Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on the second Sunday of Lent, March 16, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Gen 15:1-12, 17-18, Phil 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our readings today are all about covenants and faithfulness, even tenderness. They are so comforting that it feels almost odd to be reading such reassuring words in Lent. Aren’t we supposed to be getting stiff doses of our own sinfulness, and if the assurance of pardon, then not before a reminder of the necessity of penitence?

Perhaps. But this Sunday anyway the lectionary suggests a different path. I for one am grateful: sometimes we get so inundated with questions of ultimate meaning, with wondering what to make of our lives, our world; sometimes we get so overwhelmed with the tasks ahead of us, that words of comfort land like rain in the desert, unlooked-for and refreshing. So it is today. If you hear nothing else, then hear me say that God is faithful to the promises he has made, at least as much today as centuries and millennia ago: promises to keep, preserve, forgive, heal, redeem, fulfill.

Our reading from the Gospel is especially tender, all the more so for the feminine imagery Jesus freely employs regarding himself: “How I have longed to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” As tender as it is, it’s also bittersweet, as he reflects on the sad end many of the prophets faced, and the persecution they received in their lifetimes.

This is a fair place to stop and say, wait a minute. This is a really lovely image. Why were the prophets so poorly received, if this was the tradition they stood within? Well, to put it simply, divine comfort is a harder sell than you might think, and unearthing why also reveals why it’s actually a deeply Lenten message after all.

We can start by asking, what was it, exactly, that the prophets counseled? The critique they offered is probably more familiar than their actual counsel: we know they spoke up against economic policies that disenfranchised the poor and the stranger, against kings who had abused their power, against greed, hypocrisy, and propaganda. But what were they for? What was the alternative they suggested? At the end of the day, that’s probably even more subversive than their critique. Because what they counseled instead was simple trust in the provision of God.

Why is that subversive? Because it meant not putting trust in the things kings normally put trust in: things like the royal maintenance of chariots and standing armies; like entangling alliances with foreign powers; like wars of conquest and campaigns of international subterfuge. Famously, the prophet Samuel was even against the institution of monarchy altogether, and against the centralization of the state that a monarchy implied. For him it was much preferable that the people remain a loose network of tribes, bound by family obligations rather than by any kind of civic code.

Nathan the prophet confronted king David over his affair with Bathsheba, we know that well enough, and we have the glorious Psalm 51 as a result. But less well-known is that David was punished much more severely for presuming to do something so unthinkably wicked as to take a census of the people. A census? That sounds pretty innocuous to our ears, but the problem was that a census always means taxes and conscription, and with those things come exploitation and war.

In our first reading today, God promises Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. He believed God, and his faith in the promise was reckoned to him as righteousness. Later on, the kings of the people, instead of simply trusting God to be faithful, preferred to take matters into their own hands, and tried to bring about the fulfillment in their own time, in their own way, by whatever means they could muster. This was the opposite of faithful trust. The prophets said as much. And as a result they were run out of town on a rail.

In all those kings’ defense, it’s hard to imagine how it could have played out otherwise. What, they were supposed to just trust that everything would be okay, without making any provision for the kind of resources, security, and organization that a stable, prosperous society would need? If they built no fortresses, if they kept no chariots, how would they defend themselves when the Assyrians came marching? Or forget the Assyrians, what about when their neighbors came marching? And if they made no alliances, if they did not engage in international trade, how could they get the cedar logs or acquire the stone blocks or accomplish the fine metal work to make the Lord’s temple beautiful? 

I can’t blame them for trying to make the best of their situation. But it does seem that ‘just trusting that everything would be okay’ is exactly what the prophets would have preferred, what God would have preferred, despite how insane it sounds to the more practical and pragmatic among us.

It’s a fair question to ask ourselves, especially in Lent. How often do we try to short-circuit God’s promises of peace, or justice, or ‘life and that abundantly’ by making them come true for us on our own terms, at a time of our own choosing? I don’t know what that looks like for you, though I’d venture a guess it doesn’t look much different than for myself. Basically we try to mitigate risk by heaping up whatever resources come naturally to us. Maybe that’s money or security, or maybe it’s things like affection, or influence, or position;  or degrees, or certifications; perhaps it’s our own indispensability, or maybe it’s our zeal — for the Lord’s house, or the Lord’s people, or the vulnerable we care about.

Don’t misunderstand me, none of these things are bad on their own, and most are quite good. When we pursue them because they are good and for no other reason, then we haven’t short-circuited anything at all. But all too frequently we pursue them in order to feed some existential need or lack of our own, and then we twist them to serve another purpose, to serve ourselves instead, and we begin to look less like those simply trusting God to be faithful, and more like Lucifer claiming God’s prerogative for his own.

The truth is, though we can and do trust God to be faithful, the final and complete fulfillment of his promises will not occur in our lifetimes. We cannot have all the answers now. Our life, our work, is oriented towards a future we are not likely to see, towards beneficiaries we are not likely to meet this side of heaven. This should grant us both humility and good cheer, as we suffer whatever slings and arrows come in the meantime. Building ourselves a fortress to mitigate all possible risk is actually counterproductive: it draws, it attracts the very threats we wanted to ward off. Worse than counterproductive, it walls us off from any possibility of being surprised by God’s faithfulness, goodness, or mercy.

As people of faith there is no security we can claim, no impregnable fortress we can flee to, no army of chariots to fight our battles for us. There is only the shadow of God’s wings; there is only the cleft in the wounded side of Christ. Everything else is as so much grass, here today and gone tomorrow.

This is why Scripture uses such tender imagery so much of the time: “All we like sheep have gone astray;” “I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me;” “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters;” “I do not call you servants but friends; you are my friends.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are they who trust in him.” We are sent out as sheep into the midst of wolves, and our whole purpose is to be just as trusting, just as dependent as sheep, trusting that God will be faithful to keep us until he calls us home.  Taking refuge in divine comfort means not taking comfort in anything less, else our comfort of choice be revealed as so many fig leaves, as it was so painfully for so many biblical kings.

There’s no way around it, this is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in: especially for reasonably well-educated, reasonably well-resourced people in Berkeley, California, in 2025. We want to do something, we want to use our power, exercise our agency, to make positive change in a world that desperately needs positive change. 

Yes, please let’s do. But at least insofar as we are Christians, a big part of our work is to put ourselves in positions where we can be misunderstood, dismissed, rejected, removed from the board, for our earnestness, innocence, or integrity — in short where we are vulnerable enough to be wounded by those savvier and more cunning than we, by those more willing to take up  the weapons they find lying about the world. Such a dismissal, such a wound will, in the grand scheme of things, serve far greater and more lasting positive change than we could ever accomplish by taking up the tools of our enemy in order to force our ‘better way’ earlier.

“Them that live by the sword die by the sword.” Our life, our task, as Christians, is to trust that God is faithful: to trust that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, to live now as if this is already the case, and to make our boast in nothing but the God who went to the cross that death may die. So in simple trust we shall be gathered under the shelter of Christ’s wings. So, safe from all disquietude, we shall feed on the bread of heaven. So on that final day we shall wake up after his likeness and find our faithfulness vindicated by God’s own, and all the world at peace.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.