Year C, Lent 3 (Ex. 3:1-15, Luke 13:1-9)
(Video starts at 20:20)
May the words and my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. AMEN
Good Morning –
The lectionary gives us two interesting readings today – one from Exodus and one from Luke. The Old Testament reading continues the theme of God’s divine revelation. Here, the voice in the burning bush reveals itself to be the great I AM. God simply IS. All things come from God. All things are sustained by God. And all things exist within God. This revelation is the most sublime statement in all of Scripture.
In Luke’s Gospel, we have Jesus relating two occurrences – one where Pilate ordered the massacre of certain pilgrims in the Temple and a story about the fall of a tower in Jerusalem on a crowd of people. One is a story of moral evil, and one is a story of natural evil. Jesus’s advice is that we should repent and return to God, not tomorrow, but immediately. Otherwise, we will perish.
In reflecting on the readings in preparation for today, I realized that the connection between these two readings is the quintessential Gospel story, best articulated by St. Athanasius of Alexandria in his book “On the Incarnation,” written in about 318 AD. In the book, Athanasius gives us his vision of why God became Human. In short, our fallen human nature subjects us to the evil of death and non-existence. God became one of us and took on our fallen human nature so that we can become as God is – fully existent as the great I AM. If you have never read “On the Incarnation,” please go read it. It can be found online, or you can order the book. It may be the greatest, most accessible work in all of Christian literature.
If you have ever read C. S. Lewis’s fictional book “The Great Divorce,” he draws on Athanasius’s understanding of sin and salvation as the basis of his work. For Lewis, God created us to be dazzling, radiant, and immortal creatures, pulsating with unimaginable energy and joy and wisdom. Sin, however, reduces our existence – leaving us ghost-like, transparent, and thin as smoke.
In an attempt to bring all these streams together – Moses, Jesus, Athanasius, and Lewis – I read through today’s bulletin and realized that the Eucharistic Rite (Prayer C, expansive language) that we are using during Lent has already done this for me. Apparently, the Prayerbook writers also read Athanasius. Therefore, I will use our liturgy as the outline for my sermon today. So, please turn to page 11 of your bulletin. Follow along with the reading. We begin:
At your command, all things came to be: shining light and unfolding darkness; the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home; by your will they were created and have their being.
As Christians, we are called to believe that all things are created by God, through the Word, and given life by the Spirit. God creates out of nothingness, ex nihilo as the Latin phrase says. Not only did God create out of nothingness, but nothing comes into being without God, and nothing exists outside of God. As Paul says in his sermon in Athens in Acts 17 – God is in whom all things live, and move, and have their being. When the voice in the burning bush discloses its identity to Moses as the Great I AM, this is what the voice proclaims. God alone exists. God simply is. God not only exists outside of time and space, but time and space exist within God. God is Love, and Light, and the Life and all things.
From the primal elements you brought forth the human race and blessed us with the capacity for memory, reason, and skill, you made us stewards of your creation.
With the human race, God takes creation a step further. He creates us not like the irrational animals, but makes us in the Divine Image – the Imago Dei – and gives us a share of the Divine Power to Reason, to Love, and to Create. Thereby, we are given great responsibility, not only for ourselves but for all of creation. As Psalm 8 says, we are made a little lower than the angels of the heavenly realm. This is who you are Divinely intended to be. This is who you are in your essential nature.
But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another.
Think about what happens when we turn away from the one in whom we were created and have our being. For Athanasius and Lewis, this turning away (which we call sin) is the process of our becoming the nothingness that preceded creation. In turning away from God, we are like a light that is slowly dimming toward darkness. Or a love that is slowly growing cold. Consider an ember being removed from the fire, and watch as its light, heat, and life dissipate and disappear into nothingness. This is the effect that sin has on our lives. Death and despair is simply the natural consequence of our moving away from the I AM. We have a loss of communion with God and we have a loss of communion with one another.
Again and again you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous law. In the fullness of time you sent your Son, born of a woman, to be our Savior. He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. By his death he opened to us the way of freedom and peace.
Sin is not a legal problem. God is not a lawyer. (In fact, the only lawyer mentioned in the Old Testament is Satan.) Rather, sin is a death and despair problem. It is more like a disease. The problem we face is not about doing wrong and being punished, the problem is our falling toward non-being. The problem is that as we move away from the source of all things, we simply cease to be. The Divine Radiance within us grows dim.
This problem is compounded by our inability to rectify the situation on our own. As today’s Collect reads: we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. The issue is not a matter of trying harder and asking for God’s forgiveness when we fail. I don’t know about you, but I try as hard as I can, and I always come up short.
The solution as Athanasius writes, does not lie in ourselves; rather, it lies in Jesus’ Incarnation. The solution to our problem of falling away from God into nothingness is God being born of a woman. It is God taking upon himself our body and our nature, which tend toward corruption, death, and nothingness. In uniting the Divine’s immortality and incorruptibility with our fallen state, he restores us to incorruption and to life. The best example I can give is the treatment for leukemia. When a person suffers from the disease, the cure is to replace the defective bone marrow with healthy bone marrow from a donor. In the Incarnation, Christ replaces our defective human nature and a perfected human nature.
And by surrendering himself to death, he conquers death. In his death, he opens for us the way of freedom to choose to be with God, and he opens to us the way of peace to be in a relationship with God. He opens for us the way of returning from non-existence to the Great I AM.
He is the Lamb of God who takes away the corruption, and the failings, and the fallenness, and the non-existence of the World.
All of this is just a long introduction to a discussion of Luke’s Gospel, the nature of repentance, and how we are to understand Jesus’s instruction. The essential nature of repentance is not about telling God we are sorry and that we will try harder next time. When Jesus instructs his disciples to repent or perish, he is not telling us to behave like good little boys and girls or God will get us. Jesus is not talking about rule-breaking and punishment. Rather, what Jesus is talking about is being in a relationship with God or suffering the consequences of that absence, which is perishing into non-existence.
The Greek word translated as “repentance” is metanoia. In Greek metamorphosis means a change in form, and metanoia means a change in the intellect or the heart. The Greek word for the intellect or heart is “nous” which has that sense of that Divine portion within ourselves.
Repentance is that change towards the image of God in whom we are created, but which we lost, and now regained through the work of Christ. Repentance is not concerned with clearing our legal record. Rather it is concerned with our being changed into the likeness of Jesus. Repentance is about God’s work in creating in us a clean heart and renewing a right spirit within me and within you.
True repentance is about discovering that we cannot earn God’s love. It is about us letting go of our overdeveloped sense of self-righteousness and judgment of ourselves and others. It is about us letting go of ourselves and letting God, through Christ’s incarnation and the work of the Holy Spirit, turn our hearts back to the I AM disclosed to Moses on the mountaintop.
Therefore, we praise you, joining with the heavenly chorus, with prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and with those in every generation who have looked to you in hope, to proclaim with them your glory.
Repentance is the acknowledgment of the free gift of pure existence that God gives to each of us. It is the foundation of all thanksgiving and the reason why it is right to give God our thanks and praise. It is our acceptance of God’s grace in each of our lives.
The repentance that Christ calls us to, is a life of communion and relationship with the Great I AM and a life of communion and relationship with others. It is a life where our hearts are filled with joy and peace, where we are possessed by God’s love, and we triumph in his grace. It is a life of radiant, imperishable existence. It is a life of unimaginable joy, praise, and thanksgiving.
The Beauty of the Episcopal Church is that every Sunday in the Eucharist we are given the opportunity to turn toward God, to repent, and to accept the work of Jesus Christ. As you come forward later this morning to receive the elements of the body and blood of Jesus, know that you are receiving the transformative grace of God and that you are becoming what you receive. True repentance begins with this reception. True Repentance begins immediately.
Thanks be to God. Amen.