Lent ii

Collect

Almighty God, you show to those who are in error the light of your truth, that they may return to the way of righteousness: grant to all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may reject those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

Almighty God, by the prayer and discipline of Lent may we enter into the mystery of Christ’s sufferings, and by following in his Way come to share in his glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Post Communion

Almighty God, you see that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings

Old Testament – Genesis 17.1–7, 15, 16

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’

Psalm 22.23–31

23    Praise the Lord, you that fear him; ♦
O seed of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, O seed of Israel.

24    For he has not despised nor abhorred the suffering of the poor; neither has he hidden his face from them; ♦
but when they cried to him he heard them.

25    From you comes my praise in the great congregation; ♦
I will perform my vows in the presence of those that fear you.

26    The poor shall eat and be satisfied; ♦
those who seek the Lord shall praise him; their hearts shall live for ever.

27    All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, ♦
and all the families of the nations shall bow before him.

28    For the kingdom is the Lord’s ♦
and he rules over the nations.

29    How can those who sleep in the earth bow down in worship, ♦
or those who go down to the dust kneel before him?

30    He has saved my life for himself; my descendants shall serve him; ♦
this shall be told of the Lord for generations to come.

31    They shall come and make known his salvation, to a people yet unborn, ♦
declaring that he, the Lord, has done it.

Epistle – Romans 4.13–25

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’)—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations’, according to what was said, ‘So numerous shall your descendants be.’ He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Gospel – Mark 8.31–38

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

Sermon on Sunday, Lent II

Who likes to read? And what sort of thing do you like to read? I know most people have to read set books as students. I wonder if you have ever picked them up again and tried to read them with new eyes, seeing the motifs, the language and the whole course of the story as if it were the first time, with the literary eye which your teacher tried to develop in you when they were trying to teach you.

I ask this question about reading because the gospel of Mark began what is called the critical study of the bible. A few weeks ago we read the story of the transfiguration and Jesus’ admonition to the disciples not to tell anyone anything about what they witnessed on the mountaintop. This week we hear that Jesus spoke openly. His words were heard by ordinary people, Pharisees and Sadducees, Samaritans and even pagans (the foreign merchants and all those Roman soldiers occupying Jerusalem, for instance). This seems to be a contradiction in the narrative, doesn’t it? Silence and openly speaking? 150 years ago a German scholar, William Wrede, investigated it. He began, it seems, the literary study of the bible, for he examined the book of Mark as a literary artefact. As a consequence of his endeavours, he gave the world a number of scholarly gems – the most important being his view of the synoptic gospels and the conclusion that there was a priority of Mark.

Wrede’s work on what he called the messianic secret opened rich veins of investigation by scholars and a way of reading documents with a clarity from which we have all benefited. Part of that benefit is that we can all employ these scholarly techniques ourselves in our own reading of literature.

For instance, if we read the newspapers, rather than just being entertained by the different opinions expressed by the leader writers, we can put the articles next to one another and see what different language is used in reporting the statements of the main characters in a news item.

We can benefit from form criticism, one of the many modern disciplines of literary theory. How statements are made reveal a lot about the speaker and audience, and if there are different reports of the speech, we can investigate just why the writer expressed the news in a particular way. This is the same thing the early biblical scholars did when they placed Matthew, Mark and Luke side by side to see the similarities and the differences in the stories reported in the gospel narratives. We can hone our literary acumen by looking at our daily papers. Such an exercise can render our politicians’ words – or even their spin doctors’ presentation of his principal’s words – with a lot more clarity.

One of my teachers was a biblical scholar who compared secular and sacred sources in his work on the bible and patristic literature. He took on a project which seemed to have no relation to his academic work. He used secular sources to see whether these methods of textual criticism worked in what we call “the real world”.  Just after the war he took some public documents about the sinking of ships and submarines during World War II. He examined all the disparate and contradictory stories which were in the public domain in the same way he investigated the ancient literature. He eventually wrote up his conclusions, went into the German Navy Archive and compared his findings with the facts as the Navy had them in their private records. He went into the archive and began checking his results. His wife was waiting for him at the door at the end of his exercise and she was startled to see him emerge from the archive, because his face was pale and he was trembling. “What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously. He replied, “I was right.”

This story was told to me by a fellow student who was a great friend of the scholar and his wife, so I don’t doubt the veracity of it. I saw the man at work in the classroom, so I can also see that the story had to be true. He had a way of making the history of the church immediately relevant. He spoke of the Nicene Council as if it were a meeting of the G20. He said that the Church Fathers were herded into the building and told that they had to come up with a solution to end the controversy on the streets about expressions of the faith, as if there were flashing blue lights outside, pressuring them to come to a conclusion.

Here we have a biblical scholar who used his discipline to make sense of the world around him – literature of all sorts was examined and its truth and falsehood was exposed, warts and all.

I think we can learn a lot from biblical studies for our own benefit in contemporary culture. If we take time to carefully inspect the words of everyone around us, we can come to a better understanding of life in all its complexity.

We might even come to the conclusion that people have secrets that need to be kept, but they also speak openly about so many other things. If we put together their whole narrative, we might be able to reveal some of the secrets of the heart which they want to keep hidden. But if we carefully read their narrative with the skill of our biblical scholars, we could begin to understand what they reveal about themselves.

I believe that religion should wake us up to what is right and good, that God was at the core of our lives. I have always wanted the faith to be intellectually respectable, that it should be something to be examined in any way that is acceptable to reason and faith together.

I once spoke with some people about whether they went to church, and one replied, “Oh, I left that behind a long time ago, for it seemed so childish to me.” But what if he had the idea that faith and its documents could be examined with an eye to truth which could be revealed by examination? What if he had a set of tools which made sense for a twenty-first century schizoid man, he could have left those childish things behind and looked at everything in a new way. He could have entered into a world of maturity.

It is not a big leap from examining ancient documents to scouring social- or multi-media to extract some meaningful material for our own benefit here and now. Studying the bible is as good for us as examining a school text, the newspapers or even FaceBook. Everything should become grist to the mill of minds eager for clarity in the world around us. – I think we should watch with untiring eyes to see just what will be revealed about the reality of our own world, whether it is found in the open chattering of the crowd or in the silence surrounding a secret.

Amen

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