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Sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Chris Burdon First Sunday of Lent, 21st February 2010
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
‘I can resist everything except temptation,’ wrote
Oscar Wilde. You know what he means… What is it about certain things or
actions or habits that is so irresistible? What is it that latches on to
our little weaknesses or lazinesses and makes fools of us and our wills
and good intentions? Is there really some subtle and malicious spirit
lurking about our steps, as Satan pursued Jesus in the ‘Lead us not into
temptation’, we pray - again and again, as though the danger never goes
away. Really, the words mean ‘Do not put us to the test’. Well, tests
and temptations are littered all over the place for anybody who is
serious about being good. And Lent, you’d think, would be a good time to
be more alert to them, to identify and enumerate those sources of
temptation and times of trial. Then we really could resist them, really
could beat the Satan.
The trouble is, this seeking
out of tests and temptations can tip us deeper in the mire. If I become
aware of a new source of temptation, that can flash away in my mind or
my body so that I commit a new kind of sin. Or I can get
obsessed with the whole business, so that my mind is fixed on my
sinfulness and I find no release from guilt. ‘Repent, and believe in the
good news,’ says Jesus when he leaves the desert. But the kind of
repenting that leaves us immersed in thoughts of sin is no way to good
news. ‘Why be a Christian?’ you are asking this Lent. Well, it’s not in
order to wallow in sin, no, it’s to do with good news that liberates and
rejoices us. When I was confirmed
many years ago, my grandfather gave me a little prayer book. It had all
kinds of handy hints about how to say your prayers, when to go to
church, and of course how to make your confession. You start by
examining your life, the book said, very sensibly. But the way to go
about it was rather baffling for a ten-year-old boy. There was a list of
possible sins extending over several pages. Obvious things, like
‘telling lies’; less obvious ones, like ‘cheating the tram company’; and
some rather coyly expressed sins like ‘doing impure things with others’
and ‘doing impure things alone’. You can see how with a bit of
imagination all kinds of wonderful new ways of sinning come to light,
some of them very attractive.
Now there certainly are some
people who have very little sense of sin, let alone of guilt, and
imagine that the way we behave is just a matter of instinct or genes, it
doesn’t concern right and wrong. They are people who we say have ‘no
compunction’ – and they’re not
all bankers. But there are other people,
including many religious people, who have the opposite affliction of
‘excessive compunction’ and see themselves trapped in sin and guilt. I
did hear of one man who was convinced that he was (as
Now of course we should be
aware of our failings, and we should confess them. But sins are not to
be compiled, they are to be
forgiven.
Concentrating on the flighty temptations that dance about us and on the
individual sins we commit can actually conceal the
seriousness of sin
- big capital-S Sin, the force that
Sin, in other words, is
utterly serious. It is a destructive force ranged against all that is
good and true, a force which can master us. But sin is
also
a joke – a joke, because God forgives sin and
we too can forgive, and the malicious enemy can be overcome. Without the
possibility of forgiveness, sin is the final catastrophe; without the
real enmity to God, sin is just trivial. Put the two together, the
malignancy of Satan and the forgiveness of Jesus, and you have instead a
very serious joke. Do we get the joke,
in all its seriousness? We certainly claim to, proclaiming every week in
the creed, ‘We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’. The
water of baptism is what washes away sin, what celebrates our repentance
as individuals and as a community – that is, our change of heart and
mind so that we face the right way in our life, face towards God and the
loving just communion he calls his world into. For forty days Jesus
is in the desert, undergoing the acute test in our flesh and blood. This
is not play-acting, this is real hunger and real temptation. And then he
talks not about sin but about good news. ‘Repent, and believe in the
good news’ – get the serious joke.
Why be a Christian? Because
our brother Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, has passed the test; he has
committed himself single-mindedly to the Father; and in the Father’s
name he has become that great centrifugal force, striding out into
But did you notice the
foreboding with which today’s gospel ended? ‘When the devil had finished
every test, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.’ The devil’s
time for a more exacting test arrives all too soon – indeed, in our own
keeping of Lent it will be there in only five weeks’ time, when the
enemies of Jesus encircle him and his friends forsake him and he is
alone in Gethsemane and at the imperial tribunal; and with a little bit
of compromise he could escape the fate those enemies are licking their
lips for. But Jesus in
Is
that
still a joke? Why be a Christian, a faith which has a gallows as its
sign? Because, though we know not how, Jesus has won the victory over
death as well as over Satan. Or because, as Paul puts in our second
reading, ‘if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe
in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved’ –
that is, made whole, shining with God’s image, united with his saints.
We are an Easter people, and Alleluia is our song. Oh,
the seriousness remains, for temptations are still to be resisted and
sins are still to be confessed. But even in Lent we do not need to seek
them out, any more than we should seek out persecution or martyrdom. The
testing is there already in the desert of our world, in the siren voices
calling us to please ourselves and ignore our neighbour and not to
forgive; and the testing may be hard. But ‘lead us
not
into temptation’: where we are
facing,
where we are being led, is towards the good news of Easter, going out
into the world rejoicing, laughing at its lurid invitations, following
that energetic leader who breaks bread with sinners.
Why be a Christian? The story
of Jesus doesn’t give us all the answers. It doesn’t even reach a
satisfactory conclusion. But that’s precisely because Easter has to be
lived by his followers.
We
are entrusted with the story and the good news.
I am a Christian because I want to find out what happens next, and I
trust Jesus to lead me to it. © Canon Chris Burdon 2010 ____________________________________________ |
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