Sermon: 25 February 2024 Christ Church Lent 2Text: Mark 8.31-38Theme: Faith on the lunatic fringeLet us pray:
O Saviour Christ, in whose way of love lies the secret of all life, and the hope of all people, we pray for quiet courage to match this hour. We did not choose to be born or to live in such an age; but let its problems challenge us, its discoveries exhilarate us, its injustices anger us, its possibilities inspire us, and its vigour renew us, for your Kingdom’s sake. Amen
It was very clear from our annual meeting last week that it is hard in this rapidly changing environment and culture and society to keep a church flourishing, let alone as disciples, to remain true and faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A constant prayer for us is the one I used at the start of this sermon this morning. In a nutshell we certainly seek for courage to face come what may and discernment to use our resources and faith best for God’s kingdom. In my thinking in preparation for Ash Wednesday and Lent I have been dipping into the writings of a lay leader of the church I most admire – Sara Miles. She is a leader at St Gregory of Nyssa’s Episcopal Church, San Francisco. In her third book City of God; Faith in the Streets (2014) she talks about Christians taking the faith out of the church to the people.
Miles's book describes her transformation from a "respectable church goer" to a "lunatic evangelist" when she joined a group that took the Ash Wednesday imposition of ashes out of the church and into the streets of San Francisco. She says that she wanted to "get beyond the tastefully enclosed museum of religious life."
So they donned their black cassocks and hit the streets of that most secular of cities. They knelt in McDonalds, at bus stops, and on the sidewalks to pray and impose ashes: "From dust you came and to dust you will return."
Yes, people gawked. And yes, she felt "self-conscious, fraudulent, awkward, [and] exposed." But guess what? People loved it. Why were people so eager for ashes and so effusive with gratitude?
Ash Wednesday, writes Miles, is "the most honest of days" when the church reminds you of what no one else in society will say — that from dust you came and to dust you will return. We admit that we've made a mess. In other words, "the truth is a blessing." It was from this that I took courage to do a similar thing, if on a small scale, and offer the imposition of Ashes at Briki’s Café on Ash Wednesday. Six people came over to the table where I was set up.
This season of Lent challenges the temptation of a perfunctory faith that merely goes through the motions of church — play-acting, if you will. Lent isn't just a minor tune-up or slight readjustment of life. It doesn't just tinker around the edges or offer a cosmetic makeover. Rather, Lent calls us to resurrection from the dead through repentance, to the lunatic faith of a Jesus Freak (the title of Miles' second book).
"If there is a God," wrote Simone Weil — a secular Jew who converted to Christianity, "it is not an insignificant fact, but something that requires a radical rethinking of every little thing. Your knowledge of God can't be considered as one fact among many. You have to bring all the other facts into line with the fact of God."
And so Jesus calls us in this week's gospel: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it."
But alas. It's so easy to settle for far less. To lapse into the easy actions of a "respectable church goer." To, as Paul writes to Timothy, "have a form of godliness but deny its power" (2 Timothy 3:5).
In my sermon on Ash Wednesday, I urged us all to deny ourselves a timid faith in Lent. A friend of mine has a term for such tepid faith in a tame deity. He calls it "functional deism." The eighteenth-century deists like Thomas Jefferson believed in a supreme being who created the world, ordered it with the predictable laws of nature and morality, but then abandoned it like an absentee landlord. Deists think of God as the Ultimate Clockmaker who set everything going but doesn’t come to check and keep the clock wound. Deists reject the faintest whiff of a miracle and judge everything at the bar of reason alone.
The deist god is remote, safe, and silent. This God won't bother you. This God won't intervene in human history or answer our prayers. And this God sure won't speak to us or do the impossible.
I'd laugh if someone called me a deist, but I sure can live, think, and act like one. Thank God for the Lenten call to a lunatic faith.
It would be hard to imagine a God more different from the deist god than the Hebrew God. The psalm for this week says that the God who flung the 100 billion galaxies into space, each one with 100 billion stars, is like an attentive mother or a tender father. "For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me but heard when I cried to him." (Psalm 22.24-25)
Whereas the psalmist worships God intimate, the Genesis story describes God infinite. God rebuked both Abraham and Sarah for their timid faith in a tiny god.
When God, a little later in the narrative from where we read today in Genesis, promised Abraham that "about this time next year Sarah your wife will bear a son," he scoffed: "he fell face down, laughed, and said to himself, 'Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?'"
When Sarah overheard God's stupendous promise, she responded in an identical manner: "So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, 'After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?'" The ecstasy of erotic pleasure? The joy of a newborn baby? Sarah laughed in disbelief. But God rebuked her for her doubt, at which point she lied and denied: "Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, 'I did not laugh.' But he said, 'Yes, you did laugh.'"
The aged couple doubted and denied, they laughed, and they lied, because of the "absurd disproportion between the divine promise and the human possibility."
From a human perspective, we can understand their disbelief. People don't procreate in old age.
But in the end, the rhetorical statement is the truth that we need to cling to in our present difficult age: "Is anything too difficult for the Lord?"
God didn't shame the couple in a punitive manner. Quite the contrary. We read that "the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised."
In a delightful turn of faith, they named their son Isaac, which in Hebrew means "he laughs." Their son of laughter would always remind them of their disbelief. But he would also testify to how God fulfilled his promise despite improbable circumstances.
At the beginning of the story, Sarah laughed in disbelief. At the end, she laughed with joy: "God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have born him a son in his old age."
God makes something out of nothing. He creates ex nihilo. In the words of Paul's epistle this week, he "gives life to the dead and calls into existence that which does not exist."
So in this Lenten season – let us not be afraid and let us be open to our faith changing every aspect of our lives – for our God is truly calling us to lunatic faith in this Lenten season. The Lord be with you.