Second Sunday of Lent – morning
Sunday 25th February 2018
Lent 2 – morning
Genesis 17. 1-7. 15-16
Mark 8.31 – end
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
How would you respond I wonder, if God came to you and appeared to offer you something impossible?
This morning we hear of two different, but equally credible reactions by human beings to the Divine word.
Abram falls on his face before God. And God makes him a promise which, on the face of it, seems utterly impossible. Both Abram and his wife Sarai are already old. Well past childbearing age. And yet here is God seeming to say that he will make of them the ancestors of great nations…. and not just one nation, but a multitude!
No wonder they are given new names as a result!
Peter however, seeks to argue with God – in the person of Jesus, when he seems to be saying something that Peter considers impossible. How can God’s Messiah possibly be put to suffering and death? It makes no sense! A least from Peter’s point of view.
I am put in mind of a sign in a garage that my parents told me about many years ago. In the years after the War… WWII that is … my father drove a succession of rather elderly beat up cars, as did everyone else then unless they were very wealthy, which my parents were definitely not. It was not unusual for the car to break down on the long journey they undertook several times a year, driving from the West Country, across Salisbury Plain, to visit the family in East London. Long before the motorway network of course! Well there was a particular garage that they were towed into one day which had a large sign up – “Impossibilities done at once, miracles take a little longer!”
Peter’s reaction, while it may seem very human and understandable to us, is at heart a selfish, and therefore sinful reaction. And this is why Jesus rounds on one of his closest friends with words that must have been incredibly hurtful for Peter to hear.
Which brings us neatly to consider what is Sin… not a topic that we often talk about today except in passing. More likely to be likened to overindulgence of what we have eaten, than something which places our immortal soul in danger.
Many people want to define sin as a narrow list of actions – frequently sexual in nature. Oh how we love to speak of those! But actually Sin in the biblical understanding of the term is so much wider and takes in much, much more.
Sin is basically selfishness – anything which places self at the centre of our concerns and existence, rather than God. That is why Jesus tells us that to follow him it means denying our selves, taking up the cross and walking his path. Self-denial in this form is so much more than giving up chocolate, or alcohol, or meat, but is to deny all those self-centred attitudes that make us at times, not very nice people to know. And naturally, we think that cannot possibly apply to us!? We are always nice! Or are we?
Self-centredness is as deeply rooted in us as breathing. It lies behind much of what Darwin described in the survival of the fittest. But human beings are also capable of altruism, and most of us will – at least sometimes, sacrifice our own wants and needs for the sake of others. Darwin himself recognised this – that ‘survival of the selfish’ is only true when we speak of individuals, not groups, tribes or societies. He wrote:
A tribe including many members who, from possessing a high degree the spirit of obedience, courage and sympathy were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection.
Yet how to get people to progress from the level of the individual, to the group was a problem. Eventually someone suggested that this was the function of religion.
So it is in religion that we find the key to the evolution of human society. In both the Old and New Testament we are urged to love our neighbour as ourselves, to welcome the stranger, care for the poor, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and temper justice with compassion. Jesus commended self-sacrifice when he said, “take up your cross and follow me”. It is only in a community – or a church-, in which you discover that the other members care for you for Christ’s sake, and that you can learn that caring for others is worth all the effort and inconvenience it causes you – because ultimately it leads to more happiness than always being self-centred and greedy.
Human nature is often something we despair over – but worth remembering that we are all a work in progress… so that sign, “impossibilities done at once, miracles take a little longer”, might just apply to us too? What do you think?