Sermon for Septuagesima
“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”
Transitions. Today is a day of transition. It marks a change in focus and direction. Epiphany was the season of teaching, of opening us out to the essential divinity of Christ and to what that means for human redemption. We were shown what God seeks for our humanity. Epiphany segues into the season of the Gesimas which mark the transition towards Easter. Tomorrow, too, is Candlemas, which marks the midway point between Christmas and Easter, the transition from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, the transition from light to life.
If Epiphany taught us about the divine will and purpose for our humanity, then with Septuagesima we begin to enter into the divine work of human redemption itself. The Gesima Sundays are the pre-Lenten Sundays that turn us towards Easter as suggested in their names; Septuagesima signals the week of the seventieth day before Easter, Sexagesima, the week of the sixtieth day before Easter, Quinquagesima, the fiftieth day before Easter; terms already clearly associated with an older Latin term for Lent, namely Quadragesima; the word ‘Lent’ is an Old English term of Germanic origins that probably refers to the lengthening of days that heralds the coming of spring.
I mention these things not to be pedantic as if this were some sort of esoteric and useless kind of knowledge but because they belong to the essential pattern of our corporate lives as a community of faith and because they speak rather directly to some of our contemporary problems such as the so-called ‘nature deficit’ of the digital age and to the general sense of a disconnect between our humanity and the natural world as well as between us and God.
The lessons are clear about the change of focus and emphasis. We turn from what is revealed from above to what is to be accomplished below, if I may use such spatial metaphors without being taken literally. But notice. The Epistle speaks about running a race but that race is about disciplining the body, about the exercise of temperance or self-control, and about a prize that is “incorruptible” in complete contrast to what is “corruptible”. Notice, too, that Paul speaks directly to the idea of living out what he has been preaching; in other words, a transition from learning to living.
