2nd Sunday in Lent-Year A sermon

Lent 2 Year A March 16, 2014 During this Lenten season, we are on a journey. It is a journey of turning away from the impediments in our lives that keep us from dwelling in the fullness of God’s love, and it is a journey of turning back toward God. (Or perhaps even turning toward God for the very first time, for those who prepare to be baptized at Easter Vigil.) Every Sunday in the Episcopal Church we read one piece of scripture out of the book of Psalms. Have you ever wondered why we read out of this book over any other week after week? I think it is because they are the songs of humanity. They express the full range of human emotions, and they encompass all aspects of both the individual and communal faith journey. In her book The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris writes in a chapter titled The Paradox of the Psalms, about how she found her way back to God and the faith after being out of the church for some twenty years. She wrote about what went wrong in her early, childhood experiences of church, talking about wearing Sunday best and sitting up straight, quoting a poem by Anne Sexton titled: Protestant Easter, 8 years old. “I knew that ‘when he was a little boy/Jesus was good all the time.’ And I made a confused attempt to connect his story with what I saw around me on Sunday morning: ‘they pounded nails into his hands./After that, well, after that/everyone wore hats…/The important thing for me/is that I’m wearing white gloves.” Norris goes on to talk about how what went wrong for her in her Christians upbringing was centered in “the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly to meet God, the insidious notion that I need be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in ‘His’ church.” (90). Over the course of the chapter, Norris talks about how she found her way back to God through her immersion in the Psalms in a Benedictine community. She quotes British Benedictine Sebastian Moore who has said that, “‘God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology” and also that the images of the psalms, ‘rough hewn from earthy experience [are] absolutely different from formal prayer.’” Today we have prayed together Psalm 121. This is a Psalm that may have been written to be sung in the setting of the context of a pilgrimage, perhaps on the way to Jerusalem. It starts with a question: “from where is my help to come?” and the rest of the Psalm answers that question. Psalm 121 begins in a place in which we might not be altogether comfortable beginning—it makes us begin from a place of neediness, a place of poverty. If we give ourselves over to the praying of this psalm, then it can put us in mind of that fact that we are all on this journey that is life and we are all infinitely fragile, infinitely needy, infinitely anxious. Beginning from this place on this Second Sunday in Lent is a good reminder for us because it helps us remember that our Lenten journeys are less about our own accomplishments, what we might be able to do, and more about our fundamental dependence upon God and God’s help. And interestingly enough, different translations of this Psalm highlight this differently. We read the BCP translation this morning, but let me share with you the NRSV translation. If you want, you can watch your BCP translation in the insert as I read so you can note the differences: Psalm 121 I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore. What was the main difference you noticed? In the NRSV translation, the Hebrew word shamar, which is used 6 times in the course of the Psalm, is translated as “keep” every time. 6 times we say to each other and to ourselves that God is our keeper, that God is faithful in God’s keeping of us. What does that even mean? What does it mean to be kept by God in the face of our own neediness? These are not nice words in our culture, when we talk about someone being needy or being “kept,” these are insults for us. And yet, this is where Psalm 121 takes us today on this Lenten pilgrimage. This can be a shocking revelation to us! We’re not needy! We balance our own checkbooks; we stay on top of our own medical appointments; we do our own shopping; and we generally take personal responsibility for our own well being. The idea that we have a keeper who watches over us and protects us may be tough to understand, let alone accept. If we have a keeper, we must lose some of our independence; we must first give ourselves to the one who offers us protection and solace and safety. (Feasting on the Word Pastoral Perspective 60). And yet we know, deep down in our hearts, the loneliness, the emptiness, the heartbreak, the spiritual poverty, the hunger for more meaning that we just can’t find or provide on our own. Lent is a time to embrace our own neediness and to rest in God’s promises to keep us. And in that embracing, what we must remember is that God’s keeping of us is rooted deeply in God’s love for us. This Lent, I’ve been following a video series that is produced by the brothers of SSJE, and this past week, on Wednesday, the video was in response to the question: What is your reminder that you are loved? Here is what Brother Curtis Almquist had to say about the love and the keeping of us by God: “God loves you and you may be, at this moment, or you may be able to remember some moments, where you felt that to the core of your being. But what happens when the weather changes and that feeling has gone away? Well, I would say two things. One, I think love is ultimately not a feeling it’s a decision and it’s God’s decision and God adores you. You make God’s day. You’re the apple of God’s eye. God loves you. That’s the truth. Some days you may get in touch with the feeling that encompasses that. But I would say number one, cling to the truth. That’s of your essence. You are loved of God and God has hopes of spending eternity with you. Second of all, especially if the feeling of love is lost on you right now, write this on a piece of paper “God loves me” and keep that piece of paper with you. I’d encourage you to cart that piece of paper with you through the day and tuck it under your pillow at night. And you might say, “And when I do that will I feel that God loves me?” I don’t know. I don’t know if you will or not. But I think the truth of that has every potential of sinking into the reality of your being because it’s a decision and it’s God’s decision and the invitation for you is to cooperate with that decision. God is operating with love in your life and your response [is] to co-operate with the truth of it. You’ll catch on. You’ll catch on.” May you be brave enough to kneel before God this day, offering to God your own neediness, your own poverty, and allowing yourself to be kept in the never-failing love of God.