First Sunday in Lent

First Sunday in Lent – Year B (RCL) 2009
Genesis 9: 8 – 17; Psalm 25: 1 – 9; 1 Peter 3: 18 – 22; Mark 1: 9 – 15
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland, OR
Sunday, March 1, 2009

WASH ME AND I SHALL BE MADE CLEAN

Let us pray: Generous Jesus, we are not the people we ought to be. The results of our sin are all around us. You have given us a good garden, and look at the mess we have made of it. We have degraded and damaged our garden home, we have rebelled against your will for our world, and we have distorted your image in ourselves. Patient Jesus, keep working with us, on us and in us. Keep restoring your image in our faces. Wash us clean and rebirth us. Take our wounded world and re-create it. Take our lives and transform us. During these forty days, help us to do something about our sin. Amen.

(SUNG) AS I WENT DOWN IN THE RIVER TO PRAY, STUDYING
ABOUT THAT GOOD OLD WAY, AND WHO SHALL WEAR THE
STARRY CROWN, GOOD LORD SHOW ME THE WAY.

O, SISTERS LET’S GO DOWN, LET’S GO DOWN, COME ON
DOWN. O, SISTER’S LET’S GO DOWN, DOWN IN THE RIVER
TO PRAY.

Images of water and the powerful forces it exerts flooded through my brain as I read through the scriptures, which the Church has chosen for the first Sunday in Lent for Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary. If you have not seen the powerful cinematic images from O Brother Where Art Thou when the flooding of the countryside is used in baptismal imaging, I would recommend that you do so. My guess is that you will never view Baptism quite the same way again. Water, flooding and baptism are central images in the lectionary this morning.

In the Hebrew Scriptures we hear the end of the story of Noah and the flood, which is actually, quite violent in it’s depiction of the disappointment which the Hebrew God, Yahweh showers upon the people in retribution for their sins. After the flood, the first Covenant is entered into with the people of God which will allow them to eat of the flesh of animals, perhaps recognizing that humanity is blood thirsty in its eating habits, though murder is specifically prohibited. This is not necessarily the world as God intended it to be, but rather the world as God continues to work with the reality of human violence and sin. In solemn language, God makes a covenant and the rainbow is named as a sign, a deal of the covenant God has made with all humanity.

Indeed, the covenant is made with ALL humanity, not just Israel. It is made with all creatures on earth, including the animals, and it is made at God’s initiation – not at humanity’s initiation. A ‘covenant’ is a formal agreement, often between a superior and inferior party, the former ‘making’ or ‘establishing’ the bond with the latter. This agreement is often sealed through ceremonies. In this case, God set God’s weapon, the bow, in the sky facing away from humanity as a sign of God’s commitment not to destroy the earth again by flood. Humanity, as it were, has been washed clean of its sin through the waters of the flood and God agrees after that washing clean to reconnect with the remnant of creation and begin again this on-going struggle between the Creator and the created.

(SUNG) AS I WENT DOWN IN THE RIVER TO PRAY, STUDYING
ABOUT THAT GOOD OLD WAY, AND WHO SHALL WEAR THE
ROBE AND CROWN, GOOD LORD SHOW ME THE WAY.

O, BROTHERS LET’S GO DOWN, LET’S GO DOWN, COME ON
DOWN. O, BROTHER’S LET’S GO DOWN, DOWN IN THE RIVER
TO PRAY.

It is a terrible, terribly frightening story, this story of Noah, when you think about it. There is lots of death and destruction in this story. We may try to turn it into a cute little children’s story; and we can’t…not with all the death dealing water. It’s a sad, horrifying story. It is also an appropriate story to read at the beginning of the season of Lent, our forty-day time of honesty. This is the season when we confront our sin and confess our guilt. We have lived in such ways as to make our Creator regret having wasted the gift of creation on us.
I thought also of the powerful images of water and its almost saving power in the events around the landing of US Airways Flight # 1549 in the Hudson River last month and how that freezing body of water was actually a miraculous and saving buoy for the 155 passengers and crew of that frightening encounter with the untamed forces of nature. Once again water – and its powerful and oftentimes un-relentless progression despite our human attempts at controlling its force recalls in us the desire to remember the covenant of the bow in the sky, which marks God’s promise that “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” So, also we can be soothed when we read the stories from our sacred scriptures, which depict the waters as being a healing and cleansing reconnection with the promises of God in our baptisms.

The author of Mark’s Gospel tells the story of Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan – this author tells this story quite differently then the other evangelists. In this Gospel the telling is rapid and pointed – lacking any of the embellishing details, which we find in the other depictions. The author covers a great deal of territory in these few verses that we heard this morning. They pull together Jesus’ baptism, temptation, announcement of the coming near of the kindom and the call to repentance and belief in the Good News. All of this is done at an almost “spitfire” pace. This pace is indicative of the style of this entire Gospel and one of the reasons why we might find it so compelling and dramatic to read. The author of Mark’s retelling of the baptism is spare, and the pace continues to be propelled forward in the next verses as we are told of the tearing apart of the heavens, the voice of the Holy Spirit and the “immediate” driving out into the wilderness of Jesus to face the forty days of temptation and testing in the desert.

Sin and washing clean, baptism and redemption – the promises of God made in response to our continuing sinfulness and failure in the face of all that God would desire of and for us. These are the themes, which will occupy our journey in the next 40 days of our own sojourning into the reflection and renewal of Lent. We will be faced with the reality of our own sin – not something which we like to spend a great deal of time focused on in this society which encourages anything but reflection on our own failings and foibles. Yet this is what we will choose for ourselves, corporately and individually as we spend a season of our lives in introspection and critical self-analysis. We do not do this simply to be self flagellating and unduly critical. Rather we do this to reflect on how we have failed in our attempts to be all that God intends for us to be – and how we might improve in that challenge as a renewed and re-energized resurrection people.


(SUNG) AS I WENT DOWN IN THE RIVER TO PRAY, STUDYING
ABOUT THAT GOOD OLD WAY, AND WHO SHALL WEAR THE
STARRY CROWN, GOOD LORD SHOW ME THE WAY.

O, MOTHERS LET’S GO DOWN, DON’T’ YOU WANNA, COME ON
DOWN. COME ON, MOTHER’S LET’S GO DOWN, DOWN IN THE RIVER

TO PRAY.

In each of the Synoptic Gospel accounts Jesus goes directly from the baptism into the temptation time in the wilderness. Do we think that we would fare any better than that? Our lives become a forward propelling from our own baptisms and cleansing in the waters – into the temptations and testing of our everyday lives as we attempt to live out the covenant with our God. Here is the example though – Jesus who is God – was not spared the temptations and times in the desert. Those temptations and desert times can be for us, not only an occasion for sin and disobedience; but also an opportunity for introspection and growth in our understanding of our covenant relationship with the God who is love.

I came across a powerful quote from one of my spiritual mentors this week. In an interview in Tikkun Magazine, William Sloan Coffin has the following to say regarding this God whom so many of us struggle to know and understand: “Personally, I think that God is not too hard to believe in, simply too good to believe in, we being strangers to such goodness.”

So we could let this lent be an opportunity to renew our baptisms, to once again embrace the mystery of a God who both judges us and love us at the same time. What needs to be washed away from our lives right now? What bad habit, sinful inclinations, or dark secrets need to be drowned in God’s healing waters? What sun needs to shine, what good work needs to be undertaken, and what new practice needs to be ventured into or taken on?

Our sin is serious. Our alienation from God is at times severe. Storm clouds may gather and waters rise. Yet so is the goodness and grace of God – over us all, over humanity in its heights and depths, over the valleys and peaks of our lives, a rainbow – promising hope and covenant and resurrection.

(SUNG) AS I WENT DOWN IN THE RIVER TO PRAY, STUDYING
ABOUT THAT GOOD OLD WAY, AND WHO SHALL WEAR THE
STARRY CROWN, GOOD LORD SHOW ME THE WAY.

O, SINNERS LET’S GO DOWN, LET’S GO DOWN, WON’T YOU
COME ON DOWN. O, SINNER’S LET’S GO DOWN, DOWN IN THE
RIVER TO PRAY.