2nd Sunday in Lent, March 1, 2015

Collect for the Day

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
 

First Lesson: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you."

God said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her."

Reflection: I’d say that this is about the conversion of a (very) old man set in his ways . . . but I’d be dead wrong. We know about Abraham’s life, that he left everything he knew to follow God’s (very) vague directions into an unknown future. In light of his story, we know him as a man who has led a life as close to God as would seem possible. Yet God invites him closer still.

          The further transformation of Abraham—signified by his new name—ripples out, affecting the people close to him. Sarai also finds a new destiny and a new identity. Nor does the transformative energy stop there; it reaches generations—thousands of years, as we can attest—into the future.

          Sometimes we think sanctity is a private affair, between oneself and God. But it’s more than that. We are not alienated from each other and the universe, but threads in the complex tapestry of creation. As priest and poet John Donne wrote,

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Psalm 22:22-30 Deus, Deus meus

Praise the LORD, you that fear him; * stand in awe of him, O offspring of Israel; all you of Jacob's line, give glory.
For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty; neither does he hide his face from them; * 

     but when they cry to him he hears them.

My praise is of him in the great assembly; * I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.
The poor shall eat and be satisfied, and those who seek the LORD shall praise him: * "May your heart live for ever!"

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, * and all the families of the nations shall bow before him.

For kingship belongs to the LORD; * he rules over the nations.
To him alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; * all who go down to the dust fall before him.

My soul shall live for him; my descendants shall serve him; * they shall be known as the LORD'S for ever.

They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn * the saving deeds that he has done.
 

Epistle: Romans 4:13-25

The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations") -- in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations," according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be." He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.  

Reflections: Martin Luther’s “faith alone” theology finds strong support in this passage. In his losing struggle to fight his sinfulness and to gain the assurance of salvation, Luther received the revelation that salvation was not something any degree of effort could win him. Salvation simply wasn’t a matter of what he did, but of trusting in what Christ had done.

          The insight/revelation was a vital corrective to a church in which salvation had become highly transactional: if you do these things, you could be sure of heaven. Luther’s new understanding changed his life; his writing and teaching triggered the Protestant Reformation, and consequently the history of Western Civilization.

          What began as a stunning revelation in the context of Luther’s personal struggles and the church of his times, however, has become a sort of spiritual wallpaper these hundreds of years later. Apart from deep conversion experiences, “salvation by faith alone” is often understood as accepting the proposition that Jesus is one’s personal Lord and Savior. In other words, “belief” is equated with “faith.”

But “salvation” and “faith” can mean different things to us as we journey through life. We come to understand faith as more than accepting something otherwise incomprehensible or incredible. It is the process of learning to entrust our whole being to an inscrutable but merciful God. Faith is about the already and the not yet. It is a curious matter, as St. Paul puts it in other places, of both having been saved and of being saved. 

Gospel: Mark 8:31-38

Then Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

Reflections: I don’t know about you, but Mark’s use of the word “rebuke” comes as a surprise to me. It’s a remarkably strong word, more appropriate for money changers than for his closest friends. Nevertheless, while Jesus could have corrected gently Peter, he reprimands him sharply; he “rebukes.”

Of course Peter can’t accept what Jesus is saying. It is mad, horrifying, unthinkable. Moreover, in the gospel story, Peter has just professed that Jesus is the Messiah. (Of course, Peter still has his own ideas of what “messiah” means. But don’t we all?)

So what’s up with Jesus? Why is he so hard on Peter? What nerve does Peter strike? Perhaps it’s Jesus’ own fear—the fear we see in the Garden, with Jesus’ bloody sweat and his dread of this “cup”?

Then again, I wonder whether Jesus’ rebuke could be intentional and salvific, directed at Peter to shock him out of the rut of his ordinary views—out of ‘the way the world thinks.’

We all live with our mind and heart on a default setting that has been shaped by our society and our family over the course of our whole lives. To transcend that conditioning, to truly open our minds, involves more than correcting information. It involves being touched and moved at a really deep level. The shock of illness, death, failure—or maybe even being rebuked by Jesus—can sometimes be the key that opens us up. Pray that when that happens, we don’t slam the door shut again as soon as things “get back to normal.”