Call on the Name of the Lord and be saved

Deuteronomy 26.4-10 The confession of faith of the chosen people.

Romans 10.8-13 The confession of faith of believers in Christ.

Luke 4.1-13 ‘Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness and tempted by the devil’.

 

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Today’s readings set the bearings for this holy season of Lent: holding fast to God and resisting temptation.

 

The first reading from the book of Deuteronomy gives a summary of the Exodus of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt, through deliverance by God, who brought them through the wilderness into a promised land flowing with milk and honey.

 

That maps out what we know as the Paschal Mystery, the movement from death to life, slavery to freedom, darkness to light.

 

We enter into that mystery through baptism, which is at the heart of how Easter becomes real in our lives, so that we know the spiritual deliverance from death to life, slavery to freedom, darkness to light.

 

St Paul, writing to the Christians of Rome, our second reading, reminds us that this deliverance is made possible because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. The confession of faith, ‘that Jesus is Lord’ and that belief in one’s heart ‘that God raised Christ from the dead’ is our salvation.

 

And the final verse of each reading gives us the tools to navigate what Jesus faced in the temptations he underwent in the wilderness at the hands of the devil.

 

From the letter to the Romans, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ And from Deuteronomy, ‘worship before the LORD your God.’

 

Before we look into the gospel reading it’s worth reminding ourselves what the Church says about evil and more specifically about the devil.

 

First evil is not a thing in itself.

 

St Augustine argues that evil is the 'privation of good. ' (Enchiridion 3:11)

 

Evil is good that falls short; extreme evil is an absence of the good.

 

So, an evil action happens when the good in someone’s life retreats.

 

That means we cannot say that a person is evil, but rather that what they have done is evil.

 

In the Bible the devil is the name given to the absence of good. And the devil has a number of titles.

 

He’s the diabolos a Greek word from which we get the word ‘diabolical’.

 

Diabolos means the one who scatters, who divides. This is contrasted with the action of the Holy Spirit which unites, and binds together.

 

The good is the work of unity and drawing together, the diabolical pulls apart.

 

He’s Satan, a Hebrew word which means ‘adversary’, the one who is against us. This is contrasted with the paracletos a Greek word, a title of the holy Spirit, which means ‘advocate’, the one who speaks on our behalf.

 

As the scripture says ‘if God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Romans 8.31b)

 

Jesus also describes the devil as the ‘father of lies.’ (John 8.44)

 

Let’s go to the gospel reading.

 

Jesus, full of the Spirit, goes into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.

 

So he is filled with the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord and giver of life’ the Spirit that unites him to the Father in love.

 

He goes into the wilderness, from which the Israelites were delivered, to battle the deprivation of the good, and, as we know, he prevails.

 

The three temptations press this deprivation of the good.

 

In the first temptation the deprivation of food is a possible way in for the one who anti-Christ.

 

The devil knows where to press, how to push the bruise.

 

He says to the famished Jesus, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.’

 

He is the Son of God and his sonship is revealed in his reply, resisting the food his body craves, to state that bread is not what sustains him ultimately: it is every word that comes from the mouth of God.

 

In the second temptation we see the great lie of the father of lies.

 

The devil shows Jesus all the earthly power anyone could possibly want.

 

‘To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.’ (Luke 4.6)

 

There’s the lie.

 

The devil has been given nothing; the devil has nothing to offer, because the devil’s domain is the deprivation of good, not a thing in itself.

 

If the devil is given authority over anything it is certainly not by God.

 

We give the devil authority when we diminish the good: that’s when Satan enters in.

 

The gospel news is that the good is restored when our lives being flooded with God’s grace, when we remain faithful to the command:

 

‘You shall worship the Lord your God,
    and him only shall you serve.’ (Luke 4.8)

 

The third temptation tests the human desire for physical safety and God’s capacity to save.

 

But again, the devil is not given quarter.

 

The very name Jesus means ‘God saves.’

 

It is God who saves us, not our own merits, schemes or strategies: ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

 

And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.

 

When is that ‘opportune time’?

 

Surely it is when the good is diminished or absent, for that is the devil’s opportunity.

 

Let us not then give the devil opportunity in our lives.

 

Let us hold to those words from the letter to the Romans, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

 

And from Deuteronomy, ‘worship before the LORD your God.’

 

May we continue through Lent resisting evil, showing the marks of a true Christian:

 

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honour. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. (Romans 12.9-13)

 

 

 

Sursum Corda: An Ash Wednesday homily

Joel 2.12-18 ‘Rend your hearts and not your garments’

2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2 ‘Be reconciled to God. Behold, now is the favourable time.’

Matthew 6.1-6, 16-18 ‘Your Father who sees in secret will reward you’.

 

“Yet even now,” declares the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
and rend your hearts and not your garments.”

(Joel 2.12,13)

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The human heart is the source of all that is good and beautiful and true in our lives.

 

The human heart is the source of all evil, vice and malice in our lives.

 

I wonder, is either of those statements true? Are both true at the same time?

 

The Collect of Ash Wednesday, echoing Psalm 51, asks of the Lord that he would ‘create and make in us new and contrite hearts’.

 

The heart is a motif of the scriptures.

 

In the prophet Ezekiel God declares:

 

‘And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.’ (Ezekiel 36.26)

 

The human heart becomes the place of transformation and restoration.

 

A stony, cold heart is a feature of death and hell.

 

A warm, beating heart of flesh is a feature of life and of heaven.

 

Ash Wednesday presupposes that our hearts of flesh have cooled, and perhaps even become icy, towards God and towards our neighbour.

 

‘Create and make in us new and contrite hearts’ is not just a phrase in a prayer, but a heartfelt plea: a plea felt in the heart.

 

Our hearts ache and yearn to be warmed and loved by God.

 

When we speak of the heart we are speaking of the most interior part of who we are, the place where ultimately only we can be, and only God can penetrate.

 

So, the deepest place of our inner core is the heart.

 

The heart is also the seat of passion and power and the intensity of love.

 

The word ‘courage’ derives from the French word, ‘coeur’ the heart, so a courageous person is a person of heart and power, expressed in love that will give its all to the other.

 

The quest for holiness of life is to align what the heart believes and knows and feels with what our lives and lips show.

 

As the prayer for choristers puts it very simply and beautifully:

 

Grant that what we sing with our lips,

we may believe in our hearts,

and what we believe in our hearts

we may show forth in our lives.

 

On Sunday in our Gospel we heard Jesus’ words that it is ‘out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks’ (Luke 6.45) for good or ill.

 

So, Ash Wednesday, and the season of Lent, is a time of spiritual heart surgery; the church is the spiritual cardiac ward.

 

This is what is being said through the prophet Joel:

 

^“Yet even now,” declares the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

and rend your hearts and not your garments.” (Joel 2.12,13a)

‘Rend your hearts’ means tear your hearts.

 

Don’t just do the outward performance of showing your sorrow for sin and falling short in an outward action – like tearing your clothes - but go in deep, to the core of your being, to your very heart to begin to repent and return to the Lord.

 

Joel continues:

 

Return to the Lord your God,
    for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;
    and he relents over disaster. (Joel 2.13b)

This Lent let us invite the Lord to be lord of our hearts, let us invite him ‘to search us out and know us’ as Psalm 139 puts it – there’s a good psalm to begin to know off by heart.

 

The phrase ‘off by heart’ doesn’t just mean rattling off the words, it means that a text goes deep into our very heart, to the heart of who I am.

 

This Lent why not take a prayer or verse and commit it to heart: you could do worse than the collect for Ash Wednesday, or another text on the Oremus sheet today.

 

So Joel says we need broken hearts before we can return to the Lord.

 

When we come to the seat of truthfulness our hearts will, and should, be broken by our sin, our distance from God, the schemes and shenanigans we play deluding others, and probably deluding ourselves.

 

‘A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise’ says tonight’s psalm. (Psalm 51.18b).

 

The good news is that God does not leave us in dust and ashes; he does not will us to be brokenhearted forever.

 

Indeed, he came, as Isaiah tells us, ‘to bind up the brokenhearted’ (Isaiah 61.1)

 

Repeatedly in the psalms the message is that God’s favour rests on the broken hearted (Psalms 34.18; 109.16): ‘He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds’ (Psalm 147.3)

 

‘Create and make in us new and contrite hearts’ our collect prays.

 

Where do we go with that tonight and this Lent?

 

First, the interior life of the heart is perhaps the first secret place we go to, as Jesus commends, to be with our heavenly Father.

 

We know the phrase about ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’, well, when it comes to the spiritual life, pray in the inner chambers of the heart not as a  show but an earnest encounter with your heavenly Father.

 

This Lent make your heart the arena of prayer: and pray!

 

Secondly, the heart is always to be exalted, lifted up as ‘a holy and living sacrifice to God’.

 

We offer our ‘new and contrite hearts’ back to the Lord.

 

In the Eucharistic Prayer the words ‘lift up your hearts’ is sung.

 

In Latin it is ‘sursum corda’.

 

Of this, the late Pope Benedict XVI said:

 

Prayer is the response to the imperative at the beginning of the Canon in the Eucharistic celebration: Sursum corda – lift up your hearts! It is raising my life towards God’s height. (From: Homily, 5 February 2011)

 

Let us this Lent go deep into our hearts and find our desire for God and let us approach the glorious Eastertide raising our life to God’s height, with hearts on fire in knowledge and love of him.

 

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth.

(Psalm 37.8,12)

From dust to life

Sirach 27:4-7 ‘Do not praise a man before you hear him reason.’

1 Corinthians 15:54-58 ‘He gives us the victory through Jesus Christ’

Luke 6.39-45 ‘Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’

 

‘Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’. (Luke 6.45)

 

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We are on the threshold of the season of Lent.

 

Lent is a good time when we can be very intentional about having a spiritual shakedown and self-audit.

 

Lent is a pathway, a roadmap, if you like, of hope and restoration and grace and life.

 

That pathway starts in the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday and leads us to the victory of Easter, the triumph of Jesus Christ over death and sin.

 

Of course, the resurrection of Jesus Christ resonates throughout the year and every Sunday is an echo of Easter Day.

 

 Our second reading catches this:

 

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

“O death, where is your victory?

    O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15.54b, 55)

 

We are created from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2.7) not destined to remain in it.

 

God’s spirit of life was breathed into Adam (Genesis 2.7), and so it is into us so that we proclaim life, life in all its abundance.

 

That is why the prophet Hosea, echoed by St Paul, tweaked death on the nose and asks where is your victory, where, ultimately, is your sting, O death?’

 

This is the vision that envelopes and sustains the Christian life.

 

When we fall into deathly ways, the life of Jesus raises us up, for death, is swallowed up in victory.

 

Our destiny is not eternal oblivion, but our mortal bodies put on immortality.

 

And that promise is open now; it’s not on hold until we breathe our last.

 

It’s the ‘life in all its abundance’ that Jesus promises (John 10.10).

 

What’s happened, that those outside the Church and, frankly, some inside it, don’t see the life and hope, but just the gloom and doom?

 

There are clearly ways the Church falls short: the failures around safeguarding; the fractures over Holy Orders; the fissures over sexuality.

 

Lent is a time not to ignore difficult questions but to transcend them, by going deeper into the heart of faith, the heart of light, the heart of hope.

 

We’re called to move from dust to life!

 

And our gospel reading begins to map out what this looks like in our interior life, and how the interior life is reflected in the exterior.

 

In other words, your life, bearing, demeanour and actions all reflect your spiritual health.

 

This is about vision and insight.

 

‘Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?’ (Luke 6.39)

 

Of course, we should never suggest that physical blindness leads to, or is, spiritual blindness: people who have 20:20 eyesight according to Specsavers can be totally blind spiritually.

 

If we are all fumbling around in darkness, spiritually speaking, unable to see where we’re going, the pitfalls of life will catch us.

 

We need guidance and wisdom from those around us who are not spiritually visually impaired, as in the episode in St Mark’s gospel when, ‘some people brought to Jesus a blind man and begged him to touch him’. (Mark 8.22)

 

Who are the spiritually sighted who bring the blind to Jesus?

 

They are the saints, the godly preachers and pastors, the wise fellow Christians whose wisdom and teaching, whose lives of holiness reflect the life of Christ: they are worthy guides.

 

Blind guides, erroneous teachers, have the most condemnation reserved for them in the Gospels: they are the spiritually blind, who don’t lead us to Christ but declare anything but Christ to be the source of light and salvation.

 

May faithful witnesses bring us all to Jesus; for only he can restore our vision.

 

At the same time, for those who have vision, who have had their eyes opened through baptism there are further strong words to consider.

 

Jesus’ famous image, about seeing the speck in someone else’s eye and failing to see the log in my own, is for those who can see, it’s not for the blind.

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye. (Luke 6.41,42)

 

It hardly needs explaining but just needs commending.

 

It develops the text we heard last week: ‘judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned…’ (Luke 6.37)

 

So, if you can see the fault of someone else, and perhaps you can, then first look in the mirror.

 

I have a bloodshot eye at the moment.

 

That’s not from actually removing a log from my eye.

 

But I know that there are logs I need to remove from the eye of my heart so that I may see more clearly, not simply someone else’s sins, but see the vision of Christ - crucified, risen, ascended and glorified - all the more clearly.

 

Lent is the time to re-focus our vision of Christ, through lamenting and confessing our sins, through tears that wash out specks and logs.

 

All this then has bearing on our lives and the fruit we produce.

 

As our first reading said, ‘the fruit of a tree discloses the cultivation of a tree; so the expression of a thought discloses the cultivation of a person’s mind.’ (Sirach 27.6)

 

When we move from dust to life, the dustiness of grievance, disappointment, negativity and resentment is blown away, not into our eyes but out of our lives.

 

That space is then filled, by God’s grace, with hope, expectation, abundance and delight in the other person simply for their sake and not what we can score off them or manipulate them to do.

 

That is what the Christian cultivates in mind, body and heart so that the interior life is reflected in the exterior: your life, bearing, demeanour and actions reflects your spiritual health.

 

And as Jesus concludes: ‘The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks’. (Luke 6.45)

 

May abundant hope, joy, life and light be in our hearts and on our lips. Amen.