Second Sunday of Lent

Second Sunday of Lent                                                                      February 28, 2010

RCL, Year C                                                                                       Memorial Church

 

 

In the name of God, who desires to gather us together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. AMEN.

 

Herod—that old fox.

Jesus knew all about Herod.

The Herod in this story is Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great.

According to his father’s will, Herod received Galilee and Perea upon Herod the Great’s death.

The Romans wanted to make sure the Herod in our story today understood his subordinate status. So, the Romans did not allow him to use the title king—but called him a tetrarch…a rule of a quarter part.

Herod served at the pleasure of the emperor and the support for the Herodian dynasty from Rome was non-existent.

Herod knew this---and his fear of loss of power—combined with personality—led to pathological and paranoid behavior.

 

Jesus knew all this.

And Jesus had no use for Herod Antipas.

It is interesting that during his Galilean ministry, Jesus NEVER entered two cities particularly associated with Herod: Sepphoris (Herod’s first capital) and Tiberias (the second capital). 

And Jesus knew that Herod was opposed to the values of the gospel.

Jesus knew that Herod did not want this increasingly popular disciple of John the Baptist to make headway with his effort to bring the Galilean people over to Romans ways and allegiance. 

But there was more about Herod that Jesus did not trust.

By calling Herod an “old fox” Jesus tapped into the culture’s allusion to a fox-like personality. One that is clever, sly and unprincipled.

The Old Testament associates the fox with destruction (Ezekiel) and Jewish dietary law classified the jackal as an unclean animal.

While Jesus dismissed Herod as powerless to prevent him from carrying out his mission on earth, he knew that he was a dangerous force. (from Commentary for this Sunday’s lectionary in Feasting on the Word)

 

Luke places this story and the following lament over Jerusalem at the end of a collection of parables which are all about a call to repentance. 

An appropriate topic for our Lenten season. 

 

Jesus, as John the Baptist before him, called for the repentance of sins as a critical part of his ministry to building the Kingdom of God.

What might this mean.

We often think of sin as “specific infractions” that lead to a state of being estranged from God. (Paul Tillich)

Being in a “state of sin,” predisposes us for committing more sins.

Sin has been described as “the essence of sin as the failure to trust God in the midst of our anxiety.”

Soren Kierkegaard speaks of this failure to trust in terms of “fear and despair of not being ourselves while in the presence of God.” As Erv+ preached last Sunday, being a goat rather than a tiger.

Paul Tillich developed this theme by thinking of sin as a failure to exert the “courage to be.”

But in Luke’s Gospel today, Jesus is moving towards a topic that modern Christians steer away from.

He speaks of repentance of sins in the face of evil. Of clinging fast to the work of God with evil all around. With evil within.

 

Confronting Evil is the topic of our Tri-Church Lenten series on Tuesday nights this year. While our liturgies and scripture brought down from ancient times, speak to the reality of evil and its impact on our lives, “the church and religiously committed individuals have tended to leave evil unacknowledged as a part of their own worlds and to ignore and deny the depths of evil’s impact on people.”

In other world, evil is somewhere out there….in another part of Baltimore, in another part of the country, in another part of the world.

But Jesus knows that evil is right here—in the human heart—and we have to be on guard for that evil and the evil all around.

Peter Gomes has said, “One of the great acts of transference in modern times is the transference of the responsibility for evil and sin from individuals to institutions and society at large.”

Evil is out there. Not a part of our daily life.

But Theologian Ted Peters notes that there is a spectrum of evil that starts out with everyday, plain old sin and moves from unintentional, passive and unaware behavior of the evil within and around us—to the kind of evil that we associate with Hitler and other regimes—evil that is intentional, active, cold blooded and aware.

In fact, Peters has seven steps marking the transition from sin—being disconnected to God—to evil—being radically disconnected to God, self and neighbor.

In order to get drastically disconnected, we start with anxiety, move to unfaith, then pride, lust, self-justification, cruelty and blasphemy. (quotes from Trauma and Evil: Healing the Wounded Soul by J. Jeffrey Means, Chapter One, p. 9ff)

You don’t get to be Herod or Hitler all at once…at some point, you are born a beloved child of God and start down a road where eventually there is often no return.

Most of us catch ourselves before we get too far.

That’s why there is Lent.

And the daily practices of our faith.

 

This year, Lent comes at a particular important time.

On Thursday, I happened to mention more than once that there must be a full moon or something.

In fact, there is a full moon tonight. The third full moon since the winter solstice and the last of the winter season.

Our ancestors knew it as the Lenten Moon, or the Sap Moon—suggesting the first movement of sap in the sugar maple.

It is also know as the Worm Moon—where the first appearance of worm castings are seen in the soil signaling the revival of plant life, the return of migrating birds, and yes, beloved spring.

I wasn’t thinking of THAT kind of moon when I made my comment last week.

I made it because everywhere I went, it just seemed that people were howling at one another, howling at life.

With a horrendous winters snowstorms just past, another potential snow was forecast just as we had begun finally to plow out from the last and get back to schedule.

Schedules that were already way behind and out of whack.

It all just seemed to be too much.

 

And when things get to be too much, humans are really at risk for Satan, the tempter, the evil in the world.

I’ve noticed it driving in the car—with the way people drive and look out or don’t for other cars.

I’ve noticed it in interchanges in the store or on the street.

With neighbors over parking spaces and shoveling.

Yes, it’s easy to take out our frustration on those we probably won’t see again.

It’s easy to demonize the other we don’t know.

 

But how I think evil can insidiously come into our lives in a bigger way—is not with the stranger. It is with those we know and love best.

We’ve all done it.

Just when things have gotten to be too much, we take out our frustration with the people we love the most. We say things that we really don’t want to say. Sometimes we cross the line with words that once said, cannot be retrieved. Relationship ends or are damaged beyond repair. Or we just limp along never quite the same.

We’ve all done it with parents, children, spouses, partners, good and trusted friends.

We let it loose in a big way.

Sometimes we recover, but the danger is that we cannot after we say things that we really didn’t mean to say.

 

I remember when I was a teenager that happened to me with my father.

I was just minding my own business—more or less.

I can’t remember what triggered the explosion from my father.

I imagine that I had thrown my coat on the floor or put my glass on the table without a coaster or spent a little too much time on the family phone that evening talking with a friend.

But my father came into the room and just let me have it. Everything about me was wrong. I wasn’t showing responsibility. I was careless. I was sloppy. It all came raining down. As a final comment, he sent me—then about 16 years old—to my room.

 

Sometime the next day, Daddy came into my room and apologized. He wasn’t particularly good at that. He said, “I’m sorry sweetie, I didn’t mean those things. I love you. Let’s forget about it and move on.”

 

Even in my self-contained teenage mind, I knew why it had happened.

Once the dust cleared, I knew that he had too much on his plate.

He had retired just a year before.

A year before that my mother had died and his mother—in her nineties—had come to live with us.

In the midst of deep grief and loneliness, he was trying to care for a teenage daughter and an elderly mother all at once.

In the morning, after getting me off to school, he would bathe his own mother and make sure she was set for the day. Before he knew it, I would be home expecting dinner and support. My father was 65 years old.

I understood.

And he understood when I finally blew my top one evening when I was in law school and desperately unhappy.

I got so mad I don’t even know WHAT I said.

He drove off into the night and before he got back home, I was on the phone to say I loved him.

We got through a lot of things my father and I—together—but of us in great grief. It was the love that conquered the limitedness that led to sin against the person we loved more than anyone in the whole world.

 

But sometimes we say things to one another and can’t seem to right the ship again.

As a 13 year old, I said things to my mother before she died that I wish I could take back.

All I can do is give it to God in prayer.

We say things to a spouse: “I don’t love you anymore.”

We hear things as a child: “You are fat.”

We say things to a good friend: “You are the problem in this relationship.”

Sometimes our own frustrations hurt others in ways that change the relationship forever.

We often feel that the only place we can let our guard down and howl at God is with the ones we love the most.

There is truth in this---but there is danger.

Great danger of coming into the tempter’s grasp.

We need to steer clear of this temptation—just as Jesus steered clear of Herod’s den.

 

Church communities are like our loved ones.

They are the place we go where we know we will be loved—no matter what.

Especially a community like Memorial Church.

Sometimes we let loose on someone we love---just because the world has been unfair and we are frustrated and afraid.

As your Rector, I know this.

I become frustrated and afraid too.

In the past week, I’ve seen an escalation of frustration and anger on many fronts.

I see blaming and I see Satan lurking by ready to leap into the fray.

 

Maybe it’s time to take a page from Jesus.

Take a breath.

Go to a quiet place.

And then be about our business.

But remember, as we go about our business-- be gentle with one another.

Especially the ones we love.

 

At my father’s funeral we sang the hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, I’ll close with this words:

 

And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us.

We will not for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.

The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him;

His rage we can endure, for lo! His doom is sure, one little word shall fell him.

 

And that word is: Jesus.

Give me Jesus. AMEN.