Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, 10:30am Morning Prayer
“God, be merciful to me a sinner”
The theme of divine mercy triumphs over human presumption and folly. Divine mercy, however, makes no sense whatsoever if we do not know ourselves to be, in fact, sinners. In a way the shadows of the Cross reach backwards as well as forwards. We are illumined, paradoxically as it may seem, by the shadows of the Cross.
There is the grace of revelation and the grace of redemption and nowhere, perhaps, is that seen more wonderfully than in the 18th chapter of the Book of Genesis both in terms of this morning’s lesson and in terms of what precedes it, namely, the encounter between God and Abraham under the shade of the oaks of Mamre, a scene in which God gives the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, the proverbial ‘promised son’. God appears to Abraham in threefold aspect and Abraham prepares a meal for them and waits upon them. The scene becomes the basis for the icon of the Trinity in Eastern Orthodoxy, an image at once of the Eucharist and the Trinity, the communion of our humanity with the communion of God. All under the shade of the oak of Mamre for such is the grace of revelation which in turn signals the grace of redemption which is what we see in the story which immediately follows and which is our first lesson this morning.
We are presented with a most remarkable exchange between Abraham and God about human wickedness and divine mercy, about the power of righteousness and the powerlessness of sin. The question has to do about Sodom and Gomorrah, cities which are the proverbial images for all that is wicked and perverse, a wickedness and perversity that has very much to do with our hearts of judgment and self-righteousness.
