is the story of brothers and of brothers that are often at odds with one another and often about land. There is the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder and one in which “your brother’s blood,” God says to Cain, “is crying to me from the ground,” from the land. It marks the beginning of the blood-soaked ground of our world and day, a world of wars and destruction. There are the stories of Abram and Lot, such as we have this morning in the separating out of who is going to have what land and where. Just as importantly, that story unveils part of the divine covenant for our humanity transacted by God to Abram – the idea of a promised land. What exactly is that promised land remains a much vexed problem politically. But, perhaps, that is to miss the point theologically. Abram builds an altar to the Lord under the oaks of Mamre. It will be the scene for God’s promise to Abram and Sarah of a Son through whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, though not without a most grievous and difficult trial of Abram’s faith. Ultimately, the land is the good land where God is acknowledged, where God is honoured and worshipped. “There he built an altar to the Lord.”
There is the story of Isaac and Ishmael, too, we might add. There is the story of Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau. There are the stories of Jacob’s sons and daughters, who form the tribes of Israel. In short, a whole welter of stories about sibling rivalries and about the idea of the land.
These stories have a wonderful kind of narrative power and, to be sure, there is much that is confusing and perplexing in them, but they establish an important perspective. They are not about heroes but about ourselves as less than perfect human beings whose wills and ambitions, “devices and desires”, are countered and challenged by the God who commits himself to our humanity. Not by blessing our mess, as it were, in other words, not by condoning and accepting every whim and fancy of our own, but by a constant and steady programme of education about God’s greater will and purpose for our humanity.
In the Old Testament, sometimes those lessons seem very harsh. That has been a common complaint that arises from a more modern and sentimental outlook that requires that God be accountable to us. And it misses the point. The point being that God has constantly to teach us what is wrong with us in order to set us right again. That is the point of the penitential psalms, for instance, a point captured best in the Scriptural mantra for Lent. “Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
We see that idea of cleansing and renewal in Matthew’s story of the raising of the paralytic, a healing that is about the deeper healing of our souls through the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is a most powerful doctrine. It is a creedal doctrine. Here in the second lesson[2], Jesus makes it perfectly clear that this is something which he wants us to know. “That you may know,” he says and so he acts. The healing of the one who is paralysed happens through the forgiveness of sins. It is a powerful image.
And a disturbing one. “Jesus knowing their thoughts,” knowing the evil of our hearts that is so prone to deny the goodness of God and the form of that goodness towards others, addresses the hardness of our hearts, the hearts of sinners whom he has come to show mercy, but only if we can acknowledge our sinfulness.
In his will for us we find not only our good but also our joy. Lent is not about our “downcast looks and sour” (Herrick); it is about the new wine of redemption that requires a renewal of our selves; new wineskins, as it were, that are receptive of the new wine of salvation. It is about the hope of transformation and renewal. It happens in the land where we are, where altars to the Lord are placed and where the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed and celebrated. There can be no greater good news than the forgiveness of sins; no greater joy than the praise of God.
Fr. David Curry
Lent I, MP, 2011
10:30am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/03/13/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-in-lent-1030am-service/
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