Opening
We have entered into another season of Lent. For most of us it is not the first time we've "done Lent". We have followed this cycle year-by-year through the patterns of our lives. If we were to tell the narrative of the Lents that we have kept, we might get a facisimile of the history of our call to life in Christ. At some point we made a decision to follow Christ. At some point we recognized that to be a disciple of Christ it was going to mean molding and fashioning our life to conform to Christ's own life. The cycles of Lent tell something of the story of our call to life in Christ.
It's not linear. It's not a straight line or even multiple ones. There are cycles within cycles. My own life has been marked not just by keeping Lent but by attempting to preach on these lessons year-by-year, Lent by Lent. It is perhaps my task of preaching Lent -- preaching it over and over again -- that leads me to think of the big picture. These well-known passages come around year by year, again and again.
Most of you are aware that the lessons we follow on Sundays focus on one of the 3 synoptic gospels each cycle. Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Gospel of John is interspersed throughout the 3 years.
Now, within the annual cycle there are smaller cycles.
The Epiphany cycle, which we just concluded, presents us with a snapshot of Jesus' ministry, beginning with his baptism and ending with his Transfiguration. Like our own call to ministry, Jesus's ministry is launched with his baptism.
At the end of Epiphany, we recount Jesus's Transfiguration. It is the point at which the 3 synoptic gospels pivot and focus on Jesus's final journey to his Passion, culminating in the Resurrection. So for us in our journey in the church year we move from the Epiphany cycle to the Lenten cycle, the one that culminates in Easter.
Lent has begun. The cycle of 6 1/2 weeks that might be read as a slow-walk meditation on the way of the cross. It culminates in the Passion. And then -- Easter.
The time that follows Easter, The Easter cycle, lasts 50 days until Pentecost. It explores the meaning and implications of the Resurrection, for the disciples and followers of Jesus in the New Testament, and in the lives of Jesus' followers today – you and me.
Then, after Easter, there is a final cycle, the cycle of weeks from Pentecost until the next Advent. During this season the fullness of life in Christ is explored, with multiple themes and multiple emphases, as the whole task of following Jesus become an interwoven pattern of a cycle within a cycle with a cycle.
We hear these stories over and over again. And we know how each one goes. We know the story. What changes is who we are, how we have changed from last year, and what we make of it.
Sacred time is circular
I have shared with some of you how I can tell when we've had a good liturgy. It's when I can truthfully say, "I'm glad I came." If I can truthfully say, "I'm glad I came", then it's been time well-spent.
Now time is an interesting concept, one that serious thinkers have thought about for thousands of years and still do to this day. There is time that is clock-wise sort of time. Minutes turn into hours and hours into days. The ticking of the clock. That's secular time. It's linear. But then there is sacred time. In contrast to linear time, sacred time is generally circular. It doesn't generally function with a beginning and an ending, but rather flows from beginning to ending and then back again to the beginning. Our church year follows that sort of pattern.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.1
One Easter vigil I presided over many years ago lasted for over 2 hours. It was full. There was the of lighting fire. There was a full telling of the sacred story in the Bible. There were baptisms of children and adults in a tub of water where you had to get wet. There was an anointing you could see, fit for a king. There was Eucharist where one felt as if you were at a sacred meal.
Afterward, one of the people in attendance, I think it was a visitor, came up to me and said, "When we got to the end I couldn't believe it was over." For that person it was time well spent. Sacred time isn't measured by a clock.
Life in Christ
The sacred time of our liturgy has the power to bring us face to face with what was time present many centuries ago. Our liturgy brings us face to face with Abraham, Paul, and Jesus. As we enter this cycle of Lent, the liturgy presents us with utterly iconic scenes from the prophets and the evangelists. It has the potential to make us present with them in sacred time.
Abram faced such a new and sacred reality in the passage from Genesis we heard today. He was 99 years old and the LORD showed up at his doorstep and announced a covenant with him. His life changed with new requirements and – as a sign of the changed life – a new name. Sacred time has the potential to bring us into the presence of God and to so transform us that we are as new people.
The evangelist today relates a teaching moment in Jesus's life: "the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, ..." He's talking to disciples – those who regard themselves as wanting to follow Jesus. That would be you and me as well as Peter, James, Thaddeus and the rest. It has the potential to confront us with the reality that our life in Christ is about suffering, and rejection, death, and then ultimately resurrection.
We hear these narratives over and over again. We know how they begin and we know the end. That's not the challenge of them. The challenge for us is to open ourselves to that sacred time where we are transformed. It is not a one-off experience.
My own life experience suggests that each day I enter a new set of challenges to being a disciple of Christ. Each day I have to start at the beginning and go to the end. But sometimes I can actually hear Jesus say to me, "Follow me." Each time we meet these texts we are different from the last time. Whether it's day by day or week by week, I am in need of continual renewal, I must be called again and again to life in Christ. Such is the power of sacred time. We are able to hear the voice of the Lord in sacred time.
Lent aims us squarely at the Passion of the Lord and the 3rd day reversal of the Resurrection. Lent pursues the implications of following Jesus to the cross. We hear Jesus tell us that directly in today's reading:
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
Peter voices an initial resistance to doing such a thing. We can easily voice the same thing. "Jesus, you don't really mean that, do you?"
Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
This being a follower of Jesus thing we are called to is the way of suffering.
Suffering
Suffering there is bound to be for Peter and the disciples. Bound to be because suffering is pretty much a universal experience. Actually, I think it is universal. Everyone suffers. That was the beginning of Gautama Buddha's experience and it is the lynch-pin of the Buddhist way. When I would ask my religion classes full of 18 year olds, "Is it true that we all have had the experience of suffering?" I often get a kind of blank look from some of them, while others readily nodded their head, "Yes." I think the hesitation was probably because they had never really reflected on it. When I look out at you I don't doubt that you all know what I'm saying about suffering. It's around all of us.
Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Jesus suffered (that's what the word "Passion", Latin patior, means in this context). And he invites us to "take up our cross to follow him." That's a part of what the invitation to keep a holy Lent is about, to focus our lives on the task at hand. To enter into the way of the passion of Jesus.
But suffering is not an attractive thing. It's not an inviting thing. Typically we want to avoid it. Look at Peter's response. What do we do with this invitation?
Does Jesus' suffering make it all ok for the rest of us? Does Jesus' suffering offer a kind of redemption to each of us in our own suffering? Where is the redeeming value of suffering – for us? For Jesus?
There are no simple responses. The suffering which is on our path one year may look very different the next. The suffering for some is very different from the suffering of another. Jesus is found in all of the suffering. He invites us to participate. We are invited in to life in Christ.
We know how Jesus's story ends. He invites us into that as well.
Our end is our beginning
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή.2
The way up and the way down are one and the same, said a Greek philosopher 500 years before Christ.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
We have entered into this Lent. We do know how the story ends. We've been here before. We will give our best shot at embracing the way of the cross. We will fail. And we will meet the Risen Lord in glory. It will fade. And we will return next year to hear the story as if it were new. The sacred story goes on and on by going round and round.
We enter the sacred story. We have made a beginning of it. It's done. There's no undoing it. And in the end, as that poet and the mystic before him put it, "All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well."
