SERMON
at
Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Lent I
February 21, 2010
by
The Rev. Stanley C. Kemmerer, AHC

All religions are based on a handful of theological questions. Basic ones are
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?

In this morning’s Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures we hear an answer to the “Who am I?” question: My father was a wandering Aramaean. He went down into Egypt to find refuge there, few in numbers; but there he became a nation, great, mighty, and strong. The Egyptians ill treated us, they gave us no peace and inflicted harsh slavery on us. But we called on Yahweh the God of our fathers. Yahweh heard our voice and saw our misery, our toil and our oppression; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. He brought us here and gave us this land, a land where milk and honey flow.

Story is important. It reminds us who we are. Our sense of who we are is expressed in our behaviors. What’s happened to us in our lives is expressed in our behaviors.

Small wonder story is part of the central act of the Eucharist, the consecration prayer, in a section called the anamnesis which means “remembrance”: For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread…. Story is also an integral part of congregations’ search processes for new clerical leadership. The people are asked to tell stories about the parish, their memories and experience of it as an aid to identify what kind of leadership will be a good “fit” for them.

Story is used to inspire. To be a wandering Aramaean from a small tribe was to be nothing. Scholars think the “wandering Aramaean” referred to is Jacob, who had heard there was grain in Egypt and who had gone there to obtain some during a severe famine, to keep his people from starving. This passage speaks of a God who, when the Egyptians ill-treated him and his tribe, used His power to rescue him. Not only to rescue this “nothing” person and his “nothing” tribe but to bring them to a new and wonderful land.

We Americans have been taught a similar story. The Puritan flight from England to escape religious oppression, the hardships endured in the New World, followed by a history that has many now believing we are the greatest nation, the most powerful nation in the world.

These are the “mega” stories: the story of nations; what are the “mini” stories? What is your story? What is mine? In the time of reflection the Lenten season affords we might consider the people and events that have formed our story. The geography. The relationships.

My father was a wandering Aramaean. Have you “wandered” in your life? In your job? Are there times when you weren’t sure what you would be when you grew up? Is this one of them? What brought you out of them? In the answer may lie clues to God’s activity in your life. Through events. Through other people. Through your internal resources.

Similarly: have you experienced a time in your life when, metaphorically, the crops failed. Or hope was broken. Or trust failed. When everything that fed you dried up and withered. What brought you through? Again, in the answer may lie clues to God’s activity.

What about the treasured friends? Or relatives. Or others who left their imprints on your life and/or on the life of the community. In each Sunday’s edition of The Hartford Courant there is a feature article entitled Extraordinary Life. It profiles a person who lived in the readership area, who died in the previous few months. Whose are the “Extraordinary Lives” in your story? How are you and that story different because of them?

The Gospel shows us Jesus using his story, in the form of his use of Scripture, to respond to the temptations:

Jesus has been fasting and is hungry. The devil tells him to show
he’s the Son of God by turning a stone into a loaf of bread. Jesus
refuses to show off, quoting Man does not live on bread alone.

The devil takes him to a height and shows him all the kingdoms of
the world, promising him the power and glory of them if Jesus will
but worship him. Jesus quotes the Scripture You must worship
the Lord your God, and serve him alone.” In response.

Finally, the devil takes him up to the parapet of the Temple and
Invites him to demonstrate his faith by throwing himself off it,
himself quoting two Scripture passages, He will put his angels
in charge of you to guard you and They will hold you up on
their hands in case you hurt your foot against a stone. Jesus
trumps what the devil appears to have thought was his ace by
responding You must not put the Lord your God to the test!

How would we use our story? One way might be to make a different kind of confession than the one often associated with Lent. We most commonly think of the meaning of the term “confession” associated with the General Confession we recite as part of the Eucharist. There is another use of that term: the one associated with its use in the name of the holy day The Feast of the Confession of St. Peter. That use refers to a witness or a proclamation. Our reflections might lead us to witness or proclaim the understanding we’ve come to of God’s activity in our lives.

Another way we might use our story is suggested by this morning’s Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures: When you come to the land Yahweh your God is giving you for an inheritance, when you have taken possession of it and are living in it, you must set aside the first fruits of all the produce of the soil raised by you in the land Yahweh is giving you. You must put them in a pannier and go to the place where Yahweh your God chooses to give his name a home. You must go to the priest then in office and say to him, “Today I declare to Yahweh my God that I have come to the land Yahweh swore to our fathers he would give us…Here then I bring the first fruits of the produce of the soil that you, Yahweh, have given me.”

Story, understanding who we are, how we came to be who we are, how God’s activity in our lives has made and is making us who we are draws our attention to using who we are to demonstrate our gratitude by giving back to that same God through our time, our abilities and our material resources, to serve him. Coming to this understanding and using it are what Lent is all about!