Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
February 29, 2004, The First Sunday in Lent , Year C
by The Reverend Peter Carey

Deuteronomy 16:1-11
Psalm 91
Romans 10:5-13
Luke 4:1-13

“I invite you, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Those are the familiar words which are addressed to each of us by the celebrant of the Ash Wednesday liturgy.  We are invited to observe a “holy Lent.” 

Lent can be a holy time because it provides us, when we allow it to do so, with special opportunities for God to work his holy work in us.  His work of transformation.

God’s work of transformation begins where we are.  Where we really are.  For that reason, the liturgy of Lent urges us to a deeper kind of self reflection than we usually practice.  Sometimes it’s an uncomfortable or even painful self examination. 

The liturgy of Lent urges us to confront our weaknesses and failures and sins.  It speaks of penance and of self-denial; of confession and absolution, and it calls us to a quieter, deeper type of prayer. 

But the liturgy of Lent doesn’t stop there.  It’s not just a time of  intro-spection or honest self-analysis, but it urges us to step beyond our sins and weaknesses and failures by rekindling in us the knowledge that God really wants to transform us and to transform the world around us into something better.

It reminds us that the real reason we need to pass through forty days in the desert is that we might arrive at Easter and at Resurrection.

That is God’s holy work during Lent.  A work of transformation.  A kind of divine makeover that God has in mind for us and for the world.  A “Divine Eye for a Sinful World.”

But first there must come introspection:  an honest assessment and an honest examination of conscience.

Our introspection and our examination of conscience began this morning in the Great Litany, when we cried out:  “From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all lack of charity, good Lord, deliver us.”

From all lack of charity, good Lord, deliver us.

Today’s collect, the collect for the First Sunday in Lent, puts it this way: “O God, you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save. 

“Let each one find you mighty to save.” 

And therein lies the challenge of Lent.

We have no problem, I think, in admitting that we’re weak and sinful or, as the collect says, “assaulted by many temptations.”  Who could deny it?  Our problem is not so much in the admission of  our sinfulness, but in the weakness of our faith that God can or will help us.  That He will transform us.  That He really can and will make us into better people.

We have no problem, I think, in admitting that it’s a pretty rotten world we live in, with war and poverty and ignorance and malice and exploitation on all sides.  Our problem is not in the admission of the terrible state of the world (who could deny it?) but in our faith that God can and really will remake our broken world.

So, the liturgy of Lent calls on us to do two things.  First, to examine our consciences, to admit our failures--to confront those things done and left undone--but then, to believe.  To believe that God will help us, to believe that our God is a mighty God whose heart is longing to remake us, and to remake the world.  To believe that we who have been cast down by our sins may be raised up by God’s grace.

I heard a wonderful story of that kind of faith a couple of weeks ago while I was attending a conference in Birmingham, Alabama, sponsored by the Episcopal Church Foundation.  The conference was called “Reconstructing Anglican Comprehensiveness” and was an attempt--a rather successful attempt I thought--to ask whether there might not still be common ground for Anglicans to stand on despite the issues that divide us.  Anglican, mostly Episcopalian, theologians, historians, and scripture scholars on both sides of the Robinson issue read papers and engaged in what I would characterize as a very high level and yet cordial and friendly debate.

But the remarks that had the profoundest effect on me were those given in an after-dinner talk, not by an Anglican, but by a Lutheran theologian-- Walter Bouman, who is one of the Lutheran Church’s leading experts on Anglicanism.  Pastor Bouman was, in fact, the principal author on the Lutheran side of the Concordat of Full Communion that was entered into several years ago by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church. 

Bouman spoke about an Anglican Eucharist he had attended  years ago before the collapse of apartheid in the Township of Soweto in South Africa.  He and the Anglican priest who brought him to the Mass were the only white people present.  It was a long and joyful affair in a packed church with singing and dancing combined with the stately words of the Book of Common Prayer.  The congregation and the preacher and the celebrant and the readers went back and forth from English to Hausa to Swahili and back again to English. And on and on the service rolled until they reached the canon of the Mass, when everything became quiet and the priest began to speak the words of consecration--in Afrikaans, the official language of apartheid!

Bouman was stunned.  Then he realized why.  He realized that they did it as a witness to their unshakable faith in the power of God.  To express their faith that what had been cast down could be raised up by the transforming power of God.  If the white people of their nation used that language to oppress them, well then, God could also use it to make Himself present among them.  The language of oppression and of the oppressor was transformed into the language of redemption and of the Redeemer.  It became the language of healing and of reconciliation:  “This is my Body, broken for you.  This is my Blood, poured out for you.”  In Afrikaans.

This is the kind of faith we need to ask for during this Lenton season, this holy season.  This season when God yearns to remake us and to transform us into something better--if only we will ask Him to do so.

It is so easy to become cynical about ourselves, to say that we can’t do any better, and it is even more easy to become cynical about the times we live in, to resign ourselves to the way things are.

We have just completed a week when the President of the United States, in order to seek political gain, called for the Constitution of our country to be altered so that an entire class of citizens might be permanently relegated to second-class status.

What a shameful, what a disgraceful, what a sad state of affairs.

And yet we must not be cast down by this.  We must not be crushed by this.  We must not even allow ourselves to become bitter or cynical because of this.

We must instead put our faith where the people of South Africa put their faith in their time of trial and tribulation.  We must put our faith in God.  A God who wants to transform us and to make us better and to make our country better and our world better and, at the end of the day, to bring all things to Himself.

Listen again to the words of today’s first reading, the Old Testament reading, from the Book of Deuteronomy:

“Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

The God of Abraham did it for the people of Israel.  The same God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ will surely do it for us!

Amen.

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