Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, 10:30 Morning Prayer
“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking”
What powerful and provocative readings! They serve as a kind of wake-up call to the serious nature of the Christian faith. They recall us to the frightening realities of human sin, to our emptiness and despair when we refuse the light and truth of God. That we can do so is testament, paradoxically, to the love of God. For love cannot be forced. At most we can be persuaded.
Moral and intellectual persuasion is the only means the Christian Church has at its disposal. We cannot rely on the patterns of social and political life, the habits and customs of a more-or-less comfortable past. We are thrown back upon the stark and serious realities of the Gospel message, a message that speaks at once of our darkness and despair and of its overcoming. Nowhere is that more starkly presented than on The Third Sunday in Lent.
The great Eucharistic Gospel for this day gives us a true picture of sin. We are “a house divided against ourselves” and, of course, we cannot stand. We reject the goodness of God; we call what is good, evil. We despair of the idea of the absolute without which our lives are empty and meaningless despite all our efforts. The emptiness possesses us and “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” We “were sometimes darkness,” Paul notes in the epistle reading, and exhorts us to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,” an exhortation which can have no meaning unless we are indeed capable of embracing such a fellowship, choosing darkness over light and forgetting, forgetting wilfully, that the light is always greater than the darkness. Yet that is the problem: our wilful forgetting, our choosing darkness rather than light.
