The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” Genesis 12:1-2

Lent is the time we prepare for Easter. It’s a time for prayer, introspection, self-examination, self-denial, repentance, confession, reconciliation, and amendment of life. And all of this is in service of being ready to celebrate the great and central fact and feast of our Christian faith: Easter, the Sunday of the Resurrection.

This has been the tone and the task of Lent since the early Middle Ages, and there is a great deal to commend it. After all, who among us is without sin? Who has not fallen short of the glory of God? Who does not stumble and trip – or at least stub their toe – on their own human frailty? We need this time and framework to clear out our hearts, and minds, and behavior, and press the re-set button on our faith.

But that is only one part of Lent. In the early years and centuries of the Church, the forty days before Easter were the home stretch for those who were preparing for baptism at the Easter Vigil. For three years these adult converts learned “how to pray, how to listen to and learn from Scripture, how to care for the poor, the sick, and the orphans, how to care for and advocate for the needs of older people, and how to overcome addictive patterns in their lives, among other things”1 – the daily practices of being a Christian.

In the final six weeks, the worshiping community would embrace these converts, these catachumens, even more closely so that they could come to their baptisms ready to answer the questions of renouncing the world, the flesh, and the devil; and turning to Christ as savior, trusting his grace and love, and promising to follow and obey him as Lord. In short, people were learning how to follow the Way of Jesus, a new Way of being in the world.

Those of us who are part of the Wednesday Bible study group have seen over and over again in our reading of the Book of Acts – the record of the earliest days of the Church – that Christians were first referred to as followers of the Way, that is, the Way of Jesus. And if you have been following along with those Acts readings in the Wednesday e-mails will have seen it, too.

The phrase reminds us that faith is not just about doctrine, or what we think, or our morality, but it’s about how we live, and move, and have our being in the world as followers of Jesus, as people whose lives have been touched and are in the process of being transformed by the Lord, as we become more and more fully-formed as his people. And that was God’s plan, right from the very beginning.

It is the story that the Bible as a whole tells, even though sometimes it seems round-about, full of fits and starts, with side journeys and back stories, with poetry, letters, history, legal writings, family chronicles, court records, vision literature, the social critique of the prophets, prayer, and worship instructions. The whole big story tells of how God made a good and beautiful creation, including men and women to be the stewards of creation; of how we got off-track by putting our will before God’s; of how time and again God called his people into a covenant relationship with him, even after we had failed and gone astray.

Until finally God came into human life in the person of Jesus, the Messiah, the One who had long been promised to inaugurate the fullness of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, in God’s realm. All that happened through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, who then gave the Holy Spirit to his followers so that we might be filled with the power to do God’s works, and to think and speak God’s thoughts and words after him, to be truly human as God had always intended when he made us the stewards of creation.

In the two generations after the resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, Christian leaders reflected, prayed, and wrote about this new Way of being in the world, what it meant to be a Jesus person. And in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, we hear in highly dramatic and poetic language the vision of the world and its people flourishing according to God’s purposes.
We’ve dipped into the river of this big story in a number of places this morning. The first reading tells us of God’s purpose in calling Abraham – and all of us – to be on the journey of faith with him. That purpose is to be a blessing to the rest of the world, to be “for” others, to act as a conduit of God’s grace.

And we responded to the Genesis reading with Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” It’s a song of trust in God’s purpose, strength, and protection as we walk in his ways.

We began the service with the recitation of the Ten Commandments as we always do on this Second Sunday in Lent. They come from Exodus; that record of the Israelites being freed by God from slavery in Egypt and then led by Moses into the desert, to Mount Sinai, to enter into a covenant relationship with God, and to hear from him the pattern and the shape that covenant life would take – the Ten Commandments.

In the Letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul reflects on the nature of faith, grace, and promise in Abraham’s story, recognizing that faith and trust in God is the key component. All our efforts of trying to please, or impress, or cajole God to get in his good graces don’t work because the promise of God’s love for us can’t be bought or sold.

Finally, the story of Nicodemus the rabbi coming to Jesus, impressed by some of the signs he has done – healings, exorcisms, miracles. “You’re a teacher from God, right?”

“Well, Nicodemus,” Jesus says, “if you are only concerned about signs and miracles, you’ll never be able to participate in God’s reign; you need a spiritual awakening, a spiritual re-birth, to see what God is up to in this world. To share the life of God’s new age, to live a heaven-filled life, to have a life worth living now and for eternity, you need to know, to have a saving encounter with the Son of God.” It’s that encounter with Jesus that marks us out as his people, as those who follow in his way.

We need continually to be renewed in our practice of the Way, to draw deeply from the well of Scripture and prayer, to be fed and formed by our worship together, to go out into the world with the sign of the Cross upon our foreheads – an invisible tattoo that marks us as Christ’s own forever – ready to act as agents of blessing, healing, truth and goodness, God’s wise stewards of all that has been made. That is what we practice in Lent. That is what we prepare to celebrate at Easter: faith over fear, true worship over idolatry, life over death. That is the Way of Jesus, our Way of being in the world.

Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, you say to us:
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
such a way as gives us breath;
such a truth as ends all strife;
such a life as killeth death.
Let us follow where you lead,
and strengthen and equip us to be your people always. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Second Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2017

1from the United Methodist Church website article on Passion/Palm Sunday

"So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Matthew 6:2-3
 
Sometimes the most difficult thing we do with our day, or with life in general, is to prioritize, to sort out, to make triage decisions with our time, our calendar, our energies. Of course, we make these decisions based on our priorities, on what we value, and rank as important.
 
Thirty years ago my parents were moving from the New York suburb in Westchester County where I grew up, to a small town in eastern Connecticut. At that time, it was even more rural than it is now, with a number of working farms. And because my father had his business at home, one of the tasks to be taken care of while they were settling in, was getting the office up and running. The house was 200 years old so it needed a lot of electrical work to accommodate a fax line, a copier, and a desktop computer. On the appointed day the electrician arrived and began to get the office in order. But at about 11:45, the electrician told my father that he was taking a break for lunch. In his family, it was his job to make lunch for his children who were at home. My dad didn’t like this at all; he wanted the man to stay and finish the job right then. But the electrician said to ad, “Mr. Geer, you city people have to get your priorities straight!” So the man went home, took care of his children’s lunch, and returned about an hour and a half later, and the work got done…just not on my father’s timetable.
 
Lent is all about getting our priorities straight, and Ash Wednesday helps us to do that in a very clear and stark way, in the context of our mortality. That is why we receive ashes today; we are literally wearing our mortality on our forehead. With that framework we can see life a little more clearly.
 
In the Gospel we heard Jesus talk about three traditional practices or disciplines that were well-known to all Jews of the first century: alms-giving to the poor, prayer, and fasting. These disciplines are still core practices for Christians; that’s why we hear about them on Ash Wednesday. These traditional Lenten disciplines are all inter-related. When we fast from food that is expensive (say a nice juicy steak), we are supposed to take the money that we would have spent on that steak and give it to someone else in need. And of course, when we give to the needy, it reminds us to pray for them and their concerns, as well. And praying for others reminds us that we should be praying for ourselves, also. As we pray for ourselves and become for open to God we are led into further Christian spiritual practices. The Lenten disciplines are all of a piece.
 
Jesus has something to say about these three particular practices. He says we should do them simply, for God. He tells to do them “forgetfully” – not to pay attention to ourselves fasting, praying, giving – at least as much as we are able not to watch ourselves. The idea is that we don’t want to draw the attention of others to what we are doing.
 
The goal of these spiritual disciplines is integrity; that means having our outward appearance and our inner reality match up, be in alignment with each other as much as possible.
 
Jesus mentions the word “reward.” He says that God will repay us for what he sees us do in “secret,” in private, known only to us. We don’t know what that reward will be; Jesus doesn’t tell us. But we certainly know that one result of these disciplines is that we will get to know God better. That’s the general outcome, that applies to everyone; but there are other things that may happen to us as each of us needs, depending on what it is that should be developed further in us. Some of the results that we might need may an increase in humility, or faithfulness, or peacefulness, or strength. We might need to be more courageous, more generous, more patient or honest. Perhaps we need to be more trusting or compassionate.
 
But all of these character traits and spiritual growth and development only happen when we are rooted and grounded in Christ. And we do this by getting our priorities straight, by focusing on Jesus, by being his apprentices. This is the road and the task before us this Lent. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2017