18 Mar Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, Year C

Sunday 16th March, 2025

The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.

“The Lord is my light, my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the refuge of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” These words which we heard this morning, from Psalm 27, were ones that I chose to have as part of my Solemn Profession back in December. To me they encapsulate something vital about the whole Christ-life, which is to say, not just the Religious Life, but rather this journey with God to which we are all called, and to which we give a special attention during this season of Lent.

These words express something similar to a phrase of Paul’s from the letter to the Philippians: “our citizenship is in heaven”. For me, both these ideas stand as an ongoing reminder that my life is hidden with Christ in God: For all that I cannot avoid being ensnared in them, I fundamentally do not belong to the powers and principalities of this world, to their power structures, to their endless quest for growth and more, to their delusional devotion to satisfying their own hungers at any cost. My citizenship – our citizenship – in heaven sets us free to live as friends of Christ, and as friends of the cross of Christ, as those who become co-imitators with Paul and with so many countless others down the millennia.

But co-imitators of what, exactly? Well, that’s a huge question, and not one I have any hope of answering fully in one sermon, but what we can tackle is what might we take from the glimpse of Jesus we get in today’s brief gospel passage.

At this point in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. It’s far from the first time he’s visited – we know his family went up for the festival each year – but this time is different. There’s a threat present, in the form of Herod, and the Pharisees, who had no love themselves for the ruling regime, are trying to warn Jesus off. The danger from Herod is real here – he’s already killed John the Baptist – but what the Pharisees don’t know, can’t see, is that this danger is no threat to Jesus because his life and death do not belong to Herod.

Jesus is on God’s time, and God’s plan, not Herod’s, or Pilate’s, or the Pharisees’. Herod may have plans, but so does God, and Jesus has God’s work to do: casting out demons and performing cures. And, once this is done, he will continue in his obedience to God’s plan, all the way to the cross and beyond.

And how about us? Where is our obedience given? How is our love of God enabling us to love those around us better? A blog post I read earlier in the week pointed out that loving God more does not mean that we love anything or anyone else less – it’s not a zero sum game. Loving God more means that we love others better. Loving God more means giving a greater obedience to all areas of our life, obedience here shading into its Benedictine flavour, a deep listening that enables the fruitfulness of our lives.

At its best our life with God therefore becomes a virtuous circle: love of God begets love of others, begets love of God. And if that sounds daunting, impossible even, then we would do well to turn to Genesis, to the covenant made between God and Abram.

This encounter between God and Abram comes fairly early on in their relationship – Abram is still Abram, and has just returned from rescuing Lot, his nephew, and being blessed by King Melchizedek of Salem. He has refused the bounty offered him by the King of Sodom, affirming his commitment to “the Lord, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth”.

And out of this commitment comes what reads to us like a rather strange and gory ritual. Abram takes a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove and a young pigeon, cuts the three larger animals in two and arranges the halves opposite one another.

This ritual was literally the “cutting of a covenant.” To make a covenant in the ancient world, animals were cut in half, and then the one, or the ones, making the covenantal commitment walked down the middle between the animals. Note that in this ritual, it was the Lord — in the form of a smoking pot and a flaming torch — who passed down the middle and thus was the one making the promise. It was the Lord who “cut a covenant” with Abram, not Abram with the Lord.

The symbolism of this covenant ritual is that the one making the promise passes between the dead animals as a ritual promise that should they be unfaithful to the terms of the covenant, they are to be cut in half just as the sacrificed animals have been.

In other words, when God passed between the cleaved animals and between the dead birds, God was saying to Abram, “I promise to give you both descendants and the land. I pledge my very life — the life of God — as surety of this promise. If I fail to keep this promise, let me be slain just as the goat, the sheep and the heifer were slain.” Wow.

In both this story and in Jesus’ coming passion, we see God pledging to do whatever it takes to fulfil the promises made. God commits God’s very life to the people God created, actually and literally. And this pledge is freely made, freely given by God – not by us.

Most if not all of us here today find a sense of stability in this place, with this community, whether we have formally promised that or not. What I am hugely reassured by here is the reminder that this stability derives first and foremost from God, God who is so fundamentally for us, so much in love with us, so committed to us, that God in Christ will go all the way through life and death to make real the promises of God, to make real our citizenship in heaven. The more that we come to know this, the more we are able to build our lives on a true and lasting foundation.

And to return to Paul, that ‘we’ is important. It’s never just about me in isolation. We are called to live this Christ-life, together. Paul says, “join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.” The image this puts me in mind of – one which I readily confess has its limits – is something like a spiritual magpie, looking at where the lives of others are bearing fruit, and seeing what we might take and learn and adapt from them. In a talk by Rowan Williams that we listened to some years ago, he said that “the holiness of one is the gift of all”.

How would it be, I wonder, if we could stop being threatened by others, if we could stop looking at those around us with an eye to pointing out the slips and criticizing the “failures”? How might it be if we instead looked intently for what we might wish to emulate in the other? If we were not only open to but actively embracing and seeking out the conversion that such an attitude would bring?

The refrain to the psalm we used today – “in the shadow of your wings, I will sing your praises, O Lord” – does not actually come from Psalm 27, but is an image that we find in various places throughout scripture, including in today’s gospel reading. In it, we are reminded once again of a God who has ‘skin in the game’, who yearns to draw us to Godself. We are reminded that the promise that we, along with Abraham, are heirs to, is built on the foundation of the timeless character of God. It is God’s covenant that we participate in; like Abram it is vital that we remain attentive to God’s call on our lives, participating in the dance we will be drawn in to, joining with God as faithful improvisers. I pray that we continue on our Lenten journey, that as we know ourselves hidden in the shadow of God’s wings, we too may be born aloft on God’s pinions, set free to live in God’s light, God’s salvation, as citizens of heaven above. Amen.

Sr. Jessica

Image: Hochhalter, Cara B.. As a Hen Gathers, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59275 [retrieved March 18, 2025]. Original source: Cara B. Hochhalter.