A Homily for the First Sunday in Lent

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on February 18, 2024, the First Sunday in Lent.

Perhaps, after singing The Great Litany, you swallowed hard, glanced over at your neighbor with a startled look and asked yourself, “Good Gracious! What have I gotten myself into?” At least I hope you did. Properly understood according to the reformer’s law/gospel distinction, the law that we hymn together these weeks during the season of Lent is a most beautiful gift to us that opens the door to true Gospel freedom, sweet assurance, comfort, the peace that passeth understanding: the source of our loving service to our neighbor. “What? The law? How?” we ask. How can the law taste sweeter than honey in our mouths? Best to address these difficult questions head on.

Be very clear on the purpose of the law. It’s purpose is to reveal our sinfulness, our alienation from God, and our need for someone other than ourselves to work in us, to gift to us, a righteousness we can never, ever, ever, perform under our own steam: “Incline our hearts to keep this law,” we say. Not: “Ok. Sounds good. This is going to be hard, but if I really rein myself in, buckle-down, and stay on-task, I think I can pull this off.” But: “This is utterly impossible! Whatever am I going to do?” You are right to glance at your neighbor with barely contained discomfiture spreading across your face. Especially in light of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount where the law is intensified to such a degree as to make its successful performance a complete non-starter: 

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. (Matthew 5: 21-22)

Combine that with James’ statement—“For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it” (2:10)—and the full force of the law is made apparent. I dare say this should, at the very least, give us pause. 

I remember hearing a sermon in Philly at our parish church on, “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect,” all about how perfect doesn’t really mean perfect. It means, instead: “whole,” “integrated,” “authentic.” It means someone with “firm boundaries,” who eats a plant-based diet, and practices good “self-care.” We are apparently simply to do our level best (usually our version of what our best is for us, or what the echo chamber of our “friends” deems best) and God will give us a pass. It’s a common move in the mainline denominations. Sunday after Sunday, we soft-peddle the law (often out of an unacknowledged anti-semitism) and as a result quickly dispense with our need for a Savior. If sin is not a problem, its cure, its remedy, its defeat in the person and work of Jesus Christ is merely of passing interest. This is captured nicely by H. Richard Neibuhr in 1937 on the brink of WW II during the rise of National Socialism when he wrote rather stingingly: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” One year later Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

The law’s pupose is to show us that we are dead as doornails in our sins (exactly where God wants us so he can raise us to new life in Christ!). The law’s purpose is not to cajole us like some ruthless physical trainer into a grueling spiritual tune-up, 40 days in the wilderness on the Spiritual Peloton (with our progress charted daily, of course, and posted on Facebook) or “work harder” on our faith. The law is given to us to reveal our need for someone other than ourselves and our efforts. 

Even justice and mercy, we recall, roll down from above; justice and mercy, like everything else arrive as gift; they are received, undergone, worked in and through us. Justice and mercy are not simply human confections cooked up as we follow our own way (Isaiah 53:6). Justice and mercy are messianic, and eschatological–they are unveiled as always coming to us from a future we can’t imagine.

I keep being reminded of dear Paul, in the opening chapters of his Letter to the Romans who writes:

There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one (3:21).

This is a statement of basic Christian anthropological fact. I am a sinner in need of forgiveness, properly dead in my sins in desperate need of raising to new and eternal life by my Savior, Jesus. No way I can keep the law under my own steam by yanking on those spiritual bootstraps for 40 days and come out on the other end with every box ticked. The human situation under the law is admittedly bleak. And if this were all we had, we would be right to fall into despair. 

But, through the love of God–whose property it is always to have mercy–this is decidedly NOT all we have. The law shows us our sin, our alienation, our captivity, our false gods, our self-reliance, and self-imprisonment. The Good News of the Gospel is that God has come to us. He is disclosed to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ (our only mediator) as a trustworthy God, a covenanting God who remembers not our sins, a God of the Promise whose mercy and loving-kindness are to everlasting. “God,” says Barth

wills to be ours, and He wills that we should be His. He wills to belong to us and He wills that we should belong to Him. He does not will to be without us, and He does not will that we should be without him… He does not will to be Himself and other way than He is in relationship.

Healing, feeding, kneeling, meeting us in the dark night of our deepest wilderness need just as we are with a towel tied around his waist and wash basin at the ready, Jesus gives all of himself to us that the perfect obedience of his surrendered transparency to the Father’s will, his death and resurrection, his trampling down of death by death, his “suffering for sins once for all,” as Peter puts it, might be given, for free, to all (no exceptions) for our salvation unto eternal life.

And so this season of Lent, the challenge is not to do something or not do something. Often doing and giving something up can be self-deceptively clever ways to keep ourselves and our efforts, our faith at the center of the God-who-speaks’ story. Lent is a time when we consent to letting God be God for us and listen and let him speak: in word and sacrament, in prayer, in fetching hot coffee and a wool blanket for a neighbor. Lent is a time (like all times) when we receive the free gift of grace and rest in the home free, safe and sound, accomplished work of Jesus Christ. Everything else is shifting sand. More than that, we rest not even in our faithfulness or obedience, which go up and down like yo-yo on a seemingly hourly basis. No, we rest in the faithfulness of Christ to us. We rest in the covenanting, promising, mercy, and goodness of God who won’t let us go. Who grips us in the fireman’s hold of belovedness. Who draws and drags us to himself in the person of Jesus–“Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give rest to your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

These are what Thomas Cranmer calls the “Comfortable Words.” Not a passing comfort like when we roll over and find a position for our heads on the too squishy pillow in the middle of the night… only to wake up restless and stiff-necked 20 minutes later. The comfort, assurance, and certainty (a bad word amongst Episcopalians) that we receive as Promise, is declared, is pronounced over us and emblazoned in the sky as sheer gift from completely outside and beyond all of our human frameworks of giving up something for Lent or buckling down and working harder. Christ’s faithfulness to us doesn’t come or go, for Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and in him we are presented with our faults and foibles solidly intact to God as holy and blameless, spotless, and without blemish. We are free in Christ to approach the throne of glory with boldness, brashness, and no small amount of insouciance. Barth, again, offering his interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Thou hast made us promises, thou hast commanded us to pray; and here I am, coming not with pious ideas or because I like to pray (perhaps I do not like to pray), and I say to thee what thou hast commanded me to say, ‘Help me with the necessities of life.’ Thou must do so; I am here.

Can you imagine saying that to God? Can we imagine a life where we tell God we don’t like to pray and even quite dislike the season of Lent all the while brazenly asking (telling?) God to give us the necessities of life and reminding God of God’s promise? How is such ease with God possible? Only in the simple trust that everything we need, want, desire, yearn, long and thirst for is found in Christ and Christ alone–the water bursting from the stone, the light in the darkness, the Good Shepherd who never fails to find the one who admits they’ve passed the same landmark three times now, and the GPS is… recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.

Which makes me wonder… when we fast from, and repent of doing more and giving things up, and all the ways we are constantly putting ourselves always at the center of the story are revealed as so much dust, what is this season of Lent, actually? Might it simply be openly acknowledging our inveterate propensity for self-reliance, and self-justification, and resting and nesting instead in our need for a Savior who declares us righteous, beloved, in Him? Might that spindly reed of need, of calling out to Jesus our brother be the wilderness we are called to embrace? Might the simple admission of our need for help, voicing our longing, yearning, and thirst for some place to firm stand, be the true fast that the Lord declares? 

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Can we let the Spirit pray those words? Can we let the Spirit pray us into the Kingdom come near–nearer than near? Resting and nesting in the strong name of Jesus and only Jesus, calling us to himself and searching us out to lay on hands, to feed, wash, heal, save, and bless… nothing hidden, nothing lacking in his place of springs! Food indeed and drink indeed–given so that it can be wantonly, prodigally, and indiscriminately shared with our neighbor.

Amen.