Maybe We're All Catechumens

Scripture

Readings for Lent V, RCL Year C: Isaiah 43:16-21, Psalm 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8

Sermon

Welcome, everyone, to the Fifth and final Sunday of Lent.

We kicked off the Lenten season on Ash Wednesday with a physical reminder that we are dust, and that one day, we will return to dust. We were invited, or perhaps even better, welcomed into a season of spiritual wilderness. We've heard about the temptation of Christ in the desert and have been instead alongside him in his earthly ministry as a part of that rowdy group of disciples on the path that leads ultimately to Jerusalem. We’ve heard the beatitudes, and the parable of the tree that just needed a little time and love.

Some of the teachings we've heard from Jesus this season have been easier to swallow than others. Some stories provoke discomfort, or unease. And, because it is not the sole purpose of scripture to comfort, but also to show us what God is like, I expect they're meant to. There’s a road, and we’re walking it, but it’s twisty and sometimes we lose sight of Jesus, or even the crowd.

For example: I'm an eldest child, and the story of the Prodigal Son can feel mighty unfair in tone sometimes. How dare the responsible oldest be presented as the ungrateful jerk of the tale!

In this reaction is the reason I both look forward to this season while also kind of dreading it. I must ask myself: Why am I finding this story upsetting or on any level irritating? I love my siblings to pieces, and the story of the prodigal has not been our dynamic. I mostly find in this parable a theology and vision of the world which is delightful in its expansive mercy. So what hidden sore spot did Jesus jab in me when he told that parable?

Answering that question tends to send me into the proverbial desert of cranky, irritable introspection and prayer. What am I tempted by? Why? What does my reaction to this story tell me about my understanding of my own belovedness, of how the economy of God's love and salvation operates? For me, wrestling with these questions is one part of the spiritual pruning that is inherent to the season of Lent, the kind of pruning or uncovering that makes room for new growth come Easter.

Traditionally, Lent was the time when catechumens were prepared for baptism, which happened (indeed, happens) at the Great Vigil of Easter or on Easter Sunday. This was a rigorous process of internal honesty and confession, involving study, prayer, and fasting in the lead-up to baptism into new life in Christ. You may recall that baptisms in the Episcopal Church happen not separately or privately but in the midst of the worshiping community, and that all of those present renew our baptismal vows together as a part of that baptismal liturgy. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, but we also acknowledge that perfection in this lifetime is unlikely at best, and so we return to that baptism, where we were sealed as Christ’s own forever, over and over, perhaps seeing it each time with new eyes as it orders and re-orders our lives.

We may not formally be catechumens (most of us), but Lent, and especially this final week of it, provides us none-the-less with a time to sit and consider where the internal brambles might be, what new thing might be wanting to grow, and what it might mean for us and for our lives this year to renew again our baptismal covenant. (This starts on page 304 in your BCP, if you want to consider them.)

Devon has an awesome little comic strip on the wall of her office that illustrates how not-neat this spiritual pruning I'm perhaps neatly describing actually tends to be. There are two panels. The first panel, captioned "other people's spiritual journey," shows a properly outfitted hiker moving along a path that has some downs amidst the ups, but is definitely ascending somewhere, like up a mountain.

The second panel is captioned "my spiritual journey," and is an absolute scribble with no discernable pattern, up, down, back or forward -- though it does somehow move from left to right, indicating some sort of positive evolution. The person following this path looks a bit frazzled, and is not wearing hiking boots and all that. They're just doing what they can when they can.

It makes me smile every time I see it, because it feels so true. We are not storybook-perfect monastics, issued our hiking boots as we take our vows. And noticing change and growth is usually a rear-view mirror thing, but in a weirdly not-chronological way.

The readings in this last Sunday of Lent are inviting us anew to this final week of messy inner work as we prepare for the triumphal entry into Jerusalem next Sunday, the confounding Last Supper, the pain and betrayal of Good Friday, before we arrive at the joy of startling new or re-newed life on Easter.

We pray with the psalmist for the LORD to restore our fortunes like a life-giving rain in the desert, filling the watercourses of the Negeb, and to be with us in times of sorrow, or pain, or simple confoundment, as we sow the seeds of what will, with that life-giving rain, be reaped in joy in another season of life.

With Isaiah, too, we await the new thing that in God is springing forth, which we will learn (in time) to properly see. With Mary, some of us will find ourselves anointing for death something that we love, or have loved, but must somehow let go of, so that this new thing can spring forth.

St. Paul gives us an example of this from his own life. “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more,” he tells us, and then enumerates his many privileges. Some of them were an accident of birth – a member of the tribe of Benjamin in Israel, a Hebrew. Some had to do with his social standing as a cleric, enforcing his understanding of the Law, while persecuting people who saw the Law differently.

But he also shares the many ways in which, in the end, these privileges were not the key to a fulfilled or perfectly completed life. He sets down perhaps life-long behaviors and attitudes and assumptions, seeking to “know Christ and the power of his resurrection… by becoming like him in his death,” that he might somehow “attain the resurrection from the dead.”

This coming week, I invite you, as life allows, sit for a few minutes in full awareness that Easter is coming… but also that, in order to get to Easter, we must first navigate the remainder of Lent, and Good Friday. The road to this moment, and to Easter beyond, looks different for each of us, and yet here we all are, together here today. If you can, bless the road that led you here. If that feels impossible, bless your inability to bless that road right now, in this season, and ask God to bless it for you. Bless that which you see might need pruning. Bless that which wants to grow.

For me, I bless my own incompletion, and yours too: for we are none of us yet complete, and in Christ, always we begin again.