Author: John Drymon

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

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets.” Jesus’ lament in this morning’s Gospel is a powerful foreshadowing of the death which awaited him after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, after, as he had foretold, the children of Israel had proclaimed “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

Jesus’ lament raises a question, one which I believe to be important if we are to get to the center of Jesus’ mission 13and identity. The question is “what is a prophet?” It is a term we use rather loosely, but in the biblical worldview it held a rather specific meaning.

Let’s begin with two definitions of the word “prophet” which don’t quite get at the biblical meaning. First, there is what I call the “History Channel Definition of Prophecy”. Those of you who watch the History Channel will have recognized that much of the network’s programming has given up history in favor of speculation and what is to my mind an unhealthy curiosity with the occult. Anyway, if you were to turn on the television and flip to the history channel, you might see a “documentary” on how Nostradamus supposedly predicted the rise of Hitler or of the Taliban, or about how ancient Mayan oracles predicted the end of the world in 2012. The commentators on the program will refer to these predictions as prophecies and those who promulgated them as prophets.

But this is not the biblical definition of prophecy. Certainly, some of the Old Testament prophets predicted future events. Even so, prognostication about future disasters was not at the center of the prophetic vocation.

A second definition of prophet and prophecy arises from some contemporary Christians. They claim that a prophet is simply one who “speaks truth to power.” Specifically, they would limit prophecy to the promulgation of progressive politics. Certainly, the message of Old Testament prophets was not entirely without political ramifications,particularly seeing as how religion and politics were intimately bound together in ancient Israel. Even so, there is much more to biblical prophecy than what we would call political ideology, and, in my opinion, we would be sorely mistaken to see Jesus’ prophetic identity cast entirely in terms of modern political battles.

So, prophecy includes claims about the future and may have political implications, but these aspects neither exhaust nor define the message of a prophet. What does, then? What makes a prophet a prophet?

Well, in the Old Testament, all of the prophets were concerned with faithfulness, faithfulness to the Covenant which God made with His people. A covenant is an agreement between two parties in which each party has responsibilities. In this morning’s Old Testament lesson, God made a promise to Abraham, namely to give him offspring and land. Abraham’s end of the bargain was simply to believe, to trust in God’s promise: “And he believed the LORD;” the lesson reads, “and he counted it to him for righteousness.” This covenant was sealed in the ceremony in which Abraham sacrificed animals to the Lord, but the principal responsibility given to Abraham was simply to trust God.

Likewise, the Old Covenant given to the children of Israel through Moses was an agreement whereby the Israelites would obey certain moral and ritual laws in exchange for the land of Israel. All of those Old Testament Prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, were concerned with one thing: namely, calling the children of Israel back into faithful obedience to their end of the bargain.

But, you see, the covenant was not just a legal contract as we might think of one today. It established a relationship between God and Israel which went beyond that. A legal contract operates on both trust and distrust, in a way. We don’t enter into an agreement unless on some level we trust the other party to be faithful to it, but of course we have legal recourse if they aren’t faithful. It’s like that aphorism used by Ronald Reagan with regard to nuclear disarmament in the Soviet Union: trust but verify.

The Old Covenant was a bit different. There was no higher court to which the children of Israel could appeal if they felt God wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain. The children of Israel needed to fully trust that God would be faithful if they were to be faithful themselves. This is a lot harder than keeping a legal agreement, which is generally not predicated on implicit trust to quite the same degree, and this is why the Israelites needed so many prophets to call them back to faithfulness.

So, the prophet’s task is to call someone back into holding up their end of the bargain with God, to bring them back into a relationship of trust and faithfulness. This is why the prophetic task is so dangerous. You can stand on the corner all day long and say that the world is coming to an end or that some unpopular policy is the will of God, and you might offend a few people. In some country’s you might even be thrown into prison, as we’ve sadly seen recently in Russia. If, however, you were to stand on the same corner and denounce the unfaithfulness of this generation, to say that those who passed by were a faithless, disobedient lot who had turned away from God, then you might find yourself in a more precarious position.

This is why Jerusalem killed the prophets. Listen again to Jesus’ words:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee; How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!

Ye would not. You were not willing. We are not willing to listen to the prophet who tells us that we need saving. We are not willing to admit that we’ve been unfaithful or to permit Jesus to gather us like a brood under his wings, to gather us back to the Father. For, you see, the message of the prophet suggests that we don’t have it all figured out. The prophet convicts us of our unfaithfulness, that we might return, but it is an offensive message to us.

The message was offensive enough to those in Jesus’ day, to those who could not see past their pride to see their unfaithfulness, that our Lord was ultimately killed for it.

But there were those who heeded the call to repentance, who recognized that without a relationship with Jesus they could not remain faithful to God, who rejoiced that in the blood of the lamb, who died to themselves and were saved and put their trust in his resurrection, that in it they were given the promise of new and unending life.

There was a choice, and there still is a choice. We can choose to kill the prophet, to ignore the action of the Holy Ghost in our own hearts, to fight Jesus when he tries to conform us more to his image. We can, however, choose to accept the prophecy which is preached within us by that same Spirit, to amend our lives, to recommit ourselves to God, and to throw ourselves entirely upon his mercy. May this holy season be a time in which we choose not to rebuff the prophet, not to grow offended by his message, but to recognize our own need: a need as profound as the children of Israel under the prophets of old, a need as real as those in Jerusalem at the time of our Lord’s passion- the need to renew our trust in God and our faithfulness to his commandments. Do not kill the prophet because of pride, but receive his message of Grace and forgiveness.

+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.

“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.