Second Sunday of Lent, 28 February 2021

Lectionary Readings for the Second Sunday of Lent

Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’

Mark 8: 31-end

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent

If anyone has asked you, “What are you giving up for Lent?” You may have looked back at them, haggard and wild-eyed, and answered, “Nothing different from before —-just seeing people I love, going out to restaurants, my family vacation….” Or, if you are a young person between the ages of 16 and 18, you may have answered: “What am I giving up for Lent? Everything different from before: the gap year of travel I thought I would be taking, the university I thought I would be entering, the  job I thought I had all lined up.” Or, if you are a migrant worker, having slowly seen, little by little, the fruits of hard work and long hours bring you a small measure of security and stability, the whole world has collapsed around you, and you are giving up everything. And there is no response to make.

So where does that leave us, this Lent? Does it make all the ways we’ve thought of Lent in the past, tried to keep a holy Lent—-a good Lent—-just, simply, irrelevant? I remember as a child having it strongly suggested to me to go over and talk to a child who was being left out of the party. Eagerly wanting to be part of that party myself, I was not thrilled by this suggestion. But, as I felt I had no choice, I reluctantly walked over and said something I have no memory of now, but something I hoped was not too obviously pitying. And a small awkward conversation resulted, and then I walked back over and turned my attention to pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, or whatever real fun was going on at that party.

The point of telling you this is just to remind us that in every place we find ourselves, in every unfolding stage of our lives, we have a choice how to respond. It is our choice. Our free and glad choice! It is your choice to turn on your computer and be part of this service this morning.

Here we are, together, listening to these words from Genesis and the Gospel of Mark and trying to relate them to our own lives. So how might we choose to hear them?

Genesis is about God’s choosing of Abraham, and of Sarah, a choice that was going to so radically change their lives that they were going to be given new names to remind them of that. Mark is about facing up to the truth about life—-that if you are alive, and if you are a human being, you are going to face some kind of suffering, and there is simply no way to get around that. That you can just say but it isn’t like that, with Peter, and that is your choice, also, but that won’t be the truth, and that isn’t really going to help anything, at all.

What makes us not tear our hair out, or turn to drink or drugs, or just give up and passively stare out the window, this Lent? I think that it is because we have been given a new name, and a new hope.

In the Old Testament, names were bearers of one’s identity. God took care to change the name of Abram, meaning exalted father, to Abraham, father of multitudes, as an inseparable part of His covenant with him. Sarai meant princess, or woman of strength. It is likely that Sarai is simply the possessive form of Sarah, or ‘my’ Sarah. The new name of Sarah, therefore, meant that her strength did not belong only to her immediate family but to the whole nation that she was to begin, and to all the world. In the church’s history, what came to be known as a Christian name was given to a child at baptism—-a special name, not the family name but the particular individual name—-a name perhaps chosen at birth but publicly celebrated on this solemn baptismal occasion. Taking the name of a person of holy life was encouraged—-thus the popularity of the name Mary, or Joseph, or the apostles’ names of James and John and Peter and Andrew. Saints’ names such as Agnes, or Anne, Theresa, Elizabeth, Clare.

It was the sign of the cross that came to be the identifying mark of one who followed Christ—-who willingly took up the cross, as Christ did, and lived in a manner worthy of the One who died on it. So the name, Christian, was one that was not given, or taken, lightly.

The earliest symbols of the Christian were not the cross, however, but the fish, the anchor, the dove, the peacock…signs of the Holy Spirit, of Resurrection, of the certainty of faith. The most abundantly represented image in the catacombs is that of Christ as The Good Shepherd. Because sheep were so precious in the ancient world —-providing the essential things of life: wool, milk, cheese and meat—-the shepherd of the sheep was the one who led the sheep to good pastures, who risked his life to protect them from wild animals, who gave help to the sheep who were injured, who kept an accurate account of them, and who looked for those who were lost to be sure they were safe during the night. And so Jesus came to be remembered, above all, as the shepherd for even more precious human beings.

To follow Christ meant to try to be like him—-to care for the weak and to seek out the lost. And also to bear his image in the world, going by His name. The cross emerged, later, as the ultimate symbol of his love that reached even beyond death.

The cross is a powerful symbol; it stands for an almost-unbelievable paradox: that the ultimate hope we are given comes out of defeat and death. Christians have the privilege of understanding this—-of embracing this paradox.

This hope is ours.

Only you know what your own cross to bear in this life is. I can’t know it; perhaps even those closest to you can’t know it. But you do. Perhaps you have not yet encountered it, in your life. But because to be human is to know what it is to suffer, at some point you will encounter your cross. And it will be your free choice how to take it up. In the symbol of The Good Shepherd we are given a clue as to how to take up our own cross. With compassion, with diligence, with love. As a choice. Christians, all over the world, are bringing light and life and joy to many places of despair, identified by this powerful symbol of the cross. In every minute we have the choice to do the same.

Perhaps my favourite verse in all the Bible is this one, from Isaiah:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

We have hope. God has already called us, each one. Every one. God created us in hope, for hope, to give hope to all the world. We are named Christians, the special name of those who take up the cross of Christ, the cross of death-defying hope. It is always our choice—to claim this special name that bears ultimate hope even in this time of Lent that seems to be a time only of continuing deprivation. But we can never be deprived of our choice, nor of our hope. May we use this time of Lent as an opportunity to lift the crosses of others, those who are staggering under the greatest weight. And may we come to see this choice as our glad response to the God who called us, named us, and sends us forth, rejoicing that we bear the very name of Christ.

Amen.

The Revd Dana English

The Church of St George’s, Campden Hill

London

February 28, 2021