Today is affectionately known as Good Shepherd Sunday by those who follow the ancient lectionary of the Church, because the theme of the day is Jesus’ role as the Good Shepherd who lays down His life to protect and to save His sheep, His Church.  And to go along with our readings we pray the most obvious Psalm, the 23rd.  Chances are, if someone doesn’t know anything else about the Bible, they’ll probably be able to recite at least part of it.  When I officiate at funerals, a lot of times if most of the congregation aren’t regular church goers they won’t really sing or pray along where they’re supposed to, but when we get to the 23rd Psalm they’ll all chime right in, because the words are so comforting, so reassuring, so beautiful, that they’ve become a part of our culture, even for those who aren’t practicing Christians.

Which is kind of funny, because when we take a look at what the psalm is saying, it’s kind of surprising.  It’s not just a nice inspirational poem that says God will always be there for you.  There’s a lot more to it than that.  Take the opening line: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.”  What does a shepherd do?  Does he protect the sheep, lead them, feed and water them, doctor them, whatever?  Well, yeah, he does all those things, but to do any of them he has to actually be with them.  The shepherd’s first job is to be with the sheep.  A shepherd who doesn’t stay with the sheep is like a babysitter who leaves the kids at the house while they go run a few errands; they’re not doing their job.  Shepherding is presence.  God is our shepherd because He is present with us.  And because He is with us, we shall not want.  We don’t want anything else if we’ve got God.  But I want a convertible, or a vacation, or a villa in the south of France…  If we truly understand who God is and what He has done for us through Jesus, we find our deepest satisfaction in Him.  Listen to what it says in Psalm 73:25: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”  That’s directly from the heart of someone who knows that the convertible will break down or get totaled some day, the vacation will come to an end and the villa in the south of France will crumble someday after you’ve already died and can’t enjoy it anymore, but God and His love will last forever and will never let us down.  So why settle for anything less?

It’s kind of like a story I heard about a young boy who walked into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. The barber says, “What did I tell you?” “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. So he calls him over and says, “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game’s over!”  Again, why would we settle for short term satisfaction when we’ve got a great thing going that will never end?

So as we look down through the rest of the psalm, we find that David is just drawing out different ways that God provides all that he could want.  “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”  God provides what we need: food, rest, whatever it is, God gives us exactly what we need.  Not necessarily what we think we want, but what we need, and we don’t have to worry about lacking anything.

“He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”  God restores us.  After we’ve been chewed up and spit out by life, after we’ve been declared a loser in the eyes of the world, God still loves us, and heals our hearts and our minds and gives us the strength and the guidance that we need to follow Him and serve Him.  If God is our desire, walking in his ways will come as second nature to us, because we won’t want anything that doesn’t come from Him or glorify Him.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”  When we inevitably face death we don’t have to be afraid because, again, the Good Shepherd is with us.  Death will not look nearly as intimidating when you’re walking directly behind Jesus who has already shown us that He can beat death.  We can sayto the grave “Bring it!” because Jesus has already broken it wide open and we know it can’t hold us.

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”  Wouldn’t life be so much easier, and so much less stressful if we didn’t have to deal with other people?  I was talking with a good friend of mine the other night, and I asked him how his job was going.  He’s a librarian and works in a city library branch,  and he said “I know this probably sounds terrible but I’m seriously considering trying to find another line of work that doesn’t require as much contact with the public.”  And he started telling me about how rude and demaning most people who come into the library are, and yeah, people are selfish jerks sometimes.  And sometimes, they come after you loaded for bear, whether it’s justified or not.  But no matter what sort of conflicts we find ourselves in, if our desire is for God, we won’t be worried about what others think about us, but about what God thinks of us.  We perform for an audience of One, and if other people don’t like it, that’s just too bad because they aren’t the ones who paid for our life with their own.  Jesus has.  Yeah, we’ll have our fights, but even in the midst of them we know we’ve got God in our corner.  Does that mean we’re automatically right in every conflict?  No, but God will not forsake us even if we’re not.  He’ll bring us around to the truth.

Finally, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”  If God is our desire, we will know that whatever plan He has for us is good, and far better than anything we could have figured out for ourselves.  There’s that old saying, wherever you go, there you are, well wherever you go, there’s God’s mercy.  Even in the lousy periods of our lives, God is trying to help us grow in our reliance on His mercy.  I was in a very negative work environment once, and it was very difficult for me to have anything remotely resembling a good attitude about my job.  And what I had to keep reminding myself was that as much as I disagreed with the person I worked for, the reason God had me in that situation wasn’t so that they could change, but so that I could change, so that I could see myself as having the greater need for God’s mercy.

Now think about this for a minute.  I know that many of you have been living with the same person for decades, and you are no closer to having them housebroken the way you’d like then when you started, maybe even less so.  If you haven’t succeeded by now, the law of diminishing returns would indicate that you are bound to be dissappointed.  But instead of seeing the other person as your pet project to fix their problems, what if you work on your own?  That’s where God’s interested in applying His goodness and mercy, to your heart.  The Holy Spirit lives in  our heart so that we can be transformed by His mercy.  It’s only when allow Him to change us first, that there’s any hope of seeing change in the world around us.

And here’s the other neat thing about God’s presence transforming us.  The end of the psalm promises that we “ will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”  Jesus promised that He was going to prepare a place for us, a mansion with many rooms (By the way, some translations of the Bible say Jesus is preparing us each a mansion, but the more accurate translation is that He’s preparing one mansion with many rooms for us.  So it’s going to be more like moving on up to that apartment in the sky with The Jeffersons than Dallas.  Sorry to burst your bubble, but I’ll count myself lucky if I get a futon in the basement in Jesus’ house, let alone a whole room to myself.)  But anyway, we will lvie in God’s house.  But the cool thing is that we’re part of that construction project.  In Ephesians 2:19 St. Paul wrote this about what God is up to with all of us who have received His mercy through Jesus Christ: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”  You are the dwelling place of God by the Spirit.  All of us together as the Church are the dwelling place of God by the Spirit.  We become and we live into our deepest purpose when we realize that we’re spending every moment of every day in the presence of God, filled with the presence of God, each of us a building block in God’s house.  That is our destiny, to be the house of the Lord that He and we will dwell in forever.

So this morning may you seek to walk and live in the presence of the Great Shepherd, and may you know that He is with you at all times to provide for you, protect you and deliver you.  May you know that through the power of the Holy Spirit He lives in you, and that you can never find yourself in a situation or predicament where He’s not right there with you.  And may you find your greatest desire and satisfaction on the table that He has prepared for us, ready to receive His presence in a very special way, as He fills us with the Body and Blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, to remind us of His presence with us and in us, and to give us the grace to follow Him all the days of our life.  ✠  Amen.

On this most joyous of days as we are celebrating the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, we’re also celebrating the fact that His resurrection was the down-payment on our own resurrection.  In Jesus’ life we see our own, and in recalling the empty tomb year after year, we’re given the hope to live out our faith, even in the face of hardships, and our own impending deaths.

In our epistle lesson, St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Colossae that if they have been raised with Christ in His resurrection, they should seek those things which are above, not on the things of earth, and he assures them that their true life is hidden with Christ in God.  So a Christian’s focus is to be outside of this world on the spiritual reality of their life in Christ.  Well, doesn’t this lead, as the old cliche goes, to being so heavenly minded that we’re of no earthly good?  It might sound like it does.  But where do most people live their lives?  I would suggest that many folks spend the bulk of their time either in the past, or in a future that they have construed in their own minds.

If you’ve seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite, you’re familiar with Uncle Rico.  And even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know a bunch of people just like this guy.  Uncle Rico is about 40-45 years old, and the single greatest regret in in his life is that while he was quarterbacking his high-school football team in the state championship game, the coach benched him before the fourth quarter, and the team lost the game.  And so he lives his life trying to recapture his glory days.  He’s got the same haircut he had in 1982, the same clothes, he works out like he was still getting ready for the big game.  And he’s always thinking, “Well, if coach woulda put me in fourth quarter, we’d have been state champions. No doubt. No doubt in my mind. You better believe things had been different. I’d have gone pro in a heartbeat. I’d be making millions of dollars and living in a big ol’ mansion somewhere, soaking it up in a hot tub with my soul mate.”

What might have been.  Who hasn’t thought about what might have been if we’d won that game, gotten that scholarship, landed that job, or sealed that deal.  Things would be different.  Or we regret the stuff that we wish we hadn’t done, because we’ve been reaping the consequences all these years.  In either case, what does that regret do for you?  How does it make your today any better?  Other than learning from your mistakes so you can hopefully avoid making them again in the future, it doesn’t do a whole lot.  So why are we so obsessed with the past?

But then there are those who are focused on the future, but not a very realistic future.  If this happens, I’ll have it made.  I’ll be completely satisfied and happy if I could just have, xyz.  A lot of times these thoughts revolve around money.

Just last week the whole nation was transfixed by the MegaMillions lotto jackpot which got up to, what, $650 million?  Supposedly there are three winning tickets out there, but no one’s stepped forward to claim their share.  But for a week, everybody just stared at the jackpot getting bigger and bigger, dreaming of what it would be like to have that much money.  What would you do with it all?  Would you have yourself chauffeured everywhere by helicopter?  Buy your own tropical island to spend the rest of your life on?  Have a swimming pool full of money like Scrooge McDuck?  I think it’s interesting to note that a substantial share of lottery ticket sales come from poorer neighborhoods.  In fact, poor people are the most reliable ticket buyers.  Middle and upper class folks turn out when the jackpots get big, but poor folks play every drawing.  You would think that for folks who don’t have much disposable income, that they wouldn’t spend much money on the most statistically unlikely way to earn a fortune, but they buy those tickets, because they all have a dream of getting rich and escaping their poverty.  And for many of them, as far as they’re concerned, this is the only way that it’s going to happen.

But of course, we all know that we’re not going to win the lottery.  And we also know that there are all sorts of drawbacks to winning the lottery.  Having lots of money can lead to more stress than having no money, and everybody around you starts acting weird and cozying up to you.  Your priest calls you up randomly and says stuff like, “Hey, did you know we need a church building?  And a rectory?”  I read a quote from a couple who won a big jackpot a couple of years ago, and they said that people definitely come into your life solely to get some of your money.  Which is kind of freaky.  How do you sort out your potential friends from your potential parasites?

And lets not forget the important fact that no matter how much money you might win, you only get to enjoy it for as long as you live, and then you die.  Death is the great equalizer between rich and poor.  If the doctor gives you a terminal diagnosis, you may be able to keep the wolf at bay for a while, but you will die.  And if you get through this illness, you will get another terminal diagnosis at some point, if you get any warning at all.  Death comes for us all.  And regardless of what happened in your past, if only I had spent more or less time doing this, if only I had taken better care of myself, if only, if only.  Death does not care about our past, or our future.  It only wants to take us right now.

And that’s where God offers us an alternate reality right now.  God offers us a reality in which our death was experienced and died by God’s Son on a cross, so that the Son’s life could in exchange be given to us.  Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:20 “But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”  Jesus is the deposit, the guarantee, that we also will rise from the dead.  Regardless of what our past or future holds, the fact that Jesus Christ is alive right now changes everything for us.  Our past no longer dictates who we are or how we live.  The fact that we have died with Christ in His death and live with Him in His resurrection determines who we are and how we act.  We don’t have to hang all of our hopes and dreams on a powerball drawing because we know that we already possess something of infinite value: the certainty of eternal life.  So whether what I want to have happen in my life comes to pass or not, in 30, 40, 50 years for me it all ends the same.  I work and save for my family and for the spread of the Kingdom of God, not because I need to prove anything to myself or make my dreams a reality.  If they happen, great!  But if not, well, that’s okay because something far greater than my dreams awaits me.

Living in the past or the future doesn’t make life any better for us now.  We all wish things could be different, but as an old saying that I’m fond of says, You can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which piles up first.  And again, this doesn’t just apply to the lottery, but all sorts of things.  If only this would happen.  It’s like choosing to live with regret in advance.  But when you consider all of the factors in our lives that are outside our control, there’s so many reasons that whatever we want may not come to pass, whether it’s the laws of chance or sickness or or coincidences, there are just too many variables to be able to plan our future with any certainty.  How many of you are exactly where you thought you’d be when you were 18, or 30, or 50?  But if you “seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.”, than you’re dealing with certainty.  The tomb is empty; Jesus is alive, and our life is secure, though hidden, in Him.  We don’t get to see that life just yet, not until after we wear out our physical bodies, but in the meantime we get to take this new life for a little test drive.

And that’s what we Christians are really doing, test driving our new life in Christ until we trade in our learners permit for a real license and secure ownership of our eternal life.  There are those who would say that living the way Paul is describing here in Colossians will lead to us Christians being like the old cliche, so heavenly minded that we’re of no earthly good.  But actually the reverse of that is true: the world is no good because it’s not heavenly minded.   When we ground our lives on our faith that Jesus Christ is alive, and us with Him, then we are free to live not for ourselves but for those around us.  Jesus calls us to love and serve one another as He loved us, and gave up His life for us.  You cannot find a purer ethic than that.  He uses us to spread the borders of His kingdom to encompass more and more people, so that they can be set free from the regrets of their past and their fears for the future, and so that they can experience this new life as well.

This Easter morning, Jesus calls us to lift up our hearts and our minds from our past and future and the frustrations of today, and to instead set them on His resurrection.  In Him we have peace for our past, certainty for our future, and purpose and hope for today.  ✠  Amen.

This evening as we’re offering thanks for the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross, our lesson from Isaiah and Psalm 40 remind us that the events of this day almost 2,000 years ago were not coincidence or happenstance, but part of God’s plan of redemption for men and women who had fallen from His grace.  Jesus did not blunder into His passion and death, or merely deal graciously with an unexpected turn of events, but entered willingly into His suffering, accepting and embracing His identity as the suffering servant upon whom the chastisements of us all would be laid.  Which should make us that much more grateful for what Christ has done, because He willingly took the load of our sin on Himself.  He could have gotten out of it.  But then He would not have been living up to and into His calling to be our Redeemer.

A few years ago there was a very thoughtful movie called Stranger than Fiction, and it starred Will Ferrel in a serious role, as a very average man, an auditor for the IRS named Harold Crick, who one day discovers that somebody is narrating his life, and whoever is telling the story knows something about his death.  As Harold tries to discern exactly what’s going on, he figures out that he’s the character in a book, and he becomes obsessed with trying to figure out if his story is a tragedy, where the hero dies, or a comedy, where the hero falls in love at the end.  And he actually figures out who the author is, and she is known for killing the lead characters in every single one of her books.  Faced with the certainty of his death, he actually begins to really live for the first time, and even after the author allows him to read her rough draft of the conclusion of her book, he realizes that the end she has written for him is far more poetic and meaningful, than any death he could otherwise imagine for himself.  As he hands the manuscript back to her he says, “I loved it.  You should finish it.”  It was by embracing his identity as a character in a story of great beauty and meaning that Harold Crick was able to see his life in perspective.

Jesus embraced His role as the ultimate sacrifice for sins, and forever more we will praise Him because of what He did for us.

In Psalm 40 we read about Jesus’ inward experience of His crucifixion, so we’ll take a brief look at it, if you’d like to follow along in your bulletin.  Verses 8-10 say, “Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, * but mine ears hast thou opened. 9 Burnt-offering and sacrifice for sin hast thou not required: * then said I, Lo, I come; 10 In the volume of the book it is written of me, that I should fulfil thy will, O my God: * I am content to do it; yea, thy law is within my heart.”  All the sacrifices of Israel did not satisfy God, because God wanted something far more costly than livestock.  He wanted His people’s hearts, their love and obedience, and that was the one thing that, because of our fallen state, we could not give Him.  So Jesus was tasked with providing one completely pure heart, a life of sinlessness and total devotion.  And He pulled it off with flying colors, showing us exactly what perfect obedience and love look like.  In Jesus’ life we see the desires of the Father’s heart enacted as people are healed and fed and forgiven, and in His teaching we hear exactly what the Father wanted to say.  As verse 11 put it, Jesus declared God’s righteousness in the great congregation, He did not refrain His lips, even, or especially, when what he was saying was directed directly at the powers that be.  In verse 12, Jesus did not hide God’s righteousness within His heart but made God’s mercy and truth explicitly known through His teaching and actions.

Now you would think that for Someone who is so perfectly in tune with God’s will, that God would then spare Him when He faced difficulty.  Even in the movie I mentioned earlier, when the author realizes that her character is a real person, she’s torn about whether she should finish the book or not.  When someone asks her is it’s hard because the character is real, she replies, “Because it’s a book about a man who doesn’t know he’s about to die. And then dies. But if a man does know he’s about to die and dies anyway. Dies- dies willingly, knowing that he could stop it, then- I mean, isn’t that the type of man who you want to keep alive?”  Indeed, isn’t that exactly the type of person any of us would want to spare?

Especially when that person prays, “Withdraw not thou thy mercy from me, O Lord; *  let thy loving-kindness and thy truth alway preserve me.”  What could possibly prevent God from listening to someone who is so perfectly righteous?  It was our sins, which were more than the hairs on Jesus’ head, which took hold of Him.  Every thought, word and deed which is not in line with God’s will was taken off of us and laid upon Him.  Was that fair?  Absolutely not.  But God does not allow us to question His mercy and grace, only to accept it.

The last verse we read tonight was verse 16: “O Lord, let it be thy pleasure to deliver me; * make haste, O Lord, to help me.“  The Lord did not deliver His Son on Good Friday, because the Son was delivering us.  ✠  Amen.

Tonight as we’ve gathered to recall Jesus’ final night with His disciples, there are three significant actions of Jesus on that night which we are particularly reminded of: His institution of the Lord’s Supper through which we proclaim His death until he comes again, His washing of the disciples’ feet after the meal, and His agonizing time of prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.  It’s the first that I want to focus on tonight, because, as Anglicans, and especially as more high-church Anglicans, we love the Eucharist.  We celebrate it every Sunday, we write and read books about it, we argue about it, and those debates consume all sorts of time and energy.  But the institution of the Eucharist was only one of two commands that night.  The other half of the equation came a little later, when Jesus stripped down like a servant would to wash his disciples’ feet.

Now, this made the disciples very uncomfortable.  Their society was extremely stratified, even more so than ours is, and as Rabbi Jesus’ disciples, their job was to follow Him around and take care of anything that He needed.  It was their job to wash Jesus feet at the end of the day or before a meal.  They ran His errands and prepared His food.  So when Jesus starts washing their feet, it’s no wonder that Peter objected.  ‘You can’t do my job for me!’  But Jesus is still trying to help them understand why He came, and how He wants them to live in His absence.  ‘Yes, I’m your Master and Lord.’  “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. 16 Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. 17 If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”  Now stop right there.  Jesus did not say, blessed are you if you if you celebrate Communion.  He said blessed are you if you wash one another’s feet, if you serve one another.

In one brief action, Jesus turned the world of social etiquette and ethics on it’s head.  Now whoever had been sitting on top of the food chain finds themself buried at the bottom.  Those who had been oppressed and had never gotten a break would suddenly find themselves being served.  Jesus, who was sinless, was about to be betrayed, and tortured and executed for all of us who had sinned.  And through His death He would make us innocent and pure.  Again, everything is turned on it’s head.

Jesus summed up His object lesson for them a little later in verses 34 and 35 when He told them, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”  If we want to be obedient disciples, if we want to be disciples who are effective in reaching the world with the good news of Jesus Christ, we will love one another.  We can have the most spectacular liturgy, we could have the most immaculately perfect theology, we could have the finest building or youth program or outreach ministry or whatever it is that churches chase after, but we haven’t got anything if we don’t love and serve one another.

Bishop J.C. Ryle, who was Bishop of Liverpool long before the Beatles took over the city, said that so many people focus all of their attention on serving the poor.  And Jesus did tell us to take care of them, too.  But Bishop Ryle pointed out that it’s so much easier to serve a poor person than your equal.  With the poor person, you get to maintain some degree of superiority, and pride.  ‘Thank God I can help the poor woman.’  And while you may not pat yourself on the back, you have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done something good.  But when it’s your equal, that satisfaction is gone.  ‘I’m getting played here.  I’m never going to get anything out of this.’  One time I went to a speed networking event sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, and the way it works is everyone gets two minutes to talk to each of the other business people there, and you hand them your business card and you have seconds to convince the other person that you can give them something that you need, or at least pique their interest in whatever widget or service you sell.  And then everybody moves down a seat to rotate.  So I show up in my collar with a pocket full of cards and St. Luke’s brochures, and there were a bunch of people who, when they sat down across from me, were very obviously not happy that they had to spend a minute trying to sell me something they knew my church didn’t need.  I had one guy who said, I make posters, how ever many posters you need, 5,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, whatever it is I can do it.  So I said, “Well, my parish is pretty small and the most posters I can ever see us needing is about a 100, and he just shut down.  With a bunch of those folks, I haven’t gotten the cold shoulder so fast since I was single and trying to flirt with girls.  People are primarily interested in what can benefit them.  It’s what makes the market go round.  But Jesus calls us to forget about what makes good market sense for ourselves, and instead think about what’s good for someone else.

You may wonder, how can I serve my brothers and sisters?  How can I love them?  What does it look like?  One of the best things you can do is spend a little time around someone who’s already doing this, because when you hang out with them, before you know it they’ll be serving you, and you’ll see exactly what it looks like.  And we’ve got some great servants in our parish that I can direct you to, to learn from.  But it’s mostly simple stuff.  Can you help someone out with their spring clean-up?  That’s love.  With getting their garden started up?  That’s service.  Helping them out with their business?  That too.  And those are the tangible things.  But what means even more is just giving someone the gift of your presence.  Have you got an empty seat or two around your table for Easter dinner?  Invite someone over.  Are you planning on ordering a pizza and watching one of those last two, do-or-die Sabres games?  Tell a fellow Christian to come over to eat your food.    We should have all sorts of instances of spontaneous and uncoordinated acts of fellowship and service going on amongst our members all the time.  And while we all love coffee hour, I would venture to suggest that very, very few of us have had many life changing conversations during one.  The real fellowship in the Church happens outside its four walls, as you take the presence of Christ with you out into the world.  That’s where we make our biggest impact.

But it begins not among the poor and the sick and the disadvantaged that we serve, but with our brothers and sisters in Christ who Jesus has called us to love.  We start right here.  We may be small, we may be a remnant, but God seems to enjoy working with remnants, with little groups of messed up, dysfunctional people who no one else would ever expect anything out of, and then He does something great with them.  Now I’m not saying everyone at St. Luke’s is dysfunctional, but hey, we’ve all got our quirks and shortcomings, and dysfunctions, but who knows what God will do with tiny St. Luke’s?  Kind of like how a quilter can take a bunch of old worn-out clothes and rags and make a beautiful work of art out of them.  He used Israel, which if you’ve read even a tiny bit of the OT you’d know their history was made for daytime TV, and through them he brought the Redeemer and the salvation of the world.  He used the disciples who abandoned their Master just a couple hours after they were beating their chests and bragging about how they’d stand strong with Him right down to the final curtain call, He took those eleven chicken-hearted guys and spread His gospel throughout the known world.  There is no limit to what God can do with a dedicated group of imperfect people who don’t know how to do anything else other than trust Christ and love one another.  During Holy Week we’re seeing how our Master and Lord has served us.  Now let’s see what He can do among us, as we obey Him together, and serve one another.  ✠  Amen.

Today as we celebrate Palm Sunday, we again experience the extreme ups and downs of Jesus’ final week before His death.  At the beginning of the week, He was getting the King’s welcome into Jerusalem by a crowd that seems to have been pretty spiritually savvy.  After He had spent the past three years of His ministry trying to help people understand who He was, it finally seems as if Jesus has gone mainstream.  He has crowds shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’”  They recognize Him as the Messiah they’ve been waiting for, and they recognize that as such, Jesus was coming to Jerusalem to do God’s work.  They recognized in Jesus someone who was so centered in the vision and the purpose of God that he was uniquely blessed in whatever He did.  They may not have fully understood that Jesus was God’s Son, but they all knew He was acting and teaching with God’s authority.  At the beginning of the week, it’s obvious that Jesus and the Father are tight.

But just five days later, Jesus is being condemned by another crowd, and this time they are desperate to see Him destroyed.  They are hungry for His blood, and just the idea that Jesus might have some kind of special relationship with God was blasphemous to them.  The situation was bad enough that His disciples put as much distance between themselves and Jesus as they could, both literally and figuratively.  And so the end of this week finds Jesus nailed to the cross, deserted by those He loved except for His mother, John and a few female supporters.  And at the ninth hour of the day, His sixth hour on the cross, Jesus cries out in His native language, ““Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”  The one who had come to Jerusalem in the name of the Lord died outside of Jerusalem forsaken by the Lord.  How could it happen?  And why?  Why would God allow His Son to endure such a thing?  If Jesus and the Father were one, how is it possible for Him to be forsaken by God?

Well, we could spend a whole week sitting here addressing those questions, but at least part of the answer lies in our Epistle reading. in Philippians 2:7-8 where Paul writes that Jesus, “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”  Even though He was God with all the rights and privileges that go along with that, He chose to forego them, to lay them aside for a time so that He could live within the limitations of an ordinary human life, all so that He could humble Himself to the point that He takes the sins and the pain and the hate and the disappointment of the world upon Himself on the cross, and endures total alienation from the Father.  In Galatians 3:13 Paul wrote that “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”)”  Jesus became everything that God can’t stand, everything that characterizes our sinful selfish human lives, so that we could experience God’s acceptance and love rather than His rejection and wrath.  Last week I said that God loved us so much that He would rather have Himself torn apart than live without us, and that is exactly what’s going on as Jesus felt more alone than anyone has ever felt.

So which day in the week is it for you this morning?  Is it Palm Sunday, when it’s very clear that you are God’s chosen person?  That may sound awfully presumptuous, but it doesn’t have to be.  There are times when things are going well and we have a very deep-seated sense of security in knowing that we are loved by God and are at the center of His will for us.  But then, maybe at the drop of a hat, maybe over the course of months or years, we don’t feel so close to God anymore, if we ever did.  Sometimes it seems as if God is playing games with us, or maybe more likely it seems as though He doesn’t care at all.  Everything that happens can be taken as a sign that He’s either not happy with us or He’s forgotten us.  And we have to try to figure out why.

Well, as you ponder that, remember this.  He knows exactly what it feels like to be forsaken.  He’s been more alone than you will ever be.  Whatever load you have to carry, He has carried the weight of everything that’s wrong in the world on His shoulders and he swallowed it up in His death.  I don’t say this to minimize what you may face or the pain you feel, but to put it into perspective.  The next time you wonder if God actually cares about you, remember that Jesus took our forsakeness upon Himself so that we wouldn’t have to be alienated by God.  We may still feel distant, but the fact of the matter is that Jesus has cleared the way through His sacrifice for us to have direct access to the Father, and Jesus is the ultimate assurance we have of the Father’s love for us.

So this Holy Week, I invite you to spend the next few days immersing yourself in Jesus’ experience of being alone and forsaken.  This will do three things for you.  First, again, it will remind you that you are not alone.  Even in the midst of despair, you can find Jesus there.  He’s not called the man of sorrows for nothing.  Secondly, it will drive home for you the seriousness of your own sin.  If this is what had to be endured because of what I have done, it’s going to give me a whole new perspective on how I live my life.  The more I seek my own satisfaction, the more likely I am to  contribute even more to the weight that Jesus has to carry.  But when I understand how necessary it was for Him to suffer and die in my place, the more likely I am to have the same mind that was in Him, to humble my self and lay aside whatever rights and privileges that I think I’m entitled to.  And finally, when we walk with Jesus and wait outside the tomb for Him, our joy will be that much more intense on Easter morning.  I often say, how can the good news be that good if the bad news isn’t that bad.  This is the week when we really immerse ourselves in the bad news, so that on Easter we can be that much more moved by the news of His resurrection.  In fact, we should approach this week with the same kind of attitude that Jesus did.  Yes, He was deeply troubled by the thought of what He was about to experience, as anyone would be.  Yes, He prayed the opening verse of Psalm 22 on the cross as He died, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  But Jesus knew all the psalms by heart.  He knew how that psalm, one of the bleakest in the book, ended.  Listed to what it says in verses 22-26,

22 I will declare thy Name unto my brethren; * in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.
23 O praise the LORD, ye that fear him: * magnify him, all ye of the seed of Jacob; and fear him, all ye seed of Israel.
24 For he hath not despised nor abhorred the low estate of the poor; * he hath not hid his face from him; but when he called unto him he heard him.
25 My praise is of thee in the great-congregation; * my vows will I perform in the sight of them that fear him.
26 The poor shall eat, and be satisfied; they that seek after the LORD shall praise him: * your heart shall live for ever.

Even when we feel the most neglected and forsaken by God, we can stand fast in the promise that God has given us that all who bow down at the foot of the cross will experience Jesus’ resurrection with Him, and we can still call Him my God.  So this Holy Week, whether it’s through your attendance at services or your reading of Scripture and prayer at home, follow Jesus in His suffering as He was made the curse for us, so that you can share in His glory Easter morning.  ✠  Amen.

Today is known in the Anglican world as Passion Sunday, which marks the beginning of the season of Passiontide, as we remember Jesus’ passion, everything that He endured in order to bring about our salvation.  And this morning we’ll be looking especially at our epistle lesson from Hebrews chapter 9, because it does a great job of setting the stage for the drama of Christ’s Passion that’s about to unfold over the next two weeks in our liturgy, because it helps us understand that these events historically happened, they’re not just historical happenings that we’re remembering.  They’re dramatic, but this isn’t a drama that our civilization has cooked up to artistically express something.  (The artist at work here is God.)  There’s a certain sense of safety we enjoy when we’re exposed to history or drama.  We can sit in our chair and watch a disaster movie and think how glad we are that we’ll probably never have to experience something like that.  I enjoy reading military history, but it always leaves me a profound sense of gratitude not just for what others have done to secure and preserve our freedoms, but also gratitude that I didn’t have to do it myself.

But when it comes to the passion of the Christ, there should be no sense of safety and detachment, because what Jesus said and did has an immediate impact on my life: past, present and future.  You can sit and read about Julius Caesar all day, but what bearing does he have on your life?  Sure, he helped change history so maybe if it wasn’t for the events he set in motion your great-great-great-seventy times over grandfather wouldn’t have ended up meeting your great-great-great-seventy times over grandmother and thus you wouldn’t be sitting here this morning, but you don’t have to know that and you can go along and live your life however you please and it won’t make a bit of difference.  But the passion of Jesus Christ makes all the difference in the world to us, and we’ll see how here in Hebrews 9.

In this chapter, the writer (and by the way we have no positive i.d. for the writer) is comparing and contrasting the way God’s people have worshipped Him under the old covenant, and in the new.  He describes some of the comings and going in the Temple, and how the priests would go in and out, and there would be washings and sacrifices and offerings, but none of it seemed to make a whole lot of difference in anybody’s life.  He writes in verse 9: “It was symbolic for the present time in which both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make him who performed the service perfect in regard to the conscience— 10 concerned only with foods and drinks, various washings, and fleshly ordinances imposed until the time of reformation.”  People are doing all sorts of stuff, but their hearts are unchanged.  Their consciences are still loaded with all sorts of shame and regret.

Let me make a side note here about our consciences.  When you think about your conscience, what do you think of?  Or more properly, who do you think of?  Jiminy Cricket!  And you think of him singing “And always let your conscience be your guide!”  Well, the problem with that is, our consciences are not as pure and honest as Jiminy Cricket.  A conscience can be shaped, and warped.  Just look at what’s happened in the 20th century under fascism and communism.  Millions of people became willing partners with the state to murder their neighbors, and they were all acting according to their conscience.  It’s just that their consciences had been twisted through propaganda and state-controlled education.  And likewise, if our consciences are shaped and molded by God’s word, then we should be in good shape.  But, how many of us can honestly say that that’s the case?  Our consciences are liable to lean one of two ways.  Instead, of Jiminy Cricket, we may have Jiminy the Cricket Bat, who beats the snot out of us over every little thing we do, or we may have a lazy, self-satisfied conscience that lets everything slide.  Neither one is a trustworthy guide!  But in general, no matter what condition our conscience is in, almost everyone is carrying around some measure of guilt and regret.

And all of the stuff that was done in the Temple didn’t lighten the load for anyone.  Instead, under the old covenant there were so many rules and laws to keep that they ended up compounding many peoples’ guilt.  And the sacrifices that the priests offered for peoples’ sins were like  placeholders for the sacrifice that God was going to provide at the time of reformation of the covenant, as it’s put here.

So when Christ came, and He was arrested and falsely accused and tortured and crucified in Jerusalem, that was only one layer of what was going on.  Behind and through that event in history, Jesus was walking into the greater and more perfect tabernacle of God that was not made with human hands, into the Most Holy Place having obtained eternal redemption.  What’s that mean?  When you buy a bottle of pop, you pay a 5 cent deposit on the bottle, and you don’t get that nickel back until you take the bottle back to the store and pop it in the machine, and you redeem your nickel for the bottle.  Quid pro quo, this for that.  Christ gave His own life, which was His to hang onto if He wanted, so that you and I could be redeemed from the death that we had coming to us.  And Jesus, who was God’s Son, allowed Himself to be separated from His Father so that we wouldn’t be separated from Him.  Think about that for a second.  God preferred to be ripped apart rather than see you be separated from Him.  That’s what redemption means.

So Jesus comes into the presence of God the Father, and instead of bringing the blood of a bull or a goat with Him as a stand-in for the blood of the sinners, He brought His own blood.  Under the old covenant, the priests would bring the animal blood into the Temple, and the rationale was ok, we’re sinful and therefore deserve to die, now here’s the substitute blood which God requested, so we can consider ourselves covered for the year, or until we sin again, whichever comes first.  “…how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”  The blood of Christ doesn’t just cover up what we’ve done, but in the eyes of God it wipes the slate clean.  Does it mean we’re not sinful anymore?  No, I’m still me and you’re still you and we’re all messed up people.  But it means that in His dealings with us, God considers us to be as innocent as Jesus is.  Supposedly here in the U.S. our court system is to consider everyone innocent until they’re proven guilty.  It doesn’t always work out.  But God actually succeeds at considering us innocent, even though we are guilty.  So when we pray, we can talk to God knowing that He is not holding our sins over us like the proverbial shoe waiting to drop.  Isn’t it nice to know your past is not being held against you.  It’s hard for us to accept and believe because nothing else in life actually works that way.  Your insurance company doesn’t overlook your speeding tickets, and banks don’t overlook your credit history.  But God does it.  The Passion of Jesus Christ brings closure and healing to our past.

So how do we respond to this news of redemption?  A lot of people say, “Thanks God” and go about their business without giving Him a second thought.  It hasn’t taken with them.  In verse eleven it says that our consciences have cleansed from dead works so that we can serve the living God.  Not so that we can be happy, not so that we can be financially blessed, not so that we can be fulfilled, but so that we can serve the living God who created us and redeemed us.  We find our original purpose in life, and ironically enough it’s that new purpose that brings us real fulfillment.  The Passion of Jesus Christ gives us a new reason for living today, and a new way of life.

And finally, in verse 15 it says, “And for this reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.”  Jesus mediated, arranged and facilitated a new covenant, the terms and conditions of which were completely fulfilled by His passion and death, so that every person who sinned under the old covenant could be redeemed, and so that every person in the future who was called by God into fellowship with Him could join them in receiving God’s promise.  The same promises that He made to Abraham and Jacob and David and the prophets all through the Old Testament apply to us.  Our Presbyterian brothers and sisters sum up their theology in a document called the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it has a short catechism attached to it, the first question of which is the most famous part of the whole thing.  It goes like this: What is the chief end of man?  The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  That’s what life’s all about, glorifying and enjoying God, but note that part of the definition is that we’re intended to do this forever.  (So you better get used to it, because you’re going to be doing it for a looong time!)  We’re not supposed to have an expiration date.  And let me put your mind at ease, if you think glorifying and enjoying God forever means that you’re going to be sitting in a church service that never ends, you’ve got to expand your definition of worship.  God can be glorified in all of life, from your work to puttering in the garden to having tea with your friends.  The formal worship we offer God here together is very important and necessary, and most people don’t give it the time and attention it deserves, but it’s only one component of a life that should be totally characterized by worship and love of God.  Life with God forever will involve work without the toil and drudgery and discovery and exploration and artistry and fully appreciating every facet of the world He created for us.  Sounds good doesn’t it?  It beats sitting there listening to me for all eternity, doesn’t it?  The Passion of Christ opens the door to a whole new future for us.

So now when we walk through the next couple of weeks with Jesus, we do it knowing that what He suffered 2,000 years ago has a direct impact on our past life, and how we live today, and the fact that we’re going to live with Him forever.  He was not walking this way alone, or by happenstance, but was very intentionally staying the course for you, and for me.  We are inextricably tied to Jesus in His Passion.  So this Passiontide, don’t distance yourself from the pain, but enter into it as much as the words of the Gospels and our liturgy and your imagination will let you.  Don’t allow yourself to remain unchanged by what Christ did.  Whether this is the first time you’ll be paying attention to the old, old story, or the eightieth time, hear it as an account of God’s love for you, and His intention that your past, present and future be redeemed and cleansed and renewed by the death of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.  ✠  Amen.

In our epistle lesson this morning we’ve read Paul’s argument with the members of the Church in Galatia, a church which Paul had been instrumental in starting, and which He was quite fond of.  He and his parishioners there were very different.  He was a Jewish scholar who had been working as a tentmaker since his miraculous conversion some years before, they were the Gentile, or non-Jewish citizens of the city.  But they had responded to Paul’s message that the Jesus, the Messiah of the Jews had died on the cross for their sins, too, and they had been baptized and mentored by Paul before he moved along in his missionary journeys.  But since then, other itinerant preachers had come and gone, and lately the Galatians had been visited by a team of missionaries from Jerusalem who were Jewish believers in Jesus, and as many folks were doing at that time they were traveling throughout the Roman Empire trying to spread the message of Jesus Christ.

That should always be a good thing, except they were actually trying to do a little more than that.  The were telling the Galatians that what Paul had been preaching was good news, but he hadn’t taken the time to give them the whole story.  Now that they were Christians, the way that they were to live out their commitment to Christ was by following the Jewish law and lifestyle, including the men getting circumcised and everyone switching to a kosher diet.  Suddenly the price of being a Christian climbed sharply.  It wasn’t enough that you were willing to be martyred by the Roman emperor, or turn your back on your old way of life.  Now, you couldn’t drive over to the Wendy’s at the five corners in Orchard Park for a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger on a Saturday without breaking at least 3 Old Testament laws.  You’re eating pork, there’s dairy and meat together, you’re traveling on the Sabbath, you’re making someone else work on the Sabbath, and if you’re wearing a cotton/poly blend t-shirt while you’re doing it you’ve racked up another one because that’s a no-no as well.

Needless to say, this put a damper on the Galatian Christians’ enthusiasm.  Some of them, at least, felt like they’d gotten the bait and switch and wandered away.  Sure, Paul had sounded good, but apparently he was the bait, and now that they had met the hook they weren’t up for it.  But many of the church members were enthusiastic about this new aspect of their faith.  They were like, “We have to get what cut off?  Well…okay…”  And they embraced Judaism as a way of life because they thought it was the best way to honor and follow Jesus.  After all, He had kept kosher, and the rest of the law.  Shouldn’t they do what Jesus did?

And that’s what brings us to today’s passage.  Paul is trying to reason with them, to jolt them back to their senses.  So he tells them a story.  He says, ‘you want to be good law-keeping Jews.  Okay then, what does the law, the Torah, tell us?  It tells us that the father of Israel, Abraham, actually had two sons.  God promised him that he would father a great nation, even though Abraham and his wife Sarah were up there in years.  Sarah figured that since she had been infertile her whole life, and now she was way, way past childbearing years, and Abraham could keel over at any moment, they’d better get something started.  So she tells Abraham to sleep with her slave Hagar, and Abraham says, “OK!” and they have a son named Ishmael.  But God does not accept Ishmael, because He had promised Sarah that she would have a son, not anyone else.  Anything other than God’s plan is substandard and disqualified.  And Sarah did have a son for Abraham, a boy named Isaac, and he was the child of promise, and all the Jews were descended from him.

So you would think that the Jews would be the people of promise.  But a transition has occurred.  Most of the Jews had rejected and crucified Jesus, God’s own Son.  So now the promise has shifted to those who follow Jesus, regardless of whether they were Jewish or Gentile.  This was Paul’s message wherever he preached, that the Church was the new Israel and God was blowing the confines of His family wide open, welcoming in people from every background.  So in verse 28, Paul drives home his point: “Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. 29 But, as he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now.”  Paul is being badmouthed by these folks from Jerusalem who are trying to get  the Galatians to obey the law.  It’s always been this way; those who are not free are jealous and even hate those who are.  He goes on, 30 “Nevertheless what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.” 31 So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.”  And the Prayer Book cuts out the capstone of the argument, chapter 5, verse 1, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.”   In case you haven’t noticed, Paul is hopping mad.  Cast out these children of the bondwoman, because all they are doing is dragging you back into bondage.  At the beginning of chapter 4, Paul had said that when he found the Galatians, they were so tied up in their pagan religions. each with their own set of rules and ceremonies and superstitions, and now they were just trading in one form of slavery for another.  Just like Roger Daltrey sang in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (in one of the best moments in rock music), “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  Because the Galatians could not believe that God intended for them to be free, they figured there must be some code of conduct they had to adopt.  But in reality, they were never more free than when they came to Christ.

So often theologians argue over whether or not people have free will or not, but the truth of the matter is that from a biblical stand point, we were never less free than we were before we came to have faith in Jesus Christ.  We were enslaved to sin, to our will, absorbed in ourselves, stuck in a rut that spiritually, led only to death.  But when the Holy Spirit began working in our hearts and our minds, the darkness began to lift and we began to see that we didn’t have to live as slaves of sin any more.  That’s when we tasted freedom for the first time, that’s the first time we were able to choose a different way of life.

In the Book of John, we find a bit of Jesus’ teaching that expresses this, in chapter 8, verse 31: 31 Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. 32 And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?”  34 Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. 35 And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. 36 Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Do you remember what Christ set you free from?  Maybe it’s been so long that we don’t remember.  Or maybe we’ve been sold a bill of goods, and we’ve never even realized that we are free in Christ, because the Church has never shared that news with us.  What passes for Christianity is so often a very tame, domesticated, safe way of life, one which produces model citizens and people with shiny shoes and pearly teeth.  But it’s not the faith of the Scriptures.  It’s what we call moralism.

Let me read you a few more verses from Galatians 5, to see what Paul advised to his readers to do.  Verse 2: “Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing. 3 And I testify again to every man who becomes circumcised that he is a debtor to keep the whole law. 4 You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. 5 For we through the Spirit eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness by faith. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but faith working through love.”  It is not your behavior which defines you.  It is not your ethnicity that defines you.  It is your faith in Christ, and the fact that you are a recipient of His love and that you love Him which defines you.  “But Fr. Seth, are you saying that behavior doesn’t matter!?”  No.  I’m saying that behavior and conduct flow from identity.  Jesus says a good tree gives forth good fruit, and a bad tree bad fruit.  If our hearts are full of faith in Christ working through the love of Christ, we cannot but help to live differently, and think differently and speak differently.

So this Lent, how are your faith and love doing?  As your priest, I am not interested in what your doing or not doing for Lent, or during the rest of the year I’m not concerned about the great things you want to do for God.  I want you to be reminded every day of the incredible price which Jesus paid for your freedom, and for your heart to be full of love for Him from the time you get up in the morning until you close your eyes at night.  That only happens as the Holy Spirit works in us.  Paul said in verse 16, “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. 17 For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.”  And then he went on to list a whole bunch of sins that characterize the flesh, and a bunch of virtues which characterize a Spirit filled life, so if your led by the Spirit, if your identity is rooted in your faith in and love for Jesus Christ, you really don’t have to figure out how you’re going to live.  You’re going to produce the life that God wants, naturally, organically even.  Does that mean you’ll never screw up?  No, Paul struggled all the time.  But it means that your life will be characterized by the struggle of the bondage that Jesus released you from continually trying to bog you down again, because the world, the flesh and the devil don’t want you to enjoy the freedom that you have in Christ.

I asked how Christ has set you free, but now I ask, how does He need to set you free, today?  What expectations and qualification have been piled on you by, say, the Church in the past?  Or your parents?  Or our culture?  Or yourself?  We have so many preconceived notions of this is what a Christian will look like, or sound like, or eat or drink like, or vote like, or think like.  But how much of that is actually something that the Holy Spirit has laid on you, and how much of it is static?  Jesus kept the law perfectly, and yet His doing so didn’t look right to the Pharisees, whose specialty was obedience to the Law.  They accused Him of breaking the Sabbath by healing folks on it and defiling Himself by dining with sinners and all sorts of other stuff, but in reality Jesus just wasn’t living with the same set of shackles on Himself that they wore.  He was obeying His Father out of love and mature responsibility, not fear and duty.  And he calls us to obey the Father with Him, free to follow Him because all preconditions and obligations were paid for us, by Him, on the Cross.

This Lent I invite you to lay aside whatever shackles you carry, and embrace the freedom that is to be found by trusting Christ and accepting His love for you.  ✠  Amen.

This morning’s epistle lesson is about the contrast we Christians face between darkness and light, not just in the world around us, but especially within our own hearts.  It’s a very appropriate lesson for Lent, but its implications apply year.  Paul is encouraging the Ephesian Christians to live in a way that reflects their membership in God’s family.  They do this by following the example of our eldest brother in the family, Jesus.  The problem with our lesson is that it begins with the word ‘therefore’.  It’s making a point, but we have no idea what the line of thinking was that got us here.  So if you’d grab a pew Bible and turn to the book of Ephesians, we’ll take a quick look at the end of chapter 4 to see Paul’s whole train of thought.  Actually, it runs through the whole letter, but we’ll get the immediate context.  Paul is describing a wide variety of behaviors and attitudes that Christians are to avoid.  We’ll start at verse 31 “Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. 32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.”  So the fact that God has treated us in a certain way should mold and shape the way we feel and act.  He has shown us forgiveness and grace and patience, so we in turn reflect those same attitudes back towards those around us, especially our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Therefore, we’re to imitate God since He’s adopted us as His children.  We’re not His serfs or his day laborers, He’s actually adopted us as His children, so just like any kid in a family we naturally seek to imitate our parents.  (Or at least while we’re young we do, before we get old enough to think we know everything!)  And how are we to imitate God?  By living the same way that God did when He walked on this earth.  If Jesus Christ was God incarnate and lived a perfect human life, it stands to reason that maybe we should try to do what He did.  And what did He do?  He showed us His love by giving His life for us, as the perfect sacrifice that God could accept on our behalf, a sacrifice that was the pleasing smell that God was looking for.  If we were to offer our lives to God, it would probably smell more like wet dog or something like that.  But Jesus’ selflessness and willingness to put you and me ahead of His own comfort and well-being was exactly the smell God was looking for.

So Paul’s calling his readers to follow Jesus by living as selflessly as they can.  And he gives several different ways we can do it.  And they’re all as practical today as they were in the first century because human nature never changes.  First he names three patterns of behavior that fly in the face of self-sacrifice: fornication, uncleanliness and covetousness.  So how do these go against the kind of sacrificial love that Jesus modeled for us?

Well, take the first one, fornication.  It’s being used in a very broad sense here to mean all sexual immorality and misconduct.  It’s taking a very good gift which God gave us, and which He meant to be used within our marriages to make one another happy, and instead of following the directions on the box we decide, nah, I want this much sex, and I want it, whenever I want it.  Usually that means now.  Our culture is obsessed with sex.  You can’t escape it.  You can probably count the number of prime time sitcoms from the past decade that haven’t revolved around sex in one way or another on one hand.  Every grocery store check out line is lined with magazines that are carrying cover stories about how you can look sexier, or have better sex, or the tabloids will tell you who’s having sex with whom.  Recently someone very kindly gave Kathleen a Kindle Fire, because she’s been wanting an e-reader for a while.  And you can access Amazon.com’s book selection for the Kindle right there on the screen.  So I was browsing the store looking for books that I thought she would enjoy, and I saw a category that said, ‘books for under $1.99’.  So, being the cheapskate that I am, I checked it out, and in the very top row there was a bookcover with most of a woman’s bosoms all over it.  So I told Kathleen, “Hey, you can buy ‘Seduced by the Boss’ for only 99 cents.”  It actually costs several times more to buy the BCP for the Kindle than it does to get pornography.  But it’s that pervasive.  And of course there are the countless marriages which are being harmed and destroyed by internet pornography.  And it’s all geared to give us instant gratification, what we want, now.  But of course it doesn’t actually give us what we want, but it allows us to use others as props for our fantasies.  Real sex requires work.  It means communicating, and showing affection, and mending fences, and for us guys it might involve running the vacuum cleaner or washing the dishes.  And after you’ve used this gift the way God intends, you feel loved and closer to your spouse, and since your spouse is your desire you’ve gotten exactly what you wanted.  Everybody wins!  But with anything less, afterwards you’re still alone with your unfulfilled desires.  And who loves you?  C.S. Lewis said that if we discovered a culture in which people paid money to sit in a dark theatre and watch as a lid was lifted from over a nice, grilled steak, and then the lid was slammed back down, we’d assume something was very wrong with their attitude towards food.  Well, that’s exactly what we’ve done with God’s gift of sex.  As Christians, we sacrifice our demand for instant sexual gratification, and allow our desires to be channeled into the outlets that God has given us.

Paul also mentioned uncleanliness.  This means much more than bathing regularly and changing your underwear every day, although I do think God is a fan of both of those things.  It’s general moral, integrity.  Not necessarily sexual, either.  We can all think of people who are, in the words that we use in our house, they’re not quality individuals.  I had a roommate in college who was a jerk.  He raided my fridge, he was inconsiderate, he worked a job as a high pressure salesman and bragged about how he suckered senior citizens, he dated one of the nicest girls on campus and ran around on her, and the last I heard he was in jail for some sort of drug related offense.  Not a quality individual.  We Christians can do better than that.  We take those tendencies that we might have, and we all have at least some of them, and we offer them to God.

You can also tie in uncleanliness with what Paul says about the way Christians should speak.  He says we shouldn’t have “filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting” named among us.  All of those are subsets of uncleanliness.  Again, our culture is full of it.  I enjoy listening to Shredd and Ragan on the local rock station, because they’re very funny, and the vast majority of the time they’re pretty clean.  It’s obvious to me that they put a lot of thought into preparing and writing their show, and it comes through.  When I lived in Pittsburgh I liked all the DJ’s there, too, for the same reason.  But when we lived in California, local radio was a desolate wasteland, because every single show that I tried listening too thought that the key to successful entertainment was to be as vulgar and provocative as they could possibly get away with without having the FCC shut them down.  There was no wit, no cleverness, no thoughtfulness.  And it made their shows boring and I ended up listening to NPR and EWTN for the year.  If Christ lived His life sinlessly, watching His mouth and speaking in a way that built us up and encouraged us, can’t we do the same?  And that’s not to say that God keeps track of every little word that slips out of your mouth like Kathleen and I do to each other now that we have little ears in the house.  (.25 cents a shot is what we had to pay out to the other.  I got a lot of cheeseburgers for myself that way!)  There is some language that Paul used in his letters, that if it were translated properly from Greek to English could not be repeated on network TV.  But it’s the way we use language for the benefit of others and not just to gratify and emotionally relieve ourselves by dumping exactly how we’re feeling out there for everyone to hear.  Our speech is a sacrifice to God.

And finally Paul mentioned covetousness.  And that’s another big one that we struggle with in America, where bigger is better and we’re never satisfied until we have a bigger tv screen or a bigger car or another 1,000 square feet of living space.  Is there anything wrong with making a living?  No.  Jesus worked as a skilled tradesman for quite a while, and He probably took home a decent paycheck.  Is it wrong to be wealthy?  No, because there were lots of people in Scripture who God richly blessed and enabled them to become wealthy.  Not everyone, but some.  And if God calls us to provide for our families, there’s no shame in doing a superlative job of doing just that.    In Scripture God repeatedly blesses and commends hard work.  Is there anything wrong with enjoying our wealth, like taking a nice vacation or buying the Lexus instead of the Toyota?  Again, no, but with all of these questions, it comes down to a matter of which way our hearts are oriented.  Is it towards the giver of all good gifts, or is towards the gifts themselves?  There’s nothing wrong with wanting and working towards a particular financial goal, but when the road to satisfaction begins to trump other parts of our lives and we choose the pursuit over our friendships or our families , or our spiritual lives?  Perhaps another way to put it is would you be as content with what you have right now, or even less, as you would be if you had everything you wanted?  Not complacent, but content?  Would you be ok, or would you spas out on God for having the audacity to not give you exactly what you deserve?

Well, think of it this way.  The last thing any sinful human being should want is for God to give us exactly what we deserve.  Whatever we’ve got is better than what we deserve on account of our sins.  And not only does God allow us to enjoy varying levels of comfort and abundance in this life, but His Son died so that we could be adopted into the Father’s family, so that we could be written into the will of God, to become fellow heirs of the Kingdom of God.  People have spent millennia fighting over inheritances.  They never want anybody else to get any more than they absolutely have to from their parents’ estate.  But Jesus actually died so that millions and billions of people could share in the inheritance of glory that He was to receive from the Father.  That’s the kind of sacrificial love that we’re being called to walk in, because apparently, that’s how we roll in this family.  Instead of living for ourselves, and feeling entitled to whatever I want now, or saying whatever I want to say, we look at the other and try to figure out how we can love and sacrifice for them.  We allow our actions and words to be shaped by goodness, righteousness, and truth.  We walk as children who have been redeemed from the darkness, children of light who shine that light into the very dark world around us.  And we begin by acknowledging the darkness of our own hearts and allowing the love and the light of Christ to illuminate us and transform us.   ✠  Amen.

This morning’s psalm is Psalm 142, and if you were to look at it in a Bible instead of the Prayer Book, you’d see that most of the psalms have little notations in their titles that tells you a little bit about who wrote the psalm, or the circumstances at the time that it was written.  For Psalm 142, it says, “A Contemplation of David. A Prayer when he was in the cave.”  The book of First Samuel tells us there were a few times that David had to hide out in a cave.  We think that this was while he was on the run from King Saul, which is in and of itself an interesting story that helps us understand why David wrote this psalm.  David had been anointed by the prophet Samuel to be the next king.  He was also the young hero of the kingdom of Israel, and served under King Saul.  If you have ever had a job where your popularity or your competence brought you into conflict with your boss, you know what David was dealing with.  He was very successful at defeating the Philistine raiding parties which were invading Israel, and the people were writing songs and stories about him.  All of that attention was just eating away at Saul, to the point that one day while he was sitting in the palace he chucked a spear at David, and that began David’s life as a fugitive.

So David ended up hiding in a cave, with no friends, no allies, no supporters.  All because he was good at doing his job, and because he was God’s chosen king for Israel.  And the current king was sparing no effort to find and destroy him as a threat to his dynasty.  Eventually David was joined by a bunch of misfits and he was able to patch together a guerrilla army, but before that group came together he spent a lot of time alone.  Alone with his thoughts, and his worries.  And we find those thoughts here in Psalm 142.

First of all, he’s telling God about his problems.  Sometimes people ask, well, if God knows everything, why bother to pray?  And why doesn’t He just take care of what we need without us asking?  Well, because He wants us to trust Him, and to rely on Him because we’re not meant to operate independently.  We were not created to be autonomous individuals who don’t need other people or God.  We were made to be in fellowship with God, and part of the process of redemption, of God returning us to those original factory settings, is that He has to teach us to talk to Him.  So in verses one and two David cries unto the Lord, makes his supplication, pours out his complaints and shows God what’s troubling Him.  When He’s talking to God, there’s no sucking it up and dealing with it, there’s no not wanting to bother God with his problems, there’s no pretense that everything is okay.  He’s not holding anything back from God.

And he knows that God’s aware of what he faces.  Verse 3: “When my spirit was in heaviness, thou knewest my path; * in the way wherein I walked, have they privily laid  a snare for me.”  God’s well aware of all of of King Saul’s tricks, and He knows what David’s plans are, too.  The safest place for David is trusting in God’s leading.

David was also honest with God about how lonely he was.  Verse 4, “I looked also upon my right hand, * and saw there was no man that would know me. 5 I had no place to flee unto, * and no man cared for my soul.“  David had no right hand man to help him or give him advice.  Nobody wanted to be associated with him because the last guys to help him were a group of priests who had given David some of their bread to eat, and Saul had 85 of them killed.  So if Saul was willing to do that, to priests no less, nobody in their right mind was going to do anything to help David.  It got so bad that David had to hang out in Philistine territory and act insane so that they wouldn’t kill him, but it bought him some time away from Saul.

His isolation brought him face to face with the fact that he could not go on as a fugitive alone.  The only way he could survive was if God was on his side.  Listen to verse 6, “I cried unto thee, O Lord, and said, * Thou art my hope, and my portion in the land of the living. 7 Consider my complaint; * for I am brought very low. 8 O deliver me from my persecutors; * for they are too strong for me.”  David’s loneliness was the key to realizing that his only hope was in God, and that God was with him.  This is great news for anyone who has struggled with loneliness, and let’s face it, if you think you’ve never been lonely you aren’t being very honest with yourself.  We can be surrounded by people and busy with all sorts of important activities, and still feel alone and empty inside because all of the external stuff we fill our lives with cannot fulfill the desire we have for the presence and the friendship of our Creator.  St. Augustine wrote that God created us for Himself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him.  The philosopher and inventor Blaise Pascal wrote this about the longing for happiness and fellowship that every person has, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”  David knew that only God could meet his need.  So even though He had nobody else to turn to, he could be satisfied and confident of victory.  That’s not to say it wouldn’t be a scary ride to get there, but he trusted God’s care for him.

I think it’s interesting that when you read through the pages of Scripture, so many of the heroes of the faith were very, very alone at some point in the lives.  They had been called by God to fulfill some divine purpose for God’s people, they were on a mission from God, they were right, but they found that nobody wanted to join them or be seen with them.  The were mocked and persecuted and not a few were eventually martyred.  This isn’t a complete list, but just what I could think of off the top of my head: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Gideon, Ruth, Job, Samuel, David, Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah, Hosea and a few of the other minor prophets, and in the NT St. Paul and many of the folks he was writing to.  All of them found themselves very alone in their walk with God.  And let’s not forget the supreme example, Jesus, who spent almost all of His ministry and His life with no one around Him who understood who He really was or where He was coming from.  At the end of His ministry He was deserted by all of His friends.    If his arrest and incarceration were done according to what we know of the Roman protocols of the day He would have spent His final night alone in a cell that was a cistern, a hole in the ground, in pitch black.  After His death He was carried into the tomb and left there alone.  No one has experienced loneliness like Jesus did.  And yet He trusted God, all the way to the cross and to His death.

Last week I talked about how Jesus was tempted by the devil right after God had told Him at His baptism that He was His beloved Son, and the temptation happened right before He kicked of His public ministry.  One of the lessons we can draw from that is that just because we’re facing temptation, that doesn’t mean that we’re outside of God’s will, unless we succumb to the temptation.  And sometimes God’s preparing us to do something big by allowing us to go through various trials.  Then today’s psalm and the way we saw it fulfilled in Jesus Christ shows us that just because we’re lonely, that therefore we’re doing something wrong.  And if we look at all those folks from redemptive history who struggled with their loneliness, even to the point of begging God to let them die because they can’t take it any more, we see that when God forges some of His mightiest acts, He does it in a crucible of loneliness.  There’s the old cliche from the Robert Frost poem about taking the road less traveled, and there’s a lot of truth in it.  The right road is not he road that most people prefer.  And let’s face it. walking with God doesn’t take us along the easiest routes.  The way of the cross is, by definition, not a fun trip.  At least not by normal human standards.  God gives joy and peace and hope all along the way, but from the outside looking in at just the circumstances, it looks like God’s just yanking peoples’ chains the whole time.

But God is not capricious, like the Greek and Roman gods were in mythology.   His plan and purpose is not to see how much mischief He can cause in peoples’ lives, but to glorify Himself through them.  That’s why David can pray, “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may give thanks unto thy Name; * which thing if thou wilt grant me, then shall the righteous resort unto my company.”  Which will bring God more glory, His anointed kindgbeing defeated and destroyed, or seeing him saved from almost certain death to give thanks to God and to reign over His people?  Think about Jesus.  Which would bring God more glory?  For His Son to live on earth and then head straight back to heaven, leaving everybody else on earth still separated from God, or for Him to die to provide the sacrifice that will re-establish good will between God and His creatures?  For God’s Son to die alone, and that be the end of the story, or for Him to have a glorious resurrection that He will share with all of God’s people?  David knew that his life, and God coming to his assistance wasn’t about him, but about God being glorified.  David, and His successor, Jesus, saw themselves not as individuals whom God needed to coddle and satisfy, but as participants in God’s plan.  That’s the hope that got them through their loneliness, and even their despair.

Do we see ourselves in that same light?  When we are lonely, or afraid, or beside ourselves, do we turn to God?  Do we trust that He’s with us?  And do we know that we’re players in a much bigger drama than just our life, one in which we play demanding and difficult role, but one which will bring praise and glory to our Creator?  As we walk the way of the cross this Lent and every day, may we do it trusting in the guarantee of God’s good will for us which He’s given us in David’s life, but most of all through Jesus Christ our Lord.  ✠  Amen.

For the first Sunday in Lent our lectionary gets us ready for the next forty days of fasting and deprivation by reading us Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation.  There’s a lot of encouragement here for us.  Like the fact that Jesus was not tempted by chance, but He was specifically led by the Holy Spirit out into the wasteland that is the Judean wilderness so that He could be tested.  How is this comforting?  It reminds us of what the writer to the Hebrews said in 4:15, “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”  Whatever temptations we face, not just in Lent but all the time, Jesus has been there, didn’t do that and didn’t buy the t-shirt.  And not only that, but sometimes the periods of temptation and testing that we experience are part of God’s plan for us, the proving ground before He turns us loose to do something significant.  So a trial could be a sign that we’re in God’s will.  But He doesn’t allow our trials to irreparably damage us.  Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”  Jesus was put into an extreme situation, but as we see He handled it.

But what I’d like to look at this morning is what the devil was tempting Jesus with.  Food after a long fast, a display of God’s power, and all the power and glory in the world.    These exact things are probably not the devil will use with any of us.  I’ve heard that in casinos, there are secluded VIP areas that you’d never know are there unless the managements discerns that your credit limit is sky high, that you’re what they call a ‘whale’.  If you’re able to make single bets that are as big as a mortgage payment for most folks, or even a down payment, then you’re ushered into a very nice lounge where you’re served top shelf liquor and gourmet food while you play.  None of us will ever see that room.  Jesus was playing in the VIP lounge, and none of us will ever get the magnitude of temptations that He did.    But we face the same kind.

The first temptation He got was to turn some stones into bread.  That would have seemed like a winning proposition after forty days of fasting.  And Jesus was certainly able to do it, because on more than one occasion He fed the multitudes and He turned the water into wine.  But was it the right time for it?  And why would He do it?  In Cana He was keeping a friend from being embarrassed when the wine ran out, and more importantly He was building up the faith of His disciples.  When He fed the multitudes He was caring for the people who had inconvenienced themselves to come and listen to Him preach.  Satan was trying to get Him to use His power to satisfy His own hunger, His own craving.  Is there anything wrong with eating?  No, it’s a good thing that keeps us alive.  But one of the key tactics of the devil is to take something that is good in and of itself, and twist it, ever so slightly, so that it can be used to serve an end that God didn’t intend.  Food, alcohol, sex, coca leaves, money, beauty, education.  Every single one of those is a good thing.  And every single one of them has led countless people down a path of destruction.  Jesus would not take a shortcut to satisfaction.  He knew that He needed to live by His Father’s word and will, and He did.

Next the devil took him to the top of the Temple and invited Him to jump, and He quoted Psalm 91 which promises that God will care for His annointed.  He was offering an experience of having God intervene.  But Jesus knew that the devil was trying to get Him to test His Father, to presume that He would rescue Him because of who He is.  If He had jumped, it wouldn’t have been to prove God’s power but to prove how important He was to God.  It was an attempt to get Him to fall into pride, and it wouldn’t have shown faith in God, but presumption.  And one commentator wrote that presumption is not an over-abundance of faith, but the complete absence of it.

He couldn’t trip up Jesus through His appetite or His ego, so satan took Jesus to a mountaintop and gave Him a vision of all the kingdoms of the world laid out before Him, there for the taking.  Just say the word, one quick little bow of the knee and everything would be Jesus’.  Now, isn’t Jesus bound to rule over the whole world?  Jesus was familiar with all of the Old Testament prophets who said that the Messiah would rule over not just Israel, but that all the nations would come to Jerusalem to worship Him.  This was exactly what Jesus was supposed to be doing, receiving all the glory and power in the world, and at a savings of all the pain and humiliation He would have to endure on the cross.  It doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, from a human perspective.  But Jesus knew that to bend the knee to satan would be to break His Father’s law and negate any good that His life would have accomplished.  Because by accepting a shortcut that bypassed the cross, He would have bypassed His Father’s will, and bypassed the resurrection, and the salvation of the world that He ruled over.  He would have had a dying, meaningless kingdom, made up of damned souls who were serving a king who was in power only because the devil let him.  God would have been robbed of the opportunity to exercise and display His power.  All that, because He chose to skip the cross.

There’s an important lesson here.  Any way of life, any philosophy, any theology, any spirituality that bypasses the cross of Christ also bypasses God’s will for us.  Lat week I quoted St. Paul from 1 Corinthians 1:18, where he wrote, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  The world looks at the trajectory of Jesus’ life, from success to crucifixion, and they call Him a fool, or a lunatic, or they feel sorry for Him that He was so committed to His ideals that He’d die for them and they’ll say, “Such a waste!”  But it was on the cross that Jesus achieved His greatest strategic victory, breaking the hold that death and the devil had over the human race.  Although even there He was still being tempted.  The Pharisees standing around the cross made fun of Him and said, “If He were actually God’s Son He would come down from the cross.”  But He stayed on the cross, kept there by His love for you and me until He died.  And when He stepped out of the tomb three days later, that’s when He got to fully enjoy the promise of Psalm 91.  (Or the promise from this morning’s psalm, Psalm 3, which said “I laid me down and slept, and rose up again; * for the LORD sustained me.”)  Because He was faithful, even to the point of death, Jesus was rewarded with so much more than what the devil was offering Him.  He got to take His throne in heaven where He rules over the world, and some day soon He’s going to literally rule over the whole earth, for all eternity.  (second law of thermodynamics) And He would have had none of it if He had settled for satan’s cheap imitations.

The devil specializes in knock-offs of God’s plan.  So what imitations have you been offered?  And which ones do you buy into?  For some of us it’s the stuff I already mentioned.  We misuse the good gifts that God gives us, and we end up getting burned by them.  Or maybe we fall for the invitation to test God, maybe we have a sense of entitlement that because we’re Christians or because we behave in a certain way that therefore God should see to it that we receive special consideration.  Do you remember earlier in the Bills’ season Stevie Johnson dropped a really key pass in a game, and he put a message to God on Twitter where he said, ‘After all I’ve done for You God, this is how You treat me?’  That’s the kind of entitlement that some of us walk around with.  I talked with someone this week who said that their pastor is always complaining that he never gets any clergy discounts.  That just makes me embarrassed to be a pastor within a 50 mile radius of that guy.  If I go into a restaurant or gas station in his town, are the staff going to look at me and think, ‘Oh boy, here we go again.  Looking for a handout.’  We are all beggars when we enter the Kingdom of God, and God adopts us as His children and makes us His heirs.  That trustfund makes us richer than Mitt Romney and Warren Buffet combined!  Isn’t that enough?  Do we really need special treatment from Him in this life?  I mean, it’s great when He blesses us, or when He does heal us, but when things aren’t going the way we’d hoped do we feel like God’s not giving us what we deserve, or do we see it as a time of testing, a time to grow in faith and trust like Jesus did in the wilderness?  And do we actually believe what Jesus said in the sermon on the mount?  “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

And finally, how have you been tempted to bypass the cross?  We don’t need the devil to throw us this temptation because we’re perfectly capable of producing it ourselves.  When we see our faith as a system for wise living, or a code of morality, or steps to personal success in life, we are gutting it.  None of those things can change anybody’s life.  They can provide some good guidance, but they don’t save any souls.  They don’t break and heal hearts.  They don’t give purpose and meaning.  They don’t atone for the past.  And they don’t give life, only condemnation because we don’t live up to them.  Only the cross of Christ gives us those things.  Only the cross gives the forgiveness, the healing and the promise of eternal life.  Anything else leads to death.  Accept no substitutes for the cross.  It’s not cool, it’s not smart or witty or sexy or popular.  To embrace it is to invite the world to mock and to ostracize you.  It will make you look like a fool in the eyes of the world.  But ironically, when you stop chasing everything the world tells you you need to take up the cross instead, you’ll find that you have everything you’ll ever need.  No temptation will look good to you when you truly understand what you have in the cross, because all your old priorities died there with Christ.  Paul said in Galatians 6:14, “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.“  If we make this Lent a time to embrace and begin to understand the cross, and we’ll find the answer to the temptations that we face.  ✠  Amen.