Thursday, February 22

Receiving Ourselves as the Beloved in Repentance: Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

Scriptures: 
  • Genesis 9:8-17  • 
  • Psalm 25:1-10  • 
  • 1 Peter 3:18-22  •
  • Mark 1:9-15
  • As we begin our 40 day sojourn in the wilderness, we are once again facing violent death at the hand of a mass murder with an automatic rifle. Human violence and God’s violent response lurks behind our Scriptures in the story of the flood and Noah. But our texts don’t directly address this violence or the debates around gun control. However, the promise to Noah, given in our baptism, and fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ gives us some clues how we should respond and act in this moment. The practices of Lent direct us to respond from the place self-examination recognizing the temptations that lie in self-righteous responses to such tragic and lamentable events.. As we do this we can be assured Jesus has gone ahead of us and was tempted by Satan. Elsewhere we are told that Jesus was tempted in every way as we are, and he did not sin.
    As we take this stance of self-examination I bring our attention to a call for transformation: Kelley Hayes wrote in Truth Out that both Democratic and Republican scripts in response to mass shooting, both those who call for gun control and those who defend the Second Amendment, are caught in an ineffectual loop of point and counter point. Hayes’ point isn’t that what keeps us from doing anything about gun violence is the fault of both sides. Rather, Hayes is after something deeper than gun control legislation - transformation. The problem isn’t just guns, gun lovers, and gun manufacturers and the NRA , but a wider culture of violence. Gun violence in our schools and in our streets is connected to the violence our nation uses across the globe. Hayes doesn’t say this but I will add the threat of violence the United States has wielded against the world as the only Nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon is part of this culture of violence. The historical fact is that it was the U.S. not any other nation that first developed and used these weapons of mass destruction and continues to threaten the world with the mass violence of nuclear war. We are a violent nation, for reasons far beyond the gun violence of private citizens. Yet our military might that isn’t the only issue. Hayes says that given the state of our justice system, any law criminalizing gun ownership will disproportionately effect and do further violence to communities of color, especially Black communities. This point unveils the racist fear of many gun enthusiasts, but it also calls into question liberal solutions that rely upon criminalization to solve our social problems. Hayes doesn’t give policy advice in the article, nor will I. I see this call for transformation as a Lenten call. In response to violence and death we don’t need more violence we need transformation. We need different desires, we need to die to our violence and the various ways our violence expresses itself, including in our military, in our police, in our criminal justice system, and in mass incarceration. What we need is transformation. We need the transformation that is rooted in repentance. We need to turn from our violence, all manner of it, even that which we call legitimate because it is wielded by a uniform and has the sanction of the government and its citizens.
    How then do we begin such repentance, and move towards transformation?
    As we begin Lent we are reminded of the waters of baptism. Before being driven into the wilderness by the Spirit, Jesus is baptized. Peter tells us that the waters of the Great Flood prefigure the waters of baptism: things are washed away, drowned, so the new can come.
    In Baptism, and these Scriptures, Death, our death, lingers. Paradoxically, there is also life, affirmation, and promise. We must sit with our baptism in order to understand this relationship between Death and Life. Baptism provides us the means to find the divide between the appearance of life and true life.
    Baptism is a demarcation. The demarcation isn’t dependent upon the experience or memory of your baptism. This demarcation isn’t simply in time and space but can be found at any moment in your life. This moment and movement of a demarcation of death such when we pass through death to life is in every decision or choice we make. Are we living before or after baptism? Are we guilt ridden and ashamed, or standing with a clear conscience able to live as Christ the Beloved? This is the divide; the demarcation that exists at every moment. This is the meaning of baptism for we who have died in Christ and yet remain in the world of sin and death.
    Think for a moment of those things that you do or have done of which you are not proud, that you wish you wouldn’t do or hadn’t done. We can cling to these things, keep them as essential aspects of ourselves, focusing on them, returning to them again and again, either seeking to be sure we never do them or secretly treasuring them but attempting to keep them sequestered hidden from prying eyes. We may have long periods of not doing the thing, but if we don’t let them go, and die to those things, we find we never change
    (note: I’m not addressing actions resulting from mental illness or addiction. However, getting help and managing ones mental health and addiction may involve dying to a conception of oneself, so there is some application of baptism to such cases. However, above and in what follows, I’m focusing on those things that we have some control over and which aren’t rooted in a mental illness or addiction. if you have something around which you feel stuck and are uncertain if it is an issue of mental health or addiction, seek out professional psychiatric help or reach out to someone you know who has positively and successfully dealt with addiction in their lives. A well-trained pastor should also be able to direct you to a therapist or program, without judgement.).
    Through, Baptism we die to the self that does things we aren’t proud of, that we wish we didn’t do. We are given a clean conscience, a new start, we begin again and God promises us forgiveness and new life. In baptism we are joined with Christ and hear God say “You are my Beloved the one in whom I’m well pleased”. This is so because the self that fails, the self that harbors hatred, or lust, or rage that seeks to harm and destroy, the self that is apathetic towards others pain, who looks the other way, is washed away, drowned, in the flood of the Spirit, received in baptism and through faith in Christ.
    This is the good news: we baptized have a clean conscience, because we have died to all those things that weigh us down, over which we are ashamed and guilt ridden.
    But we know we still sin. We still do things of which we aren’t proud. What then do we make of our clean conscience and death to sin in baptism? The key is to remember that baptism isn’t just in the past, it isn’t just in time. Like all sacraments it takes place in time and space and within matter but it isn’t bound to time or to the rules of ordinary matter. The effect of your baptism is available to you every moment of every day. So, the question is on which side of the demarcation will you consistently stand? Which self are you going to pay attention to, and feed; the Old Self or the New Self, the Beloved who has died and was brought to life in Christ? Do we live in repentance continually seeing ourselves as dead, drowned in the waters of baptism, or do we live unrepentant on the other side of the waters, still waiting for our salvation, unsure and uncertain of who we are? If you are like me there is the temptation to identify with our failures, or shame, or guilt. We do this, rather than standing in the waters of our baptism and living as though we are the beloved of God, in whom God is well pleased. So take heart repent, be the beloved of God, with a clean conscience. Live as the one who is beloved, and in whom God is well pleased.
    You may say “Yes, I embrace this but I have some questions. What does the beloved desire, what does the beloved do, how does the beloved treat others? How do I know How to live?
    We find the answers in looking to the Gospels themselves: it is in the person of Jesus Christ. Under the guidance of the Spirit we too can be tempted and not sin. But we have to die to ourselves and let Christ live in us. We need to let the beloved of God take over our consciousness, be the foundation of our motives, and be the drive of our desires.
    Repent, turn from the focus on yourself and your shame or guilt or failings. Through repentance practice living differently. This is what the spiritual disciplines help us do. When you fast you are disciplining your desires through regulating one of the most basic human goods the desire for food to sustain us.  Through fasting, we come to a deep awareness of the desire, both its goodness how our desires can be guilt and shame producing. Through self-regulation and discipline we sluff off the Old Self that desires in guilt and shame, and we open ourselves to desire that is life giving and makes us whole. To meditate is to practice letting go, to learn who one is in silence before God, so then again we may learn to desire what God desires . Then there is the reading and study of Scripture so we can know from God what the Beloved does, and how the beloved pleases God. This is the discipline of lent, why we push against our desires and take 40 days to limit fulfilling our desires, even good desires like the desire for food.
    We must always begin and return to baptism which reminds us that this repentance begins in knowing we are loved. Remembering our baptism reminds us that God doesn’t see us in our guilt, shame, and failures, but God see’s us as God created us to be; whole, free, desiring our own and others life, wholeness, and health. This life while a gift comes with the cost of our death that we might live. 

    Living the life of the Beloved is continually entering the waters to die, that we and the world may have life. In this moment we hear God say “This is my beloved in whom I’m well pleased”. This Lent take up your discipline because you are loved, and you wish to know who that beloved of God truly is. Or to say it another way “Repent and believe the good news.” You are loved, act like it. Continue to die to the loveless self who hides from God, that you may have life. Amen

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