This Sunday is about the halfway point in Lent and you notice the flowers on the altar, and the bit more upbeat music today. Today is known as refreshment or rose Sunday. Its intent is to be a lessening of the Lenten disciplines—to give us a breather as it were. Now I don’t know if this sermon will be a refreshment sermon or not. I will leave that to you to determine.
For the last few weeks on Wednesday evenings, Mike Hartenstine has been leading a discussion of Blaise Pascall’s Pensees. Pascall was a brilliant 17th century mathematician who I grew to despise in my high school math classes. I had to later repent because I discovered he became a follower of Jesus. His book: Pensees, literally thoughts, is a wonderful book that leads one to think deeply about the Christian faith.
In one passage, he catches my thoughts about Lent. He states: We can only know God properly by knowing our own iniquities. [Those who have known God without knowing their own wretchedness have not glorified him but themselves.] [repeat]
For some reason, that brought to mind the opening sentence of Rick Warren’s very popular and influential Christian book written some years ago: The Purpose Driven Life. The author opens his work with the sentence: “It’s not about us” his premise being that all of life is about God and not us.
We are in the fourth week of Lent. Many of us are taking it seriously in fasts, abstinence, taking on additional spiritual disciplines. But why? If Lent is not about us then what?
I grew up Roman Catholic, attending Roman Catholic elementary and high school, and so naturally Lent was a part of my DNA. Eventually I grew to really hate Lent. I hated it because I really didn’t understand it—I really didn’t have a clue about the Christian faith.
Oh, I understood the basics—I had the truths down and I believed them. I knew about the faith. I just didn’t know how to live the faith—I knew about God, I just didn’t know him — I knew about God’s love, I just didn’t know he loved me.
So every year, when Lent came I thought this is the time to make hay– I could gain God’s favor— earn his love, rack up the God points.
That was important to me, because I knew that he couldn’t possibly love me as I am because I knew that he knew who I really was, and all I had done. And the older I got the worse that situation became.
It seemed that the nuns, and later the Franciscan friars who were my teachers, always emphasized the saintliness of those fellow classmates who gave up the most.
But given my insight into the reality that God knew me and my life, and that my propensity for bad seemed to far outweigh whatever good I might accidentally do—I felt I did not have enough to give up in order to catch up.
So though I gave things up, and took on other spiritual duties, it just never seemed enough.
How much was enough? Would it ever be possible to gain the assurance of God’s love? That was an unanswerable question for most of my life. Finally, in high school, I gave up trying, and I became an agnostic with the accompanying lifestyle.
And I remained so for years.
It was only through the prayers and sweet constant persuasion of my wife and a number of her friends, people who seemed to know God in a vibrant and real way, that I was compelled one afternoon to get down on my knees and tell God that if all this stuff that my wife and her friends tell me about him is true then show me.
I randomly opened Gail’s bible to different pages and one of them that seemed to penetrate right to my heart was one we heard in the gospel lesson this morning: John 3:16. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever would believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
I did not know then that every Christian in the world, through all time, knew this verse by heart—because for me it was a precious personal find-a discovered secret. And there I prayed to God—really prayed to him for the first time to come into my life—if he wanted it—still wasn’t sure—and do something with it—anything would be a move in the right direction.
But I still didn’t believe that God really loved me and accepted me. I knew too much about myself.
At one point, a mature Christian brother opened my eyes to the reality of the scripture Paul gives us in his letter this morning: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing –it is the gift of God—not because of works, lest any man should boast.”
“It’s not about me—or you” it’s about God—and what he did through Jesus. I was right in one aspect—because of who I was—I couldn’t give up enough—I couldn’t do enough to earn God’s love and forgiveness—so he did.
The truth is that while I was as Paul said: dead in my sins and trespasses in which I walked, God sent Jesus to die for us—the perfect gift of love and mercy. And all we need do is to acknowledge our need and receive the gift– to trust in Jesus. It is not about us—it is about God and what he has done in Jesus.
That is the same message Nicodemus learned from Jesus in the gospel passage this morning.
That is the message Paul is communicating to his readers in Ephesus.
It’s not about us—it is about God’s love. It is about his grace his mercy demonstrated in the cross. It is about his hand outstretched to us asking us to repent-turn to him and trust him.
Many of us still believe that we need to earn God’s love – we must do things so that he will love us.
Many of us may be overwhelmed by our own sense of sinfulness. How many of us believe that there is no way God can love me because of my life—what I have done?
Jesus came to save sinners; that’s all of us. He loves us at the cost of his life and wants us to trust him with our lives—he offers us himself as the gift and we can’t earn that.
We are saved in that, in his mercy he does not give us what we do deserve, and in his grace offers us a gift we do not deserve.
Our salvation is a gift not a reward.
Lent is not the time we do things to earn God’s favor—that is impossible. It may even be a sin.
Lent is a time in which we focus on the mercy and grace given to us in Christ. Lent is about God loving us so much, he sent his son. It’s about his love and grace making us alive through Jesus and his cross.
If Lent is in anyway about us, it is about our sin. The only element we contribute to Lent is our recognition of our sin and seeking repentance—turning away from our sin.
Not to grasp that reality, makes a mockery of the cross. Pascall notes: knowing God without knowing our wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us God and our own wretchedness.
That is why we take Lent seriously, because only in recognizing the seriousness, the weight of our sin, might we understand the true meaning of the cross.
In Lent we grasp Jesus and his cross in repentance, with gratefulness, and thankfulness for so great a gift of love and grace given to us.
So, in so far as Lent is about me– are we reflecting on our lives to identify sin— our habits, lifestyle practices, our attitudes?
Do we dare even look into the dark secret things of our lives and acknowledge them to the Lord?
Do we identify even those small things-things we know are not right-we suspect may be sin but tend to overlook- and realize Jesus paid a price for even those, with his life?
if we honestly do the work of Lent, we can experience a trajectory adjustment in our lives—and live into the reality that life is really not about us- it is about what God has done for us–it is about being repentant, thankful, grateful, for what God has done in his son Jesus.
Lent is the path—the gateway– to Easter; the only way to know true life in Jesus.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Richard C. Marsden
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Fourth Sunday of Lent
15 March 2015