Second Sunday in Lent, 13 March 2022
Lectionary Readings for the Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’ And Abram said, ‘You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.’ But the word of the Lord came to him, ‘This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.’ He brought him outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Then he said to him, ‘I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.’ But he said, ‘O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?’ He said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon.’ He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire-pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.’
Psalm 27
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
When evildoers assail me
to devour my flesh—
my adversaries and foes—
they shall stumble and fall.
Though an army encamp against me,
my heart shall not fear;
though war rise up against me,
yet I will be confident.
One thing I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
to live in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
and to inquire in his temple.
For he will hide me in his shelter
in the day of trouble;
he will conceal me under the cover of his tent;
he will set me high on a rock.
Now my head is lifted up
above my enemies all around me,
and I will offer in his tent
sacrifices with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make melody to the Lord.
Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud,
be gracious to me and answer me!
“Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!”
Your face, Lord, do I seek.
Do not hide your face from me.
Do not turn your servant away in anger,
you who have been my help.
Do not cast me off, do not forsake me,
O God of my salvation!
If my father and mother forsake me,
the Lord will take me up.
Teach me your way, O Lord,
and lead me on a level path
because of my enemies.
Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries,
for false witnesses have risen against me,
and they are breathing out violence.
I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the Lord!
Philippians 3: 17-4:1
Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
Luke 13: 31-35
At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’
Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent
I just returned yesterday from ten days away, a trip to see old friends in Rome and to have a retreat, after three years, at Bose Monastery in the north of Italy. It was very good to be able to take this long-planned trip, but the shadow that hung over every experience of every day was the consciousness of the war in Ukraine. I found myself not able to stop reading about events there; reading and pondering each day’s developments, talking with every person I met, and, intensely, praying. I even dreamt about the war one night. It is a shock to me to realise that I am living in a time of war. This is certainly not the first war in my lifetime, this war in Ukraine—-in this very moment there are other wars that we have been distracted from, given up on: we find ourselves unable, we cannot any longer follow what is happening there to real people in real time, because there are too many wars happening in too many parts of our earth to too many suffering peoples. I think it is important at least to name these: war is going on in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, and in Yemen; there is a terrorist insurgency in Algeria, also in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Iraq continues to struggle with political unrest, Libya with militias that are part of a long and agonising civil war; there is civil war also in Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Tunisia. Colombia, Myanmar, and Syria are torn by violence. Colombia’s war is also a drug war. South Sudan is at war due to ethnic violence. It is overwhelming, this list.
But on the 24th of February Russia invaded the Ukraine, a sovereign nation and its neighbour, and the world looked on in horror. How can we bear to hear about, read about, yet another war? And this war, in particular. This war touches us deeply, for many reasons. Above all, perhaps, because it was the long-meditated choice of a single man who has imposed his own desire for glory and his own vision of a reconstituted state that aggrandises his own. But at the cost of immense destruction, immense suffering of the innocent. Putin has lied to his own people, he has bombed hospitals and schools, he has disregarded humanitarian corridors for those fleeing for their lives.
We have seen these news images; we have imagined ourselves there. What does the Christian faith have to say about this present reality? The Gospel reading for today is an interesting one; I think it goes to the heart of how we live out our vocation as the followers of Christ. The Pharisees are a group that is always objecting, obstructing, never grasping the larger trajectory of Jesus’s actions. In this episode, they come up to Jesus as if to show great concern for his safety, but they have no real sense of why he is doing what he is doing and where it is all leading. So Jesus answers them with words they do not understand, and dismisses with an impatient wave of the hand that old fox, Herod, of whom he is not in the least afraid.
Jesus says to that group of Pharisees: I perform the work of the Kingdom, and that is to care for the sick, the lame, the blind, but as I do these things I have to continue on my path to Jerusalem. I cannot take my eyes from Jerusalem. The Pharisees are only a distraction, as always. The path lies only to Jerusalem, and Jesus never forgets this. He has real work to do, and he has very little time. Whatever minor threat the political powers pose has no bearing on his destiny that has been given him by God and from which he cannot turn away. So what is this journey toward Jerusalem? Jerusalem: the stronghold, the citadel, the seat of David, most glorious Zion, the holy place. The emblem, the problem, the end-point. Any nation’s strength is displayed in the glitter and wealth of its capital city. Its bureaucracy is there. Symbolic actions are enacted there. And so in Jerusalem in Jesus’s day. It was the arena in which his very real death was offered as a sign before all the assembled crowds. A sign of God’s love that triumphs over death, the culmination of his life of love that every day enacted the Kingdom of God on earth for those with ears to hear and eyes to see. The journey toward Jerusalem was the three-years’ long path that had to end there, and nowhere else.
As Jesus knew, the arrogant power of Jerusalem would condemn him to death, as it had done before to the prophets of Israel’s history. He knew what would happen—-it was no mystery. But he remained on the path. Because he knew what his vocation was, he remained on the path that was set out from his birth. And so must we. The call of God to those who follow Christ is to embrace our vocation, and so to remain on the path. There are immense distractions at every moment in our world—-mostly the banality of small things that seem to leave so little time to attend to the larger things that matter. But our task is to imitate Jesus, loving those who accompany us along the path, those whom we encounter on the path, those we glimpse from afar as we go. Our vocation is always to remain on the path. If you remember, the first name for the emerging group of Jesus’s followers is recorded in these verses of chapter 9 of Acts: Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. And then Jesus appears to Saul, and Saul becomes Paul, and he himself chooses this Way, and he begins his journey on that path that, for him, will lead to Rome.
Lent is a time of reflecting on what our own path is and what is asks of us. It has been laid out for us for a long time. The vocation of a Christian is to love, to love, to love. We do this in compassion and care for the least of God’s children, giving of ourselves in ways that might be wildly unexpected and sometimes not well received. There will be many distractions along the way. But our eyes also must be trained on Jerusalem. We live the lives we have in the places we are. We have daily tasks that we must face and obligations that we must honour. But what defines us, what gives us our unique identity, is that, for us, every day is also an intense and fleeting opportunity to live out our Christian vocation—-to love others as Christ loved us, unstintingly, unsparingly. Our response to the war in Ukraine is but a further part, a real and necessary part, of our living out of our Christian vocation. So we contribute money for refugees, we volunteer to help, we pray, unceasingly, for peace to come. This war is not a distraction—it is a further opportunity to engage in what our own destinies set us to do. What are your own particular distractions? What are the temptations you face as you try to keep your eyes trained on Jerusalem?
This Lent may have come along at just the right moment to slow us down so that we can re-examine the nature of our own path, and how to see it more clearly.
But I think the great assurance of our faith is that, if we strive to act in love, God will sort out the rest. Love, give, help in all the ways you can—-these are steps along The Way. They are the very essence of the path toward Jerusalem—- for us—-that heavenly city.
May we not be overwhelmed by the wars that surround us on every side, but rather be empowered and sent forth by the love of God that holds us up, in all places and in all times—-Amen!
The Revd Dana English
St. George’s Campden Hill, London
March 13, 2022