Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent
“Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost”
It is a powerful statement about the radical nature of human redemption. Coming as it does on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, it completes a pattern of reflection about our journey in the wilderness even as it marks a transition to the deeper wilderness of Passiontide.
We are lost in our temptations which set us in opposition to God. We are lost in our griefs and sorrows, our fears and worries about our children. We are lost in the utter emptiness of ourselves. These aspects of loss have been before us on the preceding Sundays in Lent. They have marked an aspect of the teaching about original sin which serves to catapult us more firmly into the redemptive grace of Christ.
Here, again, we are in the wilderness, but here we are fed in the wilderness. Loaves and a few small fishes. Even more, the fragments from the picnic are more than enough to sustain the redeemed community of our humanity. And in a way, that image of bread has been an underlying theme of the preceding Sundays reaching a kind of crescendo of meaning on this day which is sometimes known as Refreshment Sunday. The Fourth Sunday in Lent is Mid-Lent Sunday and it provides almost a kind of oasis of refreshment for our souls in the mid-point of the Lenten journey overall.
