Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 / Ps. 27 / Philippians 3:17-4:1 / Luke 13:31-35
Most of you have heard me preach at least a few times, so you know that my usual schtick is to really try to open up the Gospel reading, usually by doing a bunch of close-reading, paying attention to the other lessons for the day, and almost always by backing up to look at some historical or scriptural context.
I want to do something a little bit different today, because today is the second Sunday in Lent. Besides Christmas & Easter, Lent is probably the most well-known part of the Church year. Many people who have never set foot in a church probably have some vague, gloomy idea about what Lent is and probably at least know that lots of religious people fast for a while around this time each year.
When we get to these big seasons and moments in the Church’s calendar, I think it’s really important to spend at least a little bit of time reflecting on what exactly we’re doing and why we’re doing it, because it’s easy to forget, to lose sight of what this season is supposed to be for, and just to go through the motions year after year and miss all of the goodness on offer for us when we participate in the Church year.
So that’s today’s question: what is Lent all about? I think our reading from Genesis this morning actually really helps to answer that question. In the reading, Abram has just returned from a great battle in which he and his men defeated the armies of several kings in order to rescue his nephew, Lot. He has refused to keep the spoils of war, so that it would be clear to all of the surrounding peoples Abram’s success comes from ‘the Lord, God Most High’ alone, that no other king has made Abram’s household prosper.
After this, God appears to Abram and promises him an heir of his own flesh and blood and a great multitude of descendants, despite the fact that Abram is old, his wife is barren, and he has no hope of having a child of his own. This is not the first time God has made a promise like this to Abram, there’s something new here. This time, in the face of a promise that seems impossible to fulfill, Abram believes God, trusting that God will make a way where there seems to be no way — “and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
What follows is a strange and mysterious passage, but the gist of what many scholars think is happening here is that God appears and enacts an ancient near eastern ritual to make a covenant with Abram. The odd thing is that this covenant is one-sided; God fulfills both parts of the ritual, seeming to indicate that Abram will not need to do anything for God to fulfill the oath. God binds Godself to Abram, to fulfill this promise — all because Abram made the choice to trust God, even though he did not understand how God could make good on his promise. And, of course, we know how the story goes: after some ups and downs, God makes good on the covenant. Abram’s barren wife Sarai gives birth to a son, and a whole nation springs up from this promise that lives on to this day, and also here we are, millenia later, the spiritual children of the fulllment of this promise to Abram.
So, what does any of this have to do with Lent? This is a season where the Church traditionally fasts, where we give up some of the things that usually sustain us. This is also a season of penitence, where we start off our liturgy confessing our sins and asking for God’s restoration and mercy. But what is all the fasting and penitence for? Are we just putting ash on our heads and beating ourselves up to try to gain brownie points with God for being extra humble and contrite? No! Lent is a season of preparation.
Historically, the season of Lent developed as an extension of the practice of baptizing new Christians at Easter. In the days leading up to their baptisms, the candidates for baptism and their sponsors would enter into a special period of preparation where they would dedicate themselves to study and service and prayer, often accompanied by some kind of fasting. Eventually, this practice grew to include a period of preparation for the reconciliation of those who had been excommunicated, and later expanded to the whole Christian community.
At its root, however, Lent is not about penitence and fasting for their own sake or even primarily about repentance and forgiveness. Lent is about preparation for a great celebration; it is a season dedicated to preparing for a feast, for resurrection and new life — for a promise fulfilled. This is why Lent came to be a period of 40 days associated with Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness and the Israelites’ 40 years in the Sinai desert. For Jesus also, these 40 days of fasting and prayer were not an end in themselves, but a preparation for the Spirit to overflow with healing and life in his ministry. The Israelites spent 40 years in the desert not because God enjoyed watching them suffer in the heat and dust but to prepare them to receive the promised land. In the wilderness, Jesus and the Israelites fasted. They were stripped of many of the things that we rely on to sustain us — our favorite foods and comforts, our wealth and security. That stripping away created a space where they encountered the sustaining power of God, where they learned that they could trust God to provide, to be with them, to fulfill God’s promises. This preparation made them the sort of people who could walk into the promised land and trust that God would hand it over to them, despite the powerful nations they found living there — made Jesus the sort of person who could just flip the bird at Herod in today’s Gospel, because he knew that God had given him a job to do and would provide for him, no matter what Herod might try to do to kill him.
In Lent, we are invited to become like them. We are invited to join with the earliest Christians and with Abram in learning to trust God. We fast and pray and set aside this Lenten space to sharpen our ability to believe that God will make good on God’s promises, to believe that the God who made a nation spring from barren old Sarah and Abraham is the same God who raised Jesus from death to life and who has promised to make new life spring from death in each every one of our lives. This is not an easy thing. Imagine how long Abraham and Sarah had grieved their inability to have children, how deep that hurt must have run within each of them and within their relationship. It is hard to trust God, especially when we are in the dark and in the wilderness. I know that it is much easier for me to muddle through, work hard, and distract myself in periods of pain and difficulty rather than to give up some of those distractions in order to create the space necessary to bring my grief to God. I know that it feels much safer to trust my own efforts and abilities (which I have some control over) than to make myself vulnerable by opening myself up to trust that God really might bring healing and new life to those places of deep pain, that Christ really might be offering me new life, and that I really might have to do nothing but wait and receive the gift.
This opening up, this trust, is the work of Lent; that is what all this fasting and preparation is for. Christ is risen, Christ will come again — and in Lent we prepare to celebrate our share in Christ’s risen life and the promise of restoration to come. I’ll close with the last verse of today’s Psalm: O tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; * wait patiently for the Lord. Lord, we believe; help our unbelief. Amen.