Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
“As dying, and behold, we live”
The conjunction of The First Sunday in Lent and Valentine’s Day is at once fortuitous and providential. Valentine’s Day, to be sure, has largely become a secular event caught perhaps in the tension between the erotic and the romantic, between kitsch and extravagance, overwrought with emotion and expectation. Yet somehow it is about love! No doubt there are temptations too! The temptations of wine, woman and song, perhaps?! The First Sunday in Lent is certainly about love and temptations though of a deeper and more serious nature. Nothing like a bit of Lenten discipline for us too gathering here in the Hall, Valentine’s Day notwithstanding. It is just a wee bit too cold in the Church given the cold snap and wind chill.
The temptations of Christ are our temptations seen in a certain light of clarity and with a kind of intensity. They raise important and necessary questions about love, about what we love and how we love and in what way. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, a journeying to God and with God in Jesus Christ, a journeying that seeks the perfecting of our loves which implies already that there are problems about our loves. Temptation shows us something about those problems. The temptations test us about our loves. Yet temptation is not sin. Sin lies in giving in to temptations in which our limited loves are confused with the infinite love of God. The temptations illumine the true nature of our loves.
Paradoxically it is through the temptations of Christ that we learn what is to be loved and in what way. It takes a struggle and one which belongs to the nature of our Christian identity. The temptations of Christ recall us to our baptisms, to who we are in the sight of God and in the body of Christ. The struggle is about life and death just as in baptism there is explicitly our dying and our living again through our incorporation into Christ, into his death and resurrection. The temptations of Christ illumine the struggle for us in our lives. They reveal what we have to die to and what we have to live for. They recapitulate, in a way, the vows of renunciation in our baptism which are critical for our affirmation of faith in Christ.
