Sermon on March 8, 2020: Lent 2
Last week, as the anxiety about the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus seemed to peak, I thought to myself, you know, it would be a good idea to get a bunch of those small bottles of hand sanitizer and to put them in the pews. That way, everyone can rest assured that cleanliness is literally within arm’s reach. So I did what many of us do so well: I whipped out my phone and went straight to Amazon, thinking that I would simply Prime that hand sanitizer right into our pews—in two days max. But as you already know, Prime was no help. Oh there was sanitizer for sale, alright, to the tune of several hundred dollars. And so we find ourselves in the midst of a nationwide hand sanitizer shortage. Stockpiled away in those doomsday bunkers. Go to the stores and you can despair at all those empty shelves. You’ll see that there is nothing there.
What a fitting metaphor for the human condition, which is the fundamental assumption that we can save ourselves. If only we had made a faster trip to the store—if we had just Primed that sanitizer earlier in the week, we would be fine. We would be saved. It would definitely have preserved us from all those evil pathogens, and be the things that keeps us safe. Or so we think. At the end of the day, the basic faith of the human race is that we are the agents of our salvation. We think that we can save ourselves. Whether it’s salvation through sanitizer, or trying so very hard to convince ourselves that we are better people than we actually are, the pattern is pretty much the same. We’re the ones to get the job done. We can manufacture our own salvation.
But the message that we hear in today’s Scripture readings disabuses us of our delusion. Each passage in different ways reminds us of the most essential truth: that our help comes from above, and not from ourselves.
In the first reading from Genesis, we hear how help came to Abram in the form of God’s blessing, for God was going to bless Abram with a child, and it would be through Abram that the whole world would be blessed. In the Psalm, we affirm that our help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, and that we are sustained through God’s unwavering watchfulness over us; God doesn’t fall asleep, or need to take a break. And in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, we hear how help comes to us as a gift of a grace-filled faith, the gift of faith which God gave to Abraham, and which God has promised to give to us. It is through the gift of faith that we are made righteous, and are reconciled with God—not through our own effort, and the good works that we do. These three passages of Scripture proclaim with one voice that salvation comes to us from above—which is to say, from God. We cannot make it, and we cannot seize hold of it; we can only receive it as a gift, given to us.
This is a hard pill to swallow, because it reminds us that we are just human beings after all, so utterly dependent upon things outside ourselves that lie beyond our control, and that we are sustained only by the mercy of a God who calls us into existence. It was a hard pill for Nicodemus to swallow—Nicodemus, the Pharisee who sets a nighttime meeting with Jesus. Nicodemus tells Jesus that God must be present with him, because of all the amazing signs that he does. But Jesus responds by raising the stakes: “You must be born from above,” he says. “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” In other words, Jesus says that he is from God, and that his followers are also, in a mysterious way, from God, born from above.
To be born, to emerge from the womb, is to receive life as a gift, and this is not something that you do but rather is done to you. No one is prevented from citizenship in the kingdom of God, nor does anyone earn their way in; rather, we are given the gift of welcome to God’s community, like the gift of water poured onto the head at Baptism, when we were born by the Spirit into the Church, and became living members of the Body of Christ.
Out of love, God sent his only Son into the world so that whoever believes in him would not perish, but have life and have it to the full. Salvation comes as a gift. And yet it’s all too easy to warp it into a technology, and “get saved” through our own belief. Right? As long as you just believe, you’ll be saved—as long as I just pray the prayer, as long as I just get baptized, as long as I just… you get the idea. There’s something that I need to do if I am going to be saved. And so we distort the grace of God by becoming our own helpers, our own saviors.
But we cannot make ourselves right in the eyes of God. You can’t baptize yourself. You can’t give birth to yourself. And you can’t save yourself.
This is essential for us to understand, as Christians. But it’s a timely reminder for us now that we’re in the Lenten season. Because in Lent, it’s easy to get preoccupied with all the stuff we set out to do: the disciplines, you know, the not eating of this and the not drinking of that and so on. Sometimes we can focus on these things as if they will get us right with God. But Lent is not about feats of spiritual strength, and muscling ourselves into God’s good graces. Because God is a God of mercy, and it is God who leads us back and restores us when we’ve gone astray. Lenten disciplines, acts of penitence, and good deeds are not the way to make it right with God, because that comes only through Jesus, God’s only-begotten Son.
In Jesus Christ, God comes into the world. Why? Why did God do this? Was it because we’re all pretty decent people living wonderful, well-adjusted lives? Was it because we always do what is right, always choosing the good above all else? Was it to congratulate the happy few who got their sanitizer before it all sold out?
Why did God come?
It was for love that God came to be among us.
It was for love that the Father sent the Son into the world, that we might be born of the Spirit. The Love that loves us came into the world, to save it, to be near it. May we know this love, and know that our help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. Amen.