3rd Sunday in Lent Year A

Lent 3A_2020 March 15, 2020 “Keep Calm and Carry On.” This slogan originated in Great Britain as one of a series of posters by the Ministry of Information in 1939-on the eve of World War 2. This 3rd poster in the series was never actually posted in the public because it was being reserved for a scenario such as the German Blitz bombing, but by the time the blitz bombing happened, the posters had become unpopular with the British people who viewed them as patronizing and divisive. Thus the poster campaign came to a halt before “Keep Calm and Carry On” was ever employed, but the image with the British crown and the slogan have been rediscovered of late and have struck a chord in popular imagination in these modern times. Just a few years ago, this image was everywhere you looked on social media in various spoofs. The flip-side of this “Keep Calm and Carry On” is actually panic, and we see it everywhere we look these days. We see panic at the grocery stores, in the barren wilderness of toilet paper aisle. We see panic on the news. We see panic on social media. For me, panic has taken the form of trying to read and absorb as much information as possible. I would dare say that none of us has ever been in a situation like this before, so we don’t even know what it means to “keep calm and carry on” at this point. What are we as people of faith supposed to do when panic seems to be everywhere? Our Old Testament reading shows us today that panic is nothing new. We see the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and in a full blown panic (that most likely has started with one or two but then spreads like an epidemic throughout the entire company). They are [understandably] worried about not having any water. They doubt God; they become divisive; they forget how God has already saved them. And as a result of their panic, God’s actions of providing water for them out of a rock in the wilderness become remembered as the sight of their panic, their quarreling and their testing of God. (As another commentator put it: “When the going gets tough, the Israelites get grumpy.”—boy if that doesn’t hit close to home!) In the Psalm today, we see the same pattern, but it makes it more personal: the remembering and recitation of God’s saving works—the ways that God has saved us and the injunction (spoken in a separate voice, in God’s voice) to harden not your hearts, don’t test God; don’t panic; don’t be like the children of Israel in the wilderness or you will be denied the rest and peace of God. The Psalm is a reminder of how our own panic blocks us from receiving God’s blessings, God’s peace.i You know, we aren’t so very different from the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness. We like to cruise along, thinking that we are in complete control of our own lives, that we are completely independent of each other, that we make our own destiny. And then something comes along that proves we are wrong. We are not in control. We are, in fact, completely interdependent upon each other. What individuals do makes a difference in the life and death of others. In times like this, it is important to just stop; to remember that God is God and that we are not. I’ve been thinking about sayings from two different modern day wise women today that I want to share with you. The first is from The Rt Rev Barbara Harris, the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Anglican Communion (Suffragen Bishop of Massachusetts) who died a couple of days ago. In all my copious reading on the internet, I came across a picture of her with the following quote: “The God behind you is greater than the problem in front of you.” “The God behind you is greater than the problem in front of you.” It’s a reminder from scripture how God went behind the Children of Israel to protect them from their enemies when fleeing Egypt. “The God behind you is greater than the problem in front of you.” It’s an important reminder to me that God is with us, even in this most unusual set of circumstances. The other thing I’ve been dwelling with is a poem by a contemporary poet named Lynn Ungar. You may have seen this. She has, just this week written a poem titled Pandemic. Pandemic What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love– for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.ii –Lynn Ungar 3/11/20 Your invitation this week is to refuse to commit your heart to the panic around you and instead to commit your heart to this unexpected gift of Sabbath; to settle into our community stillness and then to reach out with your heart and to find new and more life-giving ways to be connected with each other in this unusual and uncertain season. i. This portion of the sermon was reworked from a sermon I preached on Lent 3 in 2014 at St. Peter’s by the Sea ii. http://www.lynnungar.com/poems/pandemic/