Homily for the First Sunday in Lent
February 21, 2021
Year B, RCL
Collect of the Day: Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Old Testament: Genesis 9:8-17
Gradual: Psalm 25:1-9
Epistle: 1 Peter 3:18-22
Gospel: Mark 1:9-15
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
There is a Peanuts comic strip starring Lucy and Linus that has always stuck with me, and it goes like this: Lucy is in her house, at the window, looking at the pouring rain outside. She turns to her brother Linus and says, “Boy, look at it rain. What if it floods the whole world?” Linus responds, “It will never do that. In the ninth chapter of Genesis, God promised Noah that would never happen again, and the sign of the promise is the rainbow.” Relieved, Lucy says, “You’ve taken great a load off my mind.” And Linus replies, “Sound theology has a way of doing that!”1
Linus is right. Sound theology, or sound ways of talking about God, really does take a load off our mind. It reassures us that God is good. To be sure, God’s goodness is not an invitation to try to take advantage of Him. God is not to be challenged, mocked, or trifled with. He is capable of—for example—wiping out the known world with a destructive flood. Yet alongside the seriousness of falling into the hands of the living God, there is the relief of being in the hands of the merciful God.
Good theology assures us that God is trustworthy, that He keeps His promises. Unlike human beings, who can go back on their word, if God makes a promise, He keeps it.
But sometimes it’s difficult for us to believe that. We may know it intellectually, but we would like a little more reassurance. So God helps us out. He gives us a sign of his promise—a sign of the covenant, as it’s called in our reading from Genesis. The rainbow is one of the first times in Scripture that God gives a sign to confirm his promise.
God continues to give us signs of His promises, even now. As members of the family of God, God makes promises to us—that He will love us, be with us, and never abandon us. Then to confirm those promises, he gives us wonderful signs—like baptism. I can look at my baptism and remember, “God has washed away my sins with the blood of Christ. God has claimed me as his own and I belong to Him. Nothing will ever separate me from the love of God in Jesus Christ.”
The rainbow, baptism, the Eucharist, the life of Christ itself—all these are signs that God is trustworthy. It has been said that human history is the story of God convincing His creatures that He can be trusted.2 And so the life of faith is a gradual learning to trust God more and more. All of us have room to grow in that trust—and all of us face the temptation to abandon that trust.
We speak often of temptation in Lent, and we usually mention it in reference to the temptation to commit particular sins: sexual temptation, temptation to break one’s vows, temptation to indulge in vice rather than practice self-constraint. But I think the most insidious temptation of all is the temptation to doubt the trustworthiness of God. The temptation to finally conclude, “God isn’t actually good. He won’t uphold His promises. He will abandon me eventually. In the final analysis, God can’t be trusted.”
Satan tried to tempt Jesus to think this way in the wilderness. His mission was to get Jesus to doubt his relationship with God and to doubt the validity of his mission as the Messiah. Jesus didn’t give into this temptation, or any of the other tests Satan threw his way. For Jesus too, faithfulness means trust rather than despair.
Given what we’ve endured over the past year—over the past week, even—it can be tempting to give up on the hope that there really is any coherent meaning to everything going on in the world. “Maybe the world really is as chaotic as it seems. Maybe God isn’t watching over us after all.” If there is one grand temptation we all face this Lent, it is the temptation to resign ourselves to this sort of despair—to give up hope.
My invitation for us all this Lent is to keep in mind the trustworthiness of God. Do all the things you usually would—fast, keep your Lenten discipline, pray, give alms. But behind these things and between these things, remember that God is trustworthy. Even when it doesn’t appear so, God is for us, God is with us, and God always keeps His promises. It is our faith that empowers us to trust in spite of everything, to hope against hope, as we await the Day when God finally delivers us from all temptations… and makes good on all his many promises. Amen.
Notes
1 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/540854236472479245/
2 Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust
The Pulpit and the Altar 