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The Rev. Linda
McCloud
Fearing Lent
“While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them;
I have a friend who says she does not want to pray every day and read her Bible every day because she is afraid to get too close to God. She said her fear behind that fear was that if she really got on speaking terms with God, God would call her to be a missionary. If she was a missionary, she thought that meant hacking her way through the African bush with a machete, looking for those poor benighted pagan cannibals. That scared the daylights out of her. She used that as an excuse for not praying. In our Gospel reading for today, we find Peter and John and James being terrified as they enter the cloud that overshadowed them and Jesus on the mountain. What was their fear behind the fear? Did they fear that they would see God? Their cultural heritage and conditioning had taught them that if they ever saw God they would die. They would have been right at least partially. Something about them would have to die if they saw God. Maybe their sins would die. Maybe some of their bad habits would die. Maybe they would learn to really trust God, when they saw they were at his mercy. Did Peter, John and James fear losing control? This is one of the factors in the eternal struggle between us and God. The desire to be in control of our own lives played a large part in the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They decided they wanted to take control by disobeying what God had told them. They took matters into their own hands and when they realized they had messed up, they got defensive about it. The tragedy was that they broke fellowship with God, who had previously walked with them in the garden in the cool of the day. Jesus came to restore that fellowship with God for which we were created. Adam and Eve were somehow not convinced that they were the beloved of God. But Jesus, the New Adam, knew he was the beloved Son of God. He is the one who gives a chance to start all over. The Church has set aside Ash Wednesday as a day in which we confess that we are sinners and start all over. I hope you will be here. This is the day we face our own mortality. We are not ready to live until we are ready to die. So, what is it that we fear most? Do we fear dying or seeing God? Or is the real issue fear of losing control. Lent is fast coming upon us, with Ash Wednesday only three days away. Lent is the time when we can repent and return to God and ask God to restore us to that divine fellowship for which we were created. But maybe we might be a little like my friend who fears being called to be a missionary. Is Lent your favorite season, or do you approach it with a sense of fear? Is it fear of the unknown? God is God of the unknown. Year by year, as we cycle deeper into our responsibilities as baptized persons, we edge a little closer to God, whether we realize it or not. Chances are good that God will not call you to do anything that God has not gifted you to do. Chances are very good that God has already planted within you those seeds of divine fellowship. As the days get longer and we have more sunshine, Lent is a good time to encourage those seeds to germinate and blossom. Lent starts out in darkness with something like a cloud over us. What we are listening for is for God to say of us, “This is my beloved.” This could hardly seem possible, but Saint Paul insists that it is so. Paul has an interesting take on our Old Testament lesson. Paul insists that Moses veiled his face because the glory of his encounter with God was fading. Jesus did not veil his face because his glory never fades away. Only Jesus gets transfigured, but because of him we can get transformed. We read this amazing theology of Paul in our Epistle: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” St. Paul says we can be like God. My late husband was something of a wise guy. One day I ended a mealtime blessing with “Oh God, make us like you.” Don grinned over at me and said, “You don’t have to pray for me to like God. I already like God.” If I hadn’t known he was kidding, I would have thought he missed the point. I admit it’s hard to get our minds around the fact that we can be like God. Maybe that is why we need Lent as a sacred time of reflection. Only when we have gone through the dark cloud of Lent can we come joyously into the blazing, blinding light of the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. When we stand in the light of Easter we will be in good company. We might even hear God say of us that we are his beloved. We have been in a mountaintop experience in the church since Christmas. This was a time when exciting things happened. There were special services with the children, and candlelight services. Then there was the burning of the greens on Epiphany, combined with the Bishop’s visitation. We have been building up to this last mountaintop experience of revisiting the Transfiguration of Jesus. The Church considers this event so important that we will get another chance to celebrate it on August 6. We would really like to stay here on the mountain. However, Ash Wednesday is coming, and we know what that means. We have to give up saying “Alleluia.” We have to solemnly admit that some day, we will loose all control of our lives. We have to come face to face with our own mortality. So today is a Sunday of transition. We go from the mountaintop to the valley of Lent. What will we look for there? Probably a way out. But there is no way out. We have to stay there and keep traveling. We have to follow Jesus through the desert of Lent. And we dread this because we know where Jesus is going. He is going to Jerusalem to die. As the disciples were set back by the glory of Jesus, so we would be overwhelmed with the glory of Easter if we did not go through Lent. This is how we get back up to the mountaintop. As Jesus had to be willing to die to be resurrected, so must we. This is why it is so important to stay connected to the church during Lent. When we encounter Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion, we gradually become more like him, as Saint Paul said we would. If we trust Christ in this Sacrament, offer ourselves to Christ in this Sacrament, and respond to Christ in this Sacrament, we receive the grace God intends for us. If we use this sacred time of Lent wisely, it will lead to action. Here is a portion of a letter from our Presiding Bishop concerning this holy season, suggesting one type of action we might take. She says: “Traditionally the season has been one in which candidates prepared for baptism through prayer, fasting, and acts of mercy. This year, we might all . . . pray for greater awareness and understanding of the strangers around us, particularly those strangers whom we are not yet ready or able to call friends. That awareness can only come with our own greater investment in discovering the image of God in those strangers. It will require an attitude of humility, recognizing that we can not possibly know the fullness of God if we are unable to recognize his hand at work in unlikely persons or contexts. “We might . . . fast from a desire to make assumptions about the motives of those strangers not yet become friends.” And finally she suggests that we “focus our passions on those in whom Christ is most evident – the suffering, those on the margins, the forgotten, ignored, and overlooked of our world. And as we seek to serve that suffering servant made evident in our midst, we might reflect on what Jesus himself called us – friends.” So I say, we need not fear Lent, even though it is a walk with Jesus to Jerusalem. Jesus knows where he is going, and Easter will be worth the trip. Amen.
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