Second Sunday in Lent -- Sermon

In a book I was recently reading the author was describing

            a walk he would take through a large field

            where he often encountered another person walking his four dogs.

Three of the dogs would bound through the meadow with exuberant energy.

            They leaped and ran with joyful speed and grace,

            and were a delight to watch.

The fourth dog stayed close to its human,

                        but expressed its energy by running in tight circles.

The author, Martin Laird, couldn’t help but ask the man

            why this one dog just ran in little circles.

He explained that before he got this dog,

             it had lived practically all of its life in a cage

            where it could only exercise by running in circles.

All four dogs were off leash and free to run,

and three of the dogs realized that, got it,

and energetically explored the whole field,

            but for the one who was habituated to the cage,

            that was the only way it knew how to run.

We can look at this as a parable, a parable about salvation.

Salvation is literally about being set free,

            being liberated from what has caged us in our lives,

                        what has constricted life for us in myriad ways.

In salvation the whole field of possibility and fullness of life is there,

            but how many of us realize this?

            How many of us still live as though we are confined in a cage?

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,

            the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! 

How often have I desired to gather your children together

            as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,

                                                                                    and you were not willing!”

What a heart breaking statement!

Jesus reaching out with love and life and freedom and joy

            to those who are at the heart, the center of their religion,

                        in Jerusalem where the Temple was,

                                    where the priests were,

                                    where the nation’s leaders were,

            and ironically the very place where God’s true messengers

                                    bearing revelations of God

                        are met with staunch opposition.

Why such resistance?

Why such resistance to being gathered together in the loving embrace of Jesus?

One would think that those at the heart of the religion

            would be the ones who would most welcome God’s messengers.

But no.

There is a difference between being at the spiritual heart of one’s religion

            and being at the heart of the institution of religion.

So that resistance to Jesus that he is expecting when he gets to Jerusalem?

            It’s because he is a big threat to his own religious institution.

                        For one thing, he was way too inclusive.

The Sadducees, who were the priests,

            and also the Pharisees,

            those whose religious observance of the holy law was beyond scrutiny,

were both quite clear about the distinctions that could be made between them

            and the pagan Romans, who held them as an occupied country

                                    and sucked them dry through the taxes for tribute money,

            and the tax collectors, who cooperated with this pillage,

and prostitutes and sinners and any foreigners who didn’t believe as they did.

And those were the very people Jesus was not ashamed to associate with.

            Indeed these were the ones who recognized the liberation of salvation

                        when they saw it.

The Roman centurion seeking healing for his slave,

the demoniac living among the tombs, a very unclean place,

            in the Greek Decapolis region,

the Samaritan leper,

the woman, bursting in on the dinner party at the home of Simon the Pharisee,             a woman known as a sinner,

            anointing the feet of Jesus with her tears and very expensive nard.

They found a welcome and got brought into that gathering embrace of Jesus,

                                                the One who is like the mother bird with her chicks.

They knew salvation is not about right belief,

                        about accepting a creed and doctrine,

            but about being set free, being liberated from what had caged them.

They know what it is to be brought into the loving embrace of Jesus.

The Gospel reading for today points us toward Jerusalem

            where Jesus knows he will be opposed

            by the very ones to whom he offers salvation.

He knows how it will come out,

            how instead of gathering under sheltering wings,

            he will stretch out his arms on the hard wood of the cross,

and embrace us all,           whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not.

This is the second Sunday in Lent,

                        and already we are one the road to Holy Week in Jerusalem.

And on Ash Wednesday

                                    the invitation to the observance of a holy Lent was given.

BCP, pg. 265            I invite you, [therefore,] in the name of the Church,

            to the observance of a holy Lent,

            by self-examination and repentance;

                by prayer, fasting, and self-denial;

            and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word.

Self-examination and repentance – BCP, pg. 267-268

            This litany is a most useful tool for self-examination and repentance.

Prayer, fasting, and self-denial –

and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word – what we are doing right now.

Let me come back to prayer, fasting and self-denial, and expand on these.

I must tell you that I teach meditation,

            and from my experience meditation encompasses all three.

Meditation is the prayer of silence,

            in which we are open to listening rather than speaking.

Meditation is a form of fasting,

            fasting from all activity: work, the noise of busy-ness,

            fasting from the senses: fasting beyond the tasting of food

                        fasting from sight by closing the eyes,

                        fasting from hearing by being in a quiet place.

Meditation is also self-denial.

            In the fasting from work and everything else that defines us

                        we are denying the self we imagine we are,

                        so that we can better see the self we actually are,

                                                as seen through the eyes of God.

I have engaged the spiritual discipline of meditation for quite some time now,

            and I have discovered that we have

                        a built in resistance to that loving embrace,

                                                that intimacy of close contact with Jesus.

I see this clearly in meditation practice

            where the intention is to sit in silence in openness of heart

                        for that close, intimate and personal contact in awareness

                                                            of Divine Presence.

THAT is most certainly a place where we can allow ourselves to be embraced.

And yet, I have seen this in myself

            and I have seen this in those I instruct in meditation

                        that the very moment in meditation

                        when awareness begins to open

                        and the limits of being drop away

                        and there is this huge expansiveness into infinity

            at that very moment

there is contraction,            

            an inevitable pulling away, pulling in, retreat from

                                    that divine and loving embrace.

The contraction away seems almost instinctual and automatic.

It’s like the self-preservation action of the sea anemone in a tide pool

                                                                        that pulls into itself when touched.

In that touch from the Divine

            in that expansion of awareness

            and dropping away of boundaries of separation,

we find ourselves at risk of being swallowed up in this huge Presence

                        that is embracing us, no matter how lovingly it is.

That sense of being lost in the Divine Presence

            is viewed by the ego as a threat.

To surrender to this loving embrace might mean

            that the ideas, values and even beliefs that I have,

                        that by which I identify myself and define myself

                                    as a separate and substantial being,

            are simply illusions of a presumed separateness that doesn’t exist.

And the divine joke is that this is true!

And when we get it, when we get the joke,

            what a relief!

I can give up that tortured enterprise of self-definition,

            and I am freed simply to be,

                        to enjoy on the most profound level

                        what it is to be a unique expression of divine creativity

                                    unconditionally loved, and without boundary or limit.

I don’t need to run in tight little circles.

 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets

            and stones those who are sent to it!

How often have I desired to gather your children together

            as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,

                                                                                                and you were not willing!”

How much Jesus loved those who were intent on shutting him down!

We might each ask ourselves

                        how we shut down the movement of the Spirit within us,

                        how we squelch his voice calling us out of our comfortableness,

                        how we resist being gathered under his wings.

Why does a hen seek to gather her brood under her wings?

                        Because of impending danger.

The mother bird offers protection to her babies

            even if she herself remains exposed to the disaster coming upon her.

Jesus comes to Jerusalem

            and stretches wide his arms on the hard wood of the cross,

            and his arms embrace the whole world.

In surrendering himself to death, the ultimate dissolution of self,

            he becomes the source of new life.

Lifted from the earth on the cross,

            he draws all people to himself.

Quit resisting our Lord’s invitation to come more closely within his embrace.

That is the purpose and work and goal of Lent.

And that is what salvation brings.

We can be set free to run boundlessly through the whole field of life,

            instead of in tight little circles.