First Sunday in Lent, 2024
Grace and Peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.
I’m thrilled to be your “guest” preacher this morning! Though you all know me as the Director of Christian Education here at St. Matthew, so I’m not coming from too far away.
For those of you who were unable to be at the adult forum a couple weeks ago where I shared about my call story, I recently graduated from Luther Seminary, an ELCA seminary in St. Paul, MN and I have been approved by the church to seek my first call as a pastor – or as people outside the church would say – my first job, as a pastor in the ELCA.
So, I am very excited to be back in a pulpit this morning exploring God’s Word as we heard it today in our Scripture readings from Genesis, Psalm 25 and the Gospel of Mark.
At the beginning of Lent each year we hear of Jesus’s baptism and then being driven out into the wilderness for forty days where he was tempted by Satan, accompanied by wild beasts, and waited upon by angels – as Mark reports. Our church tradition uses Jesus’s time in the wilderness – forty days – as the blueprint for our Lenten season of the 40 days leading up to Easter. The clock begins counting down on Ash Wednesday and we enter into a different spiritual space – a new kind of time – as we journey alongside Christ toward death on the cross.
Our readings this morning give us clues as to what this “different kind of spiritual space” or “new kind of time” might mean for us. I think God is speaking directly to us through these scriptures telling us: Be brave these 40 days! I am here with you! God is saying, take courage to turn in on yourself for a time of introspection. Look at the challenging parts of your inner life! Look at the wild beasts that accompany you in your life and look at them with courage because I, your God, have bound myself up with your success, your forgiveness, and your flourishing!
So, let’s turn to our passage from Genesis. Noah, his family and two of every kind of creature find themselves at the end of a great deluge – a huge flood – that has wiped every other living thing off the face of known creation.
In the midst of this, Noah hears God speaking a new promise: God says, “I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you […] never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” This is the very first Covenant that God makes with creation.
Covenants are like contracts, there are at least two partners in a covenant relationship who agree to certain terms. In this first Covenant relationship between creation and God – there is only one covenant partner who has obligations: God.
God has just put limits on Godself! God has just promised all of creation that God will be restrained from reenacting this awesome power of total destruction. And God does this out of pure grace. It is a pure gift to creation – there is no exchange taking place between members of creation to ensure God remembers God’s promise.
And this grace from God, shines a light like a million-watt lightbulb onto us! This brilliant light is both warm and soothing and it is also so bright that it is revealing. It exposes us to our deepest core.
The sheer goodness, the brightness of God’s grace exposes to us all the things for which God previously sent the flood to destroy! The wanton abuse of creation, killing, wars, destruction, an inequitable distribution of basic resources like clean water and food, the hoarding and greed of economic power, the public and often celebrated disregard and dehumanization of people - these are all still problems. God’s brightness and grace also exposes our own inner sins and guilt - the depths of which we know individually.
We might confess that God has ample reason for another total re-boot of creation…
But instead, God has bound Godself up with us in creation in a new way. In this Covenant with Noah, Noah’s descendants (that’s you and I) and with all living things, God has shown us deep and brilliant mercy and grace by promising to never destroy creation ever again even when we keep messing it all up.
In this great promise we have both been exposed and we have also been freed. We now know God is bound up with our success and is our biggest champion! Even when we fail, when we stumble, when we sin, we know that God is not going to be “destroyer” but “lover.”
So, we have been freed to look with courage and confidence at our sinfulness because we do not need to try to hide it away from God in fear that God will destroy because we know that God will LOVE.
THIS, my friends, is the “new spiritual space” and “the new time” that we have entered. A time where we can stare at the wild beasts that are our sins - our mistakes, the ways we’ve hurt people, the ways we’ve hurt ourselves - directly in the eye because we have been wrapped up in God’s mercy, grace and love so tightly that we can repent of those sins, say we are sorry for those sins, and we know that they will become like nothing.
Our sins will become like nothing because we know that our Lenten wilderness journey leads us ultimately to the Cross of Christ where all sin went to die.
We are being asked this season to be brave, take courage and look our most challenging sins in the eye like a wild beast. We can have the confidence of God being totally wrapped up with us in this experience. Our sins have been exposed by God’s sheer grace and we now have the power – through God – to hang those sins on the Cross of Christ and crucify them. For when we go with Christ to the cross, we are also certain that we go with Christ to the resurrection.
So this Lent, let’s go with confidence and courage knowing that God’s grace already abounds for us. Let’s go into the wilderness with Jesus, exposing the works of the devil in our lives, confronting our sins knowing that through the sheer power
of God’s grace, God has called on us to look those beasts in the eye and change. As Jesus says in our text: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.”
We know that in the end, God’s love will abound – that is the good news! God has showed us that promise today in the covenant with Noah and will show us that promise in 40 days with the power of new life in resurrection.
The courageous journey is now what lies between.
Amen.
Ryan Heckman | February 18, 2024