Luther Seminary Chapel of the Incarnation, March 2, 2006
Text: Gen 9:8-17 (First Sunday in Lent—Year B)
Preacher: Frederick J. Gaiser
OUT FOR IT ALL
In the midst of the social ferment
of the late 1960s, a strange thing happened one day during a chapel service at
Those students were repelled by a notion of Christian pilgrimage or spiritual journey that looked only inward or upward and failed to look outward, where, in their opinion, the real need was to be found.
They had a point, even if they expressed it somewhat inelegantly. Curiously, not long after that, I myself was verbally accosted by a group of mild-mannered nuns for a lecture in which I disparaged the notion of pilgrimage for reasons similar to those of the protesting students. How dare I question that powerful image, they asked, which is precisely what gave them the perspective to face with Christian courage the troubles of the world around us?
They had a point, too, of course, and they were kinder to the speaker in their reaction than had been the Augie students of the same era.
So, which will it be for us as we begin once more our Lenten journey, our forty-day spiritual pilgrimage—will our eyes be set so firmly on the cross that we take no notice of the events of this world? No time to stop for the guy on the side of the road, because we are on the way to holy places and holy things. No concern for the environment, because it is all passing away anyway. No time to plant a tree, for the end is near. No immersion in this life, for it is the realm of the enemy. Will our piety be so profoundly inward that we sacrifice our souls in the pursuit of religious enlightenment? Or will a pilgrim’s vision of where God is leading move us to practice the coming kingdom in our present world?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised the same question in his own turbulent times, urging German Christians to ask whether their
time of meditation has led them into an unreal world from which they awaken with a fright when they step out into the workaday world, or whether it has let them into the real world of God from which they enter into the day’s activities strengthened and purified. Has it transported them for a few short moments into a spiritual ecstasy that vanishes when everyday life returns, or has it planted the Word of God so soberly and so deeply in their hearts that it holds and strengthens them all day long, leading them to active love, to obedience, to good works?[1]
A fair question, since the answer has not always been clear to God’s people. Will our religious pilgrimage prove deadly—as they have so often, for example, in Mecca when people so fervent for the God-thing trample the human things that get in their way; or in all too many Christian congregations when people bury their faces so deeply in their hymn books and Bibles that they overlook Jesus in the face of their hungry neighbors?
We have just heard the Old Testament
reading for the First Sunday in Lent that adds an even broader dimension to
this question. Following the flood, God announces a covenant, a binding
commitment, to preserve the life not only of people—
The swallows nesting in the temple
in Ps 84, one of
When God comes to redeem the world, Isaiah announces that “all flesh shall see it together” (Isa 40:5)—mistakenly translated in the nrsv as “all people shall see it together,” for this is the same “all flesh” that includes all God’s creatures in our Genesis text. Luke picks up the refrain from Isaiah, applying it to Jesus: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). God is out for it all—for “all flesh,” as Genesis announces, and for the whole creation and the entire cosmos, as Isaiah and the Psalms make abundantly clear. There will be sparrows in that heavenly choir, and the population there may look more like the bar scene in Star Wars than a suburban Lutheran congregation at worship. God is out for it all.
And if God is out for it all, Jesus is up for it all. Are you up for this, Jesus? Jesus faces that awful question in Gethsemane and finally assents—aware now that to be up for God’s mission is to be up on the cross, precisely for the sake of all flesh, all the world, all God’s creatures, all that God has made—for it has all become compromised in our human fault. My God, what have we done? As we pollute our own nest, we pollute the nest of God’s sparrows—and God’s holy temple is diminished.
Psalm 77 reports that, though God does indeed walk this earth with us, God’s footprints, unlike ours, “are unseen” (Ps 77:19). Curiously, our environmental impact seems greater than God’s, but like God, we can strive to walk softly, to lessen the weight the earth must bear. Our impact will be real, of course, since creation is real. No spiritual journey without a physical journey—and the more so because we so often walk in ignorance and arrogance regarding our footprints on God’s world. Wendell Berry has made the point eloquently:
This is not to suggest that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.[2]
“Just don’t do that” won’t work as a Lenten message, of course, for it overlooks the bondage to sin that took Jesus to the cross. But Lent is finally not about wallowing in sin, it is about the forgiveness of sins, and living in the anticipation and the reality of that forgiveness we can hear Gen 9 with new ears. “My covenant is with all flesh,” God announces to Noah. “I’m out for it all. Your kind was in danger of screwing it all up, and you had to be stopped; but now I am committed to restoring it all, to watching it grow and thrive and develop and evolve, and I graciously invite you and your kind to be part of that marvelous process. See the bow in the clouds and know I am active still. Sing a hymn, plant a tree, love your neighbor, and celebrate my cause.”
In all of that, we will not thereby save the world. God is busy doing that in Christ—which is the reason for our Lenten journey; but because God is in Christ reconciling the world, saving all flesh, we can give ourselves to the world, even as did Christ. That will be a Lenten pilgrimage that even the protesters of the ’60s need not walk out on. AMEN