The First Sunday Lent
Sermon
The First Sunday of Lent
18 February 2024
The Reverend Dr James Gardom, Interim Priest-in-Charge
Mark 1.9–15
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.
Our Gospel reading is from Mark. So laconic that we really need to pay attention to every word. It almost feels like notes that we have found and we have to fill in our selves. In relation to Lent I wish to pick out three things – the importance of repentance, the importance of the wilderness and the importance of the Good News.
Repentance:
Our very first task in Lent is to acknowledge that the way we are is not (thank God) how God made us to be and how God wishes us to be. In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Jesus is baptised by John, and John’s baptism is a baptism of repentance.
We may well wonder why Jesus needed to be baptised since we know that he was without sin. Mark is wonderfully spare, where Gospels fill in the details and we hear about the particular failures of those who came to John for baptism. But even though Jesus was without sin, he was fully human, and in being fully human he was inevitably caught up in the structures of sin around him. The bread he ate, the roads we walked on, the money he used were parts of a system of cruelty and extraction, sustained by the violence of the Romans and the purchased silence of the Religious authorities. He needed to made clean of the clinging sin that we share.
I am not sure that I need to tell you to repent, to seek to see straight. If you think that all is well with your soul, and that you have not need of repentance, then it is exceedingly unlikely that you are keeping Lent at all, or that you will darken the doors of this church, where we confess our sins daily, and use Lent to examine our hearts and our lives. But year by year I sense the need for us to repent of the patterns of life we cannot give up, which increasingly appear to be predicated on the suffering of other. Year by year I am aware that, in addition to the personal sinfulness which we, unlike Christ, definitely suffer from, we need to repent of a whole pattern of life and power which is deeply corporately sinful.
Wilderness:
‘And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days.’
There is a real breathlessness about Mark’s Gospel, and especially in these early chapter. The word “immediately” occurs over and over again, and neither Christ nor we seem to have a chance to draw breath. The moment of baptism for Christ is huge. Imagine you are hearing this for the first time. We do not know at this point in the story, and it is possible even that Christ did not know what it meant to be Son, Christ, Beloved. There is no way that he is going to be able to think this through in the dust and the confusion, the people and the demands, so he goes into the wilderness to struggle.
Satan and Angels symbolise the struggle. He has his commission, but its form, its success, will depend on his integrity and his alignment to God’s will. So he is tested by Satan. He goes to the Wilderness for time and silence.
Some of us here have, I suspect, too much time and silence in our lives. But some of us live lives either by choice or by chance that are so rammed with busyness that there is no time at all to think straight – to seek to see right and wrong in our lives and our relationships, to bring what we do and what we are into God’s presence. For those of us who are busy, in Lent at least we must make time to face the silence and the reality, to struggle without little satans and angels In the wilderness Jesus finds God’s will, and we must find some time, some space, some silence in which we can do the same. The Wilderness is the place where any question can be asked, where we are not held in place by the conventions that surround us, and the dispositions we have already made, by the immediate clamour of needs and plans. Jesus went into the wilderness to find a blank sheet of paper, so to speak, and he emerged with an understanding of his life and of his purpose that was truly radical. We need to dare to do the same. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.
Good News:
Having repented, and in the Wilderness, come to see straight, to see as God sees, Jesus is ready to act. He departs to Gallilee, he calls disciples, he proclaims the Good News, he heals.
Note, as always, that in Mark not a word is wasted. We are told this happens “after John was arrested”. If we have any doubt about the nature and the impact of the Good News he is proclaiming it should be clear at least that it is not going to be an easy ride. We need to learn the cost to Christ, and that is part of what Lent is about. We need also to learn this gift that was bought for us at such a cost. For it is Good News. The Glory and the Wonder of the Good news, when we have Repented and waited in the wilderness, is the discovery that we are free.
The good news, for us, is this – that God has intervened decisively in Christ to free us from fear and sin and death. What we could not tackle ourselves, what we could not bear and could not change was nailed to the cross with Christ and defeated in the resurrection. And so we are saved, free. We are not stuck with the casual cruelty and callousness and waste that we have built into our societies. We are not stuck with the shabby compromises and half-truths around which we have built so much of our lives.
We are not stuck with the distance that we have put, the cordon sanitaire, between ourselves and God, for fear that we might see and see and hear and hear, and understand. We actually have the chance this year, this life, this Lent to Repent, to rethink in the Wilderness, and to begin to live the lives we have been given. The good news is that we have been set free. Free to love. Free to live. Free from judgement. Free from fear.
There are easier gifts to live with that Freedom in Christ, but certainly none that were so costly in the giving, and none so precious to receive