28-february-2016-lent-3-sermon-preached-by-fr-martin-davies

Third Sunday in Lent Christ Church St Laurence, Sydney Fr Martin Davies, Director of St James’ Institute Isaiah 55:1-9 Psalm 63:1-9 I Corinthians 10:1-13 Luke 31:1-9 The Season of Lent is a wonderful gift to us and to the whole Church. It is a time for re-assessment and recommitment in our personal and community life; it is a time of preparation for baptism - and for those who are already baptised, we prepare for the renewal of our baptismal promises at the Great Vigil of Easter.

As we began this Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday, setting out to enter the purifying desert, we took with us three ancient tools - of prayer, fasting and giving. The Church gives us these spiritual disciplines, on which Jesus taught. In considering the value of these disciplines, we should also beware the consequences of ignoring them, for they take us into the heart not only of the spiritual life, but of our essential humanity.

On an obvious surface, if prayer, fasting and giving do not have a place in our lives and in the Church, we become dry, fat and greedy. Not a pretty picture.

Lack of attention to prayer results in our knowing all too well for ourselves the words of today’s psalm, my soul thirsts for you...like a dry weary land without water. Fasting has a meaning and a value much greater than simply abstaining from certain foods or drink. More profoundly it is the difference between whether we are in control of our appetites, or they are in control of us. Our appetites of course are to do with more than food, and include sex, acquiring possessions, and power. Giving is to do with knowing when we have enough, and knowing what is more than enough. Giving is fundamentally about living justly and generously. Or not.

The English-born American liturgical scholar Mark Searle expresses concisely, a purpose of Lent, which is to ... bring us to compunction. “Compunction” is etymologically related to the verb “to puncture” and suggests the deflation of our inflated egos, a challenge to any self-deceit about the quality of our lives as disciples of Jesus. By hitting us again and again with demands which we ... fail to obey, ... the gospel passages are meant to trouble us, to confront our illusions about ourselves.

“Remember, you are dust...”

And so we enter the Lenten desert, a place where excess is stripped away and we learn to live more simply. We give time to prayer, through which we are invited to reach down into the well of abundant life which God has for us; to drink deeply of God’s life. We trim down to essentials and learn to abstain from excesses which easily dominate our lives. We live and give generously, out of the abundance which we ourselves receive from God. But these disciplines are not an end in themselves. What is the point of it all? Why Lent? Where does it lead? The Lenten journey won’t always be an easy one, and the desert is an entirely appropriate image.

But as the early Christian desert fathers and mothers knew, the desert is a fertile place of great reward.

The great Benedictine Maria Boulding wrote The desert in our lives is the place where in our poverty, our sin and our need we come to know the Lord. For us, like the Israelites before us, it is the place of the essential confrontations, where the irrelevancies are stripped away and the elemental things become all-important, where the truth of our hearts is revealed.

Maria Boulding OSB, The Coming of God

A Eucharistic preface for Lent describes this as a joyful season, in which we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed. Lent makes no sense at all without Easter. Of necessity, a fast precedes a feast, or quite simply we will not be physically able to eat at the banquet.

With its image of food and drink, today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah in the time of exile, offers an insistent invitation to Come, listen and heed; to move from sorrow to joy. This too, is our Lenten transformation.

Our deepest longing finds expression in the psalm today, in the form of thirst. When the absence of water is met with anticipation of abundance and satisfaction, longing gives way to joy and praise. Both physical and spiritual thirst mobilize us to satisfy this most basic need. Again, it is the gift of Lent which enables us to find what will truly satisfy our thirst, first of all through our engagement with Lent’s wise disciplines.

As it happens, I once lived on a few acres with a vineyard, and an unproductive fig tree. Somewhat mindful of the bible story, threats to remove the tree were set aside, and it was decided to give it just one more chance. With much watering, and attention to the soil around the tree, it responded, and next season it produced a little fruit. The following year was even better.

Sometimes we ourselves are like the tree; unproductive. In such times, we and others may even doubt that we are actually alive. We may have given up on ourselves; and there may be any one of many reasons for this. Those around us may also be able to see us better at some points, than we ourselves can. Like the gardener who pleaded to save the fig tree, it often does happen that someone, somewhere, sees that we are capable of more, and gives us another chance. Perhaps it is the chance that we would not give ourselves, or do not see as even a remote possibility. Or, we may know there is something missing in our life, but don’t yet know what it is. Or it may be that we do know deep down what we need to do to grow, but lack the courage to take those first steps unassisted.

We may know very well, that what we need do to grow will take us way out of our comfort zone, and involve risk. But the result of not taking a risk to grow, may result in life-long regret within ourselves, perhaps evident also to others in our bitterness and crankiness. With support and encouragement, little by little, with patience, and attentive nurturing, we become capable of more than we imagined. There is a story of an old woman in a church who told someone, the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are, and that [God] loves us too much to let us stay like this.

But we can be quite resistant to the change asked of us by this new chance of growth. It is not necessarily that we don’t want to change, but we know that it will require something of us. Lent is an excellent time for digging deeper into the mysteries of being human, and of grasping their complexities in a way that allows us to respond to the encouragement to grow. Reluctance or refusal to begin or continue the growth we know we need, may leave us as unproductive as the fig tree, and feeling more spiritually dead than alive.

Our task, especially during the season of Lent, is to prepare the soil of our lives, so that God can allow God’s gift of prayer to work within us, to create lives that are open and receptive, free from enslavement to out-of-control appetites, thankful and generous. Let us tend the soil of our lives, that through the Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting and giving, the remainder of the Lenten journey may be joyful, in the knowledge that resurrection awaits us.