Lent 1

First Sunday of Lent 2009 Genesis 9.8-17

God said to Noah and to his sons with him, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you

1 Peter 3.18-22

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you

Mark 1.9-15

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan

1. On the way to Easter 2. The covenant with man 3. The goodness of creation 4. The flood of unintended consequences 5. Christ is baptised for us 6. The ark of the Church

1. On the way to Easter We are on the way to Easter. In these five talks I am going to lay out the path the Church takes on its way there. The path is marked out by the readings set for the five Sundays of Lent. These readings will tell us about the relationship of God with man, and about the relationships between men that are made possible by it. we will find that the Church points out to the world that much more is possible when we are ready to hear about the relationship of God with man, than when the world is determined not to hear about any such relationship. Nevertheless, because the Church points to God, it is able to ask what sort of people we want to be. Through this Scripture we gain insight into our society that is available nowhere else. So I propose the of set out some of the questions these Scriptures are asking. I am not going to tell you something or other, but only what the Church hears in Scripture and sings in its worship, and so what you yourself may hear and sing in Church this Sunday. What the Church says it not only says in Lent and Easter, but in every Church service. Easter simply spells out in large format what is going on every Sunday morning, when on behalf of the whole world the Christian community confesses its sins and receive forgiveness, and so remains a confident people. Each year I have talked about the social and moral pain that our society puts itself through, and the social and ecological costs involved. I will spend a little longer on the social and economic pain and cost, and show how the Church that is confident of the resurrection is uniquely able to talk about pain and cost, because it is formed by the promise of forgiveness and the hope of redemption.

Easter is when new Christians are baptised into the Church. Lent is the way of preparation for those who are going to be baptised, and also the preparation of the Church to receive them. If you are not yet a member of the Church, hear what the Church says, step forward and receive this life and this baptism. But there is another baptism on the way. For our society is going to go through an unsettled period and the Church is preparing itself for this now. It is possible that by preparing for it and being able to countenance it, some of the trouble may be averted to some degree, but I would not bank on it. We are undergoing a severe economic crisis. What is causing this crisis? Greed is of course some part of the answer but the problem is not only that we have demanded too much, but that we have not demanded enough. We do not value ourselves enough, and all our materialistic impatience and over-reaching is nothing but compensation for this crisis of morale, a failure to value ourselves. Our chief denigrator is ourselves. We belittle and devalue ourselves in the fear that if we don’t others will denigrate us more. But we denigrate ourselves in defiance of God. God is the true judge of man, and God finds man good and loves him. That is the news of the gospel. Unbelief is what self-denigration is, a failure to receive the good judgment of God and thus our own failure to judge well. Longterm failure to hear this true judgment given in the gospel results in a society with wildly see-sawing estimations of its worth, and these are reflected in wildly fluctuating markets. Societies that believe that they are loved by God have a steady, a realist and ultimately an optimistic view of themselves, and they prosper. So the question is whether we will receive our true valuation from God. 2. The covenant with man God loves man. Man is the creature informed by love, and brought into existence by love. Love is the key to man. The technical term for love – ‘covenant’ – appears in our first reading, from Genesis. God loves man and situates him in creation that God preserves for man’s sake. God gives us creation. Covenant means that something is given, and this givenness is the basis on which human beings meet and live together. This material world makes us available to one another, obliged to take cognisance of one another. And covenant means relationship. We are given this relationship and we may take it, in freedom, and in gratitude. We may take our existence and all features of life as blessing. Of course we may also NOT take it. We can decide that life is not a blessing, but a burden or curse. Man may turn away from this love and hide and waste himself in all sorts of other loves. But the love of God for man remains and God waits until we are ready to receive it. The community of the Church understands itself as loved, for its own sake, and because it is God's witness to the world that does not yet know about any covenant. The Church tells us that man is a covenantal being, that God is with man, and enabled by God, man may be with his fellow man. Man flourishes as he knows he is loved, and by love is enabled to love and give himself in service in turn. All communities and societies are entities of love. Loves aspires to permanence: we desire its growth, not its break

down; love may seek self-control, so that it becomes truer and more permanent. If man is a creature of covenant he is not merely an individual but also a creature in relationship, and we may deduce, since he is not yet in relationship with all his fellows, that he is creature with more future than past. But without the Christian understanding of covenant, the default position of Western society seems to be that man is man is on his own and so fundamentally an isolated being. 3. The goodness of creation Our Old Testament reading gives us the story of Noah. The narrative that starts the Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The story of the Flood and Noah gives us the same narrative, in more picturesque form. The ark is all creation: creation rides on the forces of the storm, is it shaken by it, but the promise of God is irrevocable, and so creation survives. God holds back all threats to human life: his covenant covers us like a rainbow. God creates in freedom and creation exists just for the joy of it. The lesson is that creation is good. It is the garden that God sets before us for our sake, to wonder at. It is not a hostile place made by some distant or unfeeling God, the God of Gnostics or Manicheans. We address the ‘Maker of heaven and earth…’, as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and as ‘our Father’. It is a central teaching of the Church, premised on the covenant of God with man, that creation is gift and it is good. Our materiality and our bodies are not a mistake but good as made. We are embodied persons, persons with bodies. Our bodies are not our masters, but we may be masters of ourselves as we achieve some control over our own bodies. Many of our contemporaries do not see creation as good, but have a pessimistic and merely functional orientation to the world. They are not happy with its materiality, and some are in revolt even against the human body. This is not a new crisis, for pagan man has always feared the sheer exuberance and materiality of creation, and the manyness and uncontrollableness of the people around us. It is an old belief that the material world is a dark power, and that the dark always threatens to overcome the light. We call this Manicheanism. But Christians have an entirely different view. We regard creation as good and we receive the limits it represents as good, and we receive the human body along with all its limits and challenges as good. We neither idolise the body or material world, nor do we denigrate them. They will be redeemed. This is the Christian doctrine of creation emphatically communicated by the story of Noah and the ark. 4. The flood of unintended consequences A flood is on its way. ‘The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth so that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered’ (Genesis 7.18) A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat (Mark 4.37) and a flood arose, the river burst against that house (Luke 6.48). What flood is this? This flood is the sum of the consequences of our actions and inactions. We mostly acknowledge that there is a growing ecological crisis. Now we see other waves coming our way. There is a banking crisis and an economic crisis, the result of our profligacy and negligence come back to us. Behind these are other waves, political and

social. The flood represents the breakdown of trust, of self-giving, collapse of confidence, which can turn our society into a raging sea. In these talks I will talk about a number of crises which are aspects of this flood. In a moment I will start at the beginning, which is to say with the crisis in judgment or crisis in morale. But first, since our reading is Noah’s flood and the destruction of the world, let us look at the ecological. Ecological crisis I have spoken to you about the coming ecological crisis many times before. I have said that it shows us that we do not seem to be in control of ourselves. I have told you that we have been introducing technology into the places where we should be exercising virtue and learning self-control. We have been using technology and consuming resources in order to save us from having to learn self-control. We seem to have believed that, though the material resources of creation are not infinite, our technology can make them so, and we have consumed and exhausted material resources in decades that might have lasted us centuries. We have torn the minerals out of the earth at a rate that has rendered tracts of the world so barren that no future generation can gain so much as subsistence from them. We have treated creation as it were disposable, even as though it were a latrine. I have spoken to you many times about the moral poverty that comes from treating creation as though it were bottomless. If creation were infinite we would never have to exercise any self-control. It is good that creation has limits. It is good that we explore and discover these limits. To burn our way through creation is absolutely impoverishing for us. It gives us no opportunity for moral growth. It does not teach us to husband these resources or to wonder at this creation and care for it. It is as bankrupt as wanting a world in which the food cooks itself or the beds make themselves: if they did we would never have to interact with the world or learn about it in any way. It is only because it is a finite world that we have to learn how to act within it. It is only when we exercise self-restraint that we can act generously and for other people. And it is only the opportunity of acting well and generously, that there is the joy which is the whole point and purpose of creation. If we treat creation as though it had no end we will never experience the joy of acting with responsibility, and so with freedom and spontaneity. We would never learn to distribute well, that is to give things as they are good for the specific people we give them to, or give them to the degree and extent that they are good for those people, and not more. The ecological crisis may therefore teach us how to stop cramming everything into our mouths and despoiling the whole earth as fast as we can go in order to prevent anyone else beating us to it. It may be the opportunity that is given to us so that we can learn and grow and to discover how to be human. The longer we leave this lesson the more abrupt its eventual beginning is going to be. 5. Christ is baptised for us Our reading from the Gospel of Mark tells us that ‘Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan.’ John the Baptist came to prepare the way for the Lord, that is, to prepare us to receive the Lord. John brought us the news that we can repent, we can

turn around, that our present path is not inevitable, we may yet swerve out of it into a less self-destructive one. And Jesus undergoes this baptism, and performs this repentance, for us. Secondly we are told that ‘a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ Then it tells us that Jesus proclaimed ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ The news has been amply trailed, and now in Christ the good news himself is here. This is the unshakeable, non-negotiable basis on which we can say any of the things that follow. God is with man, God is with us. But we are also told that as result of this baptism Jesus goes out to wilderness to confront the angry and destructive powers, to face them down and subdue them. What takes place in this confrontation in the wilderness gives us the whole narrative of the gospel, for Christ is going to withstand all the rage of human beings without God, and overcome this rage that possesses us and so to redeem us from it. Our reading from Genesis tells about a flood that threatens to engulf mankind. We in the West have come so far away from a sustainable relationship with the natural world and with the givens of our own created nature. We are those forces which have become out of control. We have made a vast and painful correction inevitable, so perhaps we should even be relieved that this flood has started. These crises of ecology and economy may indeed be the way to our redemption, if we receive them as the judgment and correction delivered to us through the covenant of God. I have said that covenant is fundamental, and that relationship, promise and its redemption, that relationship begun not be ended but increase. Creation has become disordered, but Christ is here to bring it back to order, and to give it a better order and greater beauty than it had in the first place. In the readings of the next four weeks we will see that Christ takes us on, just as he takes his baptism from John. He makes it possible for us to leave our madness and to enter into his communion. Jesus Christ is the ark which will save us. 6. The ark of the Church In the story of Noah, the sending of the flood is just the scene-setting for the story which is the ark. God will provide us with salvation so that neither we nor creation will be destroyed, and Christ is this salvation. We may embark on a long voyage over difficult waters. We are now being summoned to grow up, to end the long period of our flight from responsibility, to see all the truths that we have been avoiding. Though our crises may seem too big to take, they a summons to repent and leave the make-believe world in which we have been living. In Lent the Church withdraws from the world. The Church periodically steps back from the world in order that it be refreshed and receive again the gospel that it has been entrusted with. The Church withdraws in order to be able to go back to the world with a transforming gospel from another kingdom. The Church travels between the desert where it can hear the Word of God and be made holy by it, and the city to which it repeats that Word. This back and forward movement of the Church is essential to its witness. In Lent the Church leaves the city so that on Palm Sunday it can go back into the city with its Lord, to suffer and to die.

In these talks I am going to examine the social, political and economic crises and relate them all to a crisis of morale. I am going to conclude that Britain is loss of confidence that amounts to a nervous breakdown. Because it has not heard the news of the love and the judgment of God, its self-belief has crashed. The Christian life takes us through judgment and crisis, indeed only the Christian faith is premised on going through judgment, which is what the cross is. The Church hears and receives its judgment through Lent and on Good Friday, and it receives the judgment that is due to the nation. If we do not acknowledge the Christian gospel, all we do amounts to running from judgment, but in running away from one judgment we run into another. But when we hear this judgment and receive it as the truth, we are forgiven and redeemed. If this society wishes, it can emerge back out of its crisis. It can repent, ask for forgiveness and cancellation of its debts, and having received that forgiveness, it can embark, or re-embark, on the voyage of Christian discipleship. In ark that God has prepared for us, we can ride out all the floods that threaten us. The whole Church is the witness to the covenant of God with man given to us in Christ. Every Christian in London is witness to this. They are all on the way with me, through the passion of Lent to reach the resurrection. Our task is to tell you that you are loved, and loved with an unending love and with truth. This Great Lent is our way to Easter. Come with us. Summary 1. God has brought with man into covenant with himself 2. The Covenant is open to us in Jesus Christ, through the Church and mediated by the Scripture that tells us about God's covenant people of Israel. 3. The Church that is confident in the covenant of God and the promise of redemption can identify crises without fear and warn of disaster. 4. As it celebrates the resurrection, the Church is able to receive judgment. The good news of the covenant is the basis on which we may receive the correction required for our redemption. 5. Love aspires to permanence, and so seeks the correction and discipleship that will make it permanent. 6. The Church teaches self-control and the ability to wait. Christian discipleship sustains our self-giving permanently. We have no need to give ourselves away to one another instantly or to withdraw ourselves again. 7. It is only because it is a finite world that we have to learn how to act within it. It is only when we exercise self-restraint that we can act generously and for other people. 8. We may give ourselves to one another permanently, man to woman, in the covenant of marriage. Self-giving depends on difference and it

matures complementarity. Marriage raises morale and result from good morale. 9. The Church celebrates the resurrection and the passion simultaneously. It travels to Easter through the passion of Lent. 10. The Church withdraws in Lent in order to prepare for the trials that this witness requires. 11. Christ withstands the rage of man-without-God, overcomes this rage and so will redeem us from it. 12. The Church is witness of this covenant to the nation. The Church witnesses to the nation, and the nation that receives this witness will receive its judgment and receive the confidence that comes through this covenant.