Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“And lead us not into temptation.” We make this prayer to our heavenly Father every week, and some of us every day. This makes God’s action in this morning’s Gospel very curious indeed: “and Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil.” What God does is precisely the opposite of what is asked of Him in the Lord’s prayer. By the Holy Spirit He leads His Son directly into temptation.

And, in some ways, our own forty day sojourn in the wilderness, our observance of Lent, is a time in which God might lead us into temptation, too. If you’ve given something up—meat or chocolate or selfish thoughts or whatever—you’ve probably already been tempted by opportunities to avail yourself of that old comfort or that old habit. I know I have. If you’ve taken something on—a prayer practice or other spiritual discipline—you’ve probably already been tempted to be less than conscientious in keeping it up. The old ways are more comfortable; they’re safe. It is significant that in addition to power, the devil tempts Jesus with comfort (the comfort of a bit of bread in the midst of his fasting) and he tempts our Lord with safety (specifically, protection from falling down a cliff).

But why might God lead us into temptation? Why was His Son led by the Holy Spirit into a time of trial rather than flight from it? Well, the simple answer is that sometimes God answers our prayers with a “no”, and that includes our perennial prayer to “lead us not into temptation.” But that doesn’t get to the larger question, the “why?” question, so here is my humble attempt at an answer.

It has been my experience that during the periods in which I’ve been most conscientious about prayer and fasting, in which my own relationship with God seems strongest, that I have been most open to temptation. It is usually the temptation which the church calls “sloth”, one of those deadly sins: laziness not in completing tasks at work, but in maintaining rigor and regularity in the very practices which has forged my relationship with my Lord, namely prayer and fasting. I find myself in pretty good company in this. Ascetics and mystics from throughout Church History have noted the same struggle. Precisely when their prayer life seemed most effective, just when they seemed closest to God, was when the temptation to slack off a bit seemed most prevalent and most disastrous.

On one level, and at the danger of delving into creepy territory, it is because the enemy redoubles his efforts when he’s losing, when the faithful Christian has turned more profoundly from his crafts and wiles toward the loving God. The first Sunday of Lent is as good a time as any to remember that radical evil sadly exists, and that the defeat experienced by the agents of said evil incites them to tempt the faithful with even more resolve.

But this still doesn’t explain why God led His Son and why He leads us through the valley of the shadow of death to begin with, why he gives these tempters the chance to snare us.

The answer is paradoxical but at the same time unsurprising. God leads us into temptation because He loves us. He loves us so much that He trusts us, which is perhaps the ultimate expression of love. He trusts us enough to give us the freedom to be petulant children if we choose, to rebel if we choose, and like the prodigal son to choose once again to return and be forgiven and to be given the fatted calf of his boundless mercy.

God trusted Adam and Eve enough to place the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. He loved them enough to give them the freedom to choose, to choose whether to obey or to yield to temptation. God loves and trusts us enough not to coddle us, but rather to give us the opportunity to choose to deny Him and disappoint Him. In other words, he gives us freedom to be adults. But His love and trust is even greater than this, for he gives the children of Eve the chance to return after countless mistakes—countless occasions in which we indulge in the same forbidden fruit as our forebears—to return and be saved, to make another go of it through fasting and prayer.

We may, of course, still ask God to “lead us not into temptation”, to deliver us from the time of trial, and He will sometimes answer with a “yes”. He knows what temptations will destroy us when we’re at a point of weakness, and we can be thankful when He spares us from the opportunity to fall back into a destructive pattern. But we can also be thankful, as hard as it may be sometimes, that He respects us enough to let us choose to rage and rebel. We can be thankful, as one prayer in the BCP puts it, for those failures and disappointments which remind us of our dependence on God alone. May this holy season of Lent, then, be for us not just a reminder of our sinfulness and our need for repentance, but also a joyous celebration of our redemption and of the freedom God gives us to accept it. Let us be thankful that the chance we have to confess Christ with our lips and to believe on Him in our hearts means something, because we’re not automota, because we’re not robots who couldn’t choose otherwise, because being an adult is hard but God trusts us to grow up. Be thankful, and with thanksgiving return to the Lord who richly pardons and brings us to new and unending life.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“For [God] knoweth whereof we are made; He remembereth that we are but dust.” Thus the psalmist gives us this day a rather paradoxical argument for hope. This is “good news” we are told, but it doesn’t seem so great.

The days of man are but as grass;

for he flourisheth as a flower of the field.

For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone;

and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Keep in mind that during the period when the psalter was written, Judaism didn’t have a concept of the Resurrection of the dead. That would come later in that religion’s history, and ultimately be adopted by Christianity as well. So, what the psalmist is saying is that we should be happy that God is merciful to us and our children, but we’ll still all be dead as doornails. I don’t know about you, but that seems like cold comfort to me.

Now, in about forty days we’ll be celebrating the fact that that’s not all there is. It’s not a secret; Easter comes at the end of Lent every year so it’s probably not going to be a surprise this year. Even so, I think it’s important to abide in the truth of Ash Wednesday and Lent as much as we look forward to the glory of the Resurrection. We need to be reminded that we’re all going to die. It’s not a pleasant thought, but we’ve all got to come to terms with it.

As I said on Sunday, the experience of two years of pandemic and now the reality of war may have made this a bit more present to us, but it’s by no means easy. You might have heard me say before from this very pulpit that we live in a death denying culture. We shield ourselves from death and pretend it doesn’t exist, which is part of the reason most people die in a hospital or nursing home, and it’s probably the biggest reason we have such a huge industry dedicated to making people look younger.

But, no matter how much we try to escape it, death is real, and it’s profitable to realize this fact and keep it at least in the back of our minds. This is because we do have something to do here among these things that are passing away. The Christian life is not all about waiting until we die so we can enjoy the beatific vision. Yes, we look for the General Resurrection and the life of the world to come. Yes, we find and found our greatest hope in this Truth. But we also live in this world for a reason. We are given a short amount of time to share the love of God in Christ with our fellows. We have such a short time to get involved in the mission of the church.

This holy season in which we find ourselves is, we will be reminded again in a few moments, the time when in the Early Church adults were prepared for Baptism and penitent notorious sinners were prepared to reenter the fellowship of the Church. It was the time in which these people were reminded that life is short and we’ve got work to do if we’re going to be a people focused on mission.

And what is that mission. If you would, please open your prayerbooks to page 304… These questions will be familiar to most of you. We rehearse them at every Baptism. The first three questions are about what we believe, which is terribly important, but more apposite for our purposes today are the following five questions. They’re about what we do. Let’s rehearse them again…

Those are our marching orders, as it were. That’s what we’ve got to be involved in during our brief journey through this life. Look back over it during the next forty days. Consider how you’re already fulfilling these promises you made or that your parents and godparents made on your behalf. Consider where maybe you haven’t kept those promises. Pray about it, and be prepared to address them this Lent.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Several years ago I introduced you to a Greek word which has special significance on this Transfiguration Sunday. Since not all of you were here then, and since I don’t expect my little Greek lessons to take the first time, I wanted to highlight it again. Your word for the day is prolepsis. It’s from a Greek root pro-lambanein which means anticipation, and it means the breaking-in of a reality before it has been accomplished in the time-line as we perceive it.

Prolepsis is not simple foreshadowing. Most of us know what foreshadowing is. Since we just celebrated Valentine’s Day, here’s an example from Romeo and Juliet. In the famous balcony scene, after Juliet expresses fear for Romeo’s safety, Romeo replies “life were better ended by their hate/ Than death prorogued wanting of thy love.” This is a foreshadowing of what will actually take place, as (spoiler alert) Romeo dies at the end of the play.

That’s foreshadowing, but prolepsis is something different. The future is not merely hinted at, not merely suggested, but rather it breaks in to the present. As Christians we live proleptically; we allow the sure and certain future of the Kingdom of God to break in to the present. We cannot fully perceive the Kingdom of God, it hasn’t been fully accomplished in our time-line, and yet the Kingdom of the world to come is made real and present at the altar. From our human perspective, the dead have not yet been raised to enjoy eternal life with God, but from the perspective of God, who functions outside of time as much as within it, the faithful departed are already in God’s presence. It can get confusing, but it will suffice to say that the mystery of redemption is beyond our capability to perceive because our minds simply cannot function without positing the passage of time. More about that in a minute.

This morning’s Gospel reading is an example of prolepsis. What happened on the Mount of Transfiguration was in fact an incursion of the future into the present. Specifically, the reality of the Resurrection was not just foreshadowed, but made really present in Christ’s miraculous mountaintop transformation.

Let’s take a closer look at the text. When on the mountain top, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white. Mark’s version is even more striking, interesting since he is usually the least descriptive of the evangelists: “His garments became glistening intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” Even somebody whose whole livelihood was to bleach clothes, a fuller, couldn’t have got any clothes this white. This should stir up in our minds the men at the tomb on the day of the Resurrection, whose clothes are described by all of the Gospel writers as being extraordinarily white.

Likewise, we learn from today’s Gospel that at the Transfiguration “the appearance of [Jesus’] countenance was altered.” This is what “transfiguration” literally means- to change appearance. Compare this with all of those accounts of the Resurrection, where Jesus is not recognized. Mary Magdalene didn’t recognize Jesus until he called her by name; the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize him until he broke bread with them; the apostles didn’t recognize him until he said “peace be with you.”

All of this is to suggest that though Christ was still on his way to Calvary, though he had not yet even died, he and his disciples experienced a foretaste of the Resurrection that day on the mountain. The Father wasn’t simply foreshadowing what was going to happen after Jesus’ death; rather, God let a little bit of the future, a little bit of the greatest event in human history in fact, impinge upon the present of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus had a “little resurrection” that day which was intimately connected to the resurrection as it was to take place several days later. Perhaps it was to give hope to the apostles. Perhaps, it was to give Jesus himself the strength to suffer the agonies of the Cross, knowing that the transforming power of the Resurrection would ultimately triumph.

In any event, we have something to learn from this, too. We still live in a world beset by sin and suffering. We still live in a world where death is a reality. The experience of pandemic and the current Russian warmongering stand as two very powerful examples for us today. We still need forty days of Lent—that ever looming church season which commences Wednesday—to remind us that things aren’t right.

But we can nonetheless experience the Resurrection and the Kingdom of God among these things that are passing away. We must acknowledge the “not yet” nature of the Resurrection and the Kingdom. We still have a shift in verbs in the Creed. “We believe in one God” and so forth, while we “look for”, or prosdokō to use the original language of the Creed– “await”, the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. They are still future events, but we Christians are proleptic people. We look for the Resurrection of the dead, but we also experience it in the here-and-now. We experience it in Baptism. We look for the life of the world to come, but we also experience it in the here-and-now. We experience it in the Eucharist.

We should be open to experiencing the risen life, but we must also live in the real world, and we can hold these two truths together. Like Peter, we might want to build huts for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; we may want to remain in the joy we experience in the risen life made so real and present in the Sacraments and in our lives as Christians, but like Jesus and like the disciples, we’ll eventually have to go back down the mountain. We shall all have to go back out into the world to love and serve the Lord, and humbly walk in the way of the Cross. The mountain-top experiences are fleeting, but like Jesus and the disciples they give us strength. They give us the strength to do God’s work in a broken world, to live lives of sacrifice, knowing that some day we shall experience the risen life, the life of the Kingdom uninterrupted for ever. May we hold on to that blessed hope, and thus be strengthened to live in love and do God’s work with even more resolve.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.