Author: CCW

“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”

The story of the Temptations of Christ is read on the First Sunday in Lent. In response to the second temptation, Christ responds with these words: “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” But, of course, in relation to the idea and the reality of the doctrine of original sin, that is exactly and constantly what we do. We tempt God. We constantly put God to the test, trying to make him accountable and measurable to us. Our task this Lent is to ponder the mystery of our sinfulness, the mystery of original sin.

Original Sin: What is it and why does it matter?

Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with the world? Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with me? In other words, have you ever had that sense that nothing is the way it should be either with ourselves or others or our world and day? Has that sense of things not being right ever resulted in asking about evil? Unde hoc malum? Where does evil come from? Or do we persist in saying and thinking that everything is good; just a few bad apples in the pile that spoil everything?

Original sin is the doctrine that there is something radically and inescapably not right about any of us right from the get-go of our being. Very tough stuff. And yet, it seems, this is actually part and parcel of the good news. Original Sin catapults us into the totality of God’s grace and grants utter primacy to God’s will. Our task is to try to understand something about this strange and curious teaching that seems to cause so much consternation. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton observes, it is the most empirical of all Christian teachings, the most provable from experience.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven”

The land is the place of worship. Abram comes into the land which God has given him and builds there “an altar to the Lord.” Jesus comes to his own city. And there is healing and forgiveness. The land is the place of forgiveness and new life.

This morning’s first lesson is part of a whole theology of the land that unfolds in the witness of the Scriptures. That theology of the land begins first with the story of Creation and the Fall. Creation is the paradise in which God has planted us but has become the wilderness of our disobedience in which we have to learn the truth of God and his will through suffering and work, through the forms of our wilfulness made visible to us, and through the forms of divine love revealed to us.

In way, the Book of Genesis is the story of brothers and of brothers that are often at odds with one another and often about land. There is the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder and one in which “your brother’s blood,” God says to Cain, “is crying to me from the ground,” from the land. It marks the beginning of the blood-soaked ground of our world and day, a world of wars and destruction. There are the stories of Abram and Lot, such as we have this morning in the separating out of who is going to have what land and where. Just as importantly, that story unveils part of the divine covenant for our humanity transacted by God to Abram – the idea of a promised land. What exactly is that promised land remains a much vexed problem politically. But, perhaps, that is to miss the point theologically. Abram builds an altar to the Lord under the oaks of Mamre. It will be the scene for God’s promise to Abram and Sarah of a Son through whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, though not without a most grievous and difficult trial of Abram’s faith. Ultimately, the land is the good land where God is acknowledged, where God is honoured and worshipped. “There he built an altar to the Lord.”

(more…)

Print this entry

“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”

Everything in this gospel must disquiet us. There is, first, the idea of Jesus being led “by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil”; secondly, there is the idea of the wilderness itself, an image which disturbs as much as it attracts.

Wilderness here is the place of temptation but under the guiding force of the Holy Spirit. This implies a kind of necessity about the wilderness in the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage. Somehow there is something good about temptation.

Wilderness. It is an intriguing term. What do we understand by the wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns.

The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, the wilderness of chaos as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Alternatively, we might think of the wilderness as a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best captured in the twentieth century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum. There is as well the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the greater wildness of the urban jungle.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

Dust and ashes. Hardly an auspicious beginning, we might think. Usually we think of dust and ashes in terms of endings; the fire that ends in a heap of ashes, the dust that is swirls around in the wind, the detritus of the mundane world.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Dust and ashes are the dominant images of the day. Ashes are a symbol of repentance in the ancient biblical culture. Dust recalls us to the biblical story of creation and is the strong image of our creatureliness. Everything in the physical and material universe is made of dust, we might say. That is an important feature of our creation: we are the God-made dust into which God has breathed his spirit, even sanctified dust.

The two images coalesce in the ritual imposition of ashes on our foreheads, itself another image that signals the special nature of our creatureliness. We are made in the image of God by virtue of our reason and will symbolized in our foreheads. Ashes are imposed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and they are placed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Those words, too, suggest an ending. They seem to sound an ominous and serious note.

And yet, the business of this day is all about a beginning and as such there is something lovely and wonderful, even beautiful about Ash Wednesday. It is, we might say, a somber day of the soul’s rejoicing. Why? Because the operative word and idea of Ash Wednesday is repentance and repentance is great good news for our souls. We get to begin again.

(more…)

Print this entry