Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,

given by Rev. Eliza Linley/February 25, 2007

  The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share

Christ's love in the world.  We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to other

       Who are we, beloved sons and daughters of God, and how do we find our identity within that definition? Lent provides us an opportunity to find that identity. Traditionally we think of Lent as a time to deny the self in order to draw closer to God. But who is the Holy Spirit calling to, if not our truest, deepest selves? What if it’s not so much about giving up stuff as about giving in? Think of the Holy Spirit of God, just for a minute, as someone very close to you. As a lover, who wants, more than anything, to have some time alone with us. This lover is not giving an ultimatum, but a heartfelt plea. “Sweetheart, you know how much I love you! I just want to spend some time with you, get to know you better…why don’t we just go away to the desert together, hmm…? Just the two of us? What if that’s the real message God has for us this Lent? Makes it a little more attractive, doesn’t it? Who could say no? This morning’s readings are all about that journey with God through the wilderness, and studying them can be a model for our own Lenten getaway at home with God.

     In Deuteronomy the Hebrew people arrive at a place they can finally call home. After years of wandering in the wilderness, God commands them to celebrate their homecoming with an offering of first fruits, and to remember where they came from. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…”  They are to remember that God loved them enough to bring them out of slavery and oppression into a land flowing with milk and honey. But the price for this is to remember, and give thanks. Remember who brought them out of misery and who loves them still. Remember, too, that they were strangers and sojourners in the land of Egypt, and that they are not the only people in this new land they have been privileged to inhabit. No, there are aliens who reside among them. There are Canaanites and Hivites and Amorites and Perizzites and Palestinians who were already there when they got there, and they are to celebrate with all the bounty God has given them. 

There are Native Americans and Mexicans and Vietnamese and Guatemalans and Chinese and some of them don’t have green cards and some of them are gay and lesbian and some of them are black and brown and all manner of different things, and God commands us to celebrate together with them all and to give thanks at our deliverance from death into life. That’s the price of admission. That’s what it costs to be in a love affair with God.

     Bp. Marc Andrus of California says, “Our task in the church is not actually to include or exclude anyone. Actions of justice and injustice reverberate through the whole, promoting either integrity, remembering, shalom, or diabolic isolation.” Last week in Tanzania there was a meeting of all the primates in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The primates asked the Episcopal Church to go back on its commitment to the full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians in all ministries of the church. How could the Episcopal Church, having taken a stand that assumes that God – not us - includes and accepts the full gifts of all; how could we turn back? Decide it was a mistake? As daughters and sons of God, we simply cannot. That is not our understanding of who God is calling us to be. If we are not faithful to that call, then who, or whose, are we?

     In Romans St. Paul recalls the words of the Deuteronomist, that the word of God is not up in heaven that you have to send someone to bring it down, and it’s not across the sea, that you have to send out the fleet to bring it back; no, it’s already in your mind and in your heart. If we pay attention to the Holy Spirit, in other words, it is likely that we will know what God is saying to us, to the church, and what we should do. Everyone, he says, that calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. You don’t have to be a Jew or a Greek. You don’t have to be straight or gay, or even Episcopalian. In this season of Lent, however, we are being asked to take time, to make time, to listen, and not to assume we know without giving God a chance to speak to us.

     The readings play on the theme of fullness and emptiness. Jesus returns from his baptism full of the Holy Spirit, but he puts himself in a situation where he becomes famished. The temptations the Adversary set before him are all about being filled up with something other than God. Of course, this is the temptation we face all the time.

We are tempted to try to be all things to all people, to feed everyone with the stones of our own self-sufficiency. We are tempted to idolize power and authority, or to assume them for ourselves and then pat ourselves on the back, because it looks like this might be a way to get something done for a change. When we are heedless of God’s call to us, when we act as though we ourselves had the power to bring our own sorry asses and oxen and selves out of bondage, then we are putting God to the test. We expect to get everything without giving, or even acknowledging, God at all.

    

God’s love calls to the love that God has already put in us. That’s what Lent is really about. This season, notice how love speaks to you. Who shows you God’s heart? How do you know that you belong to God? How do you become secure enough in God’s love to manifest compassion in the world? Risk prayer. Show up for worship. Let God speak within you.

     Do you think it’s not about love, about being the beloved? Do you think it’s kind of self-centered to think of ourselves as the ones God yearns for? Then hear these words. It’s what Teresa of Avila, the great and practical 16th century Spanish mystic, wrote as a response to words she heard in prayer:

Soul, you must seek yourself in Me

And in yourself seek Me.

With such skill, soul Love

Could portray you in Me.

That a painter well gifted

Could never show

So finely that image.

For love you were fashioned

Deep within Me

Painted so beautiful, so fair;

If, my beloved, you are lost,

Soul seek yourself in Me.