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Called by God to be Holy
March 5, 2006
1 Lent Year B
Delivered by Reverend Sandra Stayner
Genesis 9:8-17
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-13
I want you to imagine the scene described in Mark's gospel today. The banks of the Jordan River were crowded with people who had left their daily tasks behind and come to hear the preaching of the strange Holy man who lived in the desert eating locusts and honey. They had come because they were afraid - they lived daily under the oppression of foreign rulers. They came because they were no longer sure of their relationship with God. They had wandered away from the paths of righteousness and their souls were thirsty for a lively relationship with the one who had once led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. They were eager to begin a new journey so they came to the holy man, John, to receive the baptism of repentance. And that day as they waited in the water for their turn to come, they saw the young man Jesus standing before his cousin John. Like each of them he was immersed in the waters, filled with mud that had been stirred up by the feet of the people waiting along with him. As he came up out of the waters, the heavens were torn apart and a dove, the sign of God's Spirit descended upon him. Then a voice was heard from the heavens, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." Did they see the dove and hear God's words? Mark doesn't tell us that in his story. But Jesus did. From that moment on he knew without a doubt that he had been marked for an important task, a task that would demand each and every resource he could muster. His ministry was about to begin.
Today, those of us who have already begun our adult journey with God stand with those of you who are about to begin your own journey, to learn what unique gifts each of you have been given for ministry, gifts that will lead you down an unbelievably exciting path if you will allow yourself to be led. Let the words ring in your ears as once they rang in Jesus', "You are my beloved child. In you I am well pleased." God is pleased with you. God loves you as he has always loved you - more than your mother or father, brother sister, or best friends. You have been chosen by God to carry out his work in the world - I don't mean simply by living a squeaky clean life, having a shower every day, speaking politely to your elders, doing as well as you can at school - I mean someone who is now called to stand up against injustice wherever you see it, stand up for your friends in our class, stand with people from minority groups are shunned or laughed at. Each and every one of us is called to be the ambassadors of God's kingdom in this world. Now this might sound like a daunting task except for the fact that all of us who have been baptized are also filled with God's spirit. We are filled with the same power of God that filled Jesus during his time on earth. The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus like a dove. She descends upon us as we come up from the waters of baptism and are sealed with the Holy Spirit. At that time, we are filled with the Ruach or breath of God, the same spirit that moved over the face of the earth at the beginning of time, bringing order out of chaos.
What a wonderful thing it is to catch a glimpse of who we really are in Christ - beloved children of God. Wonderful yet at the same time awesome, for we belong to a holy God, who will not rest until all people have come as one of our collects says, 'within the reach of his saving embrace.'
As Jesus was filled with the spirit of God, the same Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness, "threw him out," the text says, not with a nice polite nudge, but with the same force Jesus would later use to exorcise demons. You see following God is not about finding some nice little niche in suburbia filling it up with anything that pleases us, and turning our backs to the world. To follow Jesus is to be led places we may not of our own volition have chosen for ourselves, to allow ourselves to be driven by the Spirit wherever the Spirit leads. The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness for forty days and nights, to see if he would be able to stand the temptations that would inevitably come against him as he strove to bring God's redemptive power into the world. It was a time of personal formation during which he wrestled with the wild beasts, and as some of the other gospel writers tell us, of wrestling with his own personal desires. It may have been a time for Jesus to come to terms with the call that was placed on his life. In the Hebrew Scriptures the wilderness is always seen as a place of God's call. It was in the wilderness that Moses first encountered God and was told that he was to lead the Israelites out of their bondage to the Egyptians. Once they had escaped from Pharos's hand, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty long years as they were formed into a holy people, set apart for the purposes of God.
Once we have recognized our call to be a part of God's holy people we will probably spend the rest of our lives trying to understand what that call is all about. We are promised that one day we will reach the podium with a gold medal around our neck, but like the athletes we just watched at the Winter Olympics, the road to the top is long and hard. We need to begin our training in earnest, and we probably need to be reminded at fairly regular intervals to keep up the hard work, and not to fall behind.
Lent comes round every year to remind us that we are all in training for God's kingdom. We have not loved God with all our heart and souls and minds. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have offended against God's holy laws, and we are all in need of repentance. I suspect that one of the most damaging things to God's kingdom here on earth is the apathetic attitude of so many of those who are called by his name. Sure we have been redeemed, but are we actively pursuing the way of love we saw demonstrated so powerfully in Jesus' life, as he ministered here on earth? Most of us are in need of a change of heart in our own personal relationships, in the way we treat our spouses, or brothers and sisters, or people around us. We must also be much more deeply engaged in the problems of our society. Did you know that the U.S.A. incarcerates a larger percentage of its population that any other nation in the world? We have a larger percentage of people in prison than Stalin did at the height of his regime. Do we really have that number of criminals on our streets or is there something else going on here? God calls his people to care about those who are in prison, to visit them, to pray for them, to address whatever is causing the need to keep so many people in jail. As people of God we must take up the cry of the poor, and the dispossessed. We cannot allow ourselves to remain distant and unaffected from the obvious inconsistencies in our world.
Lent is a time for each one of us to reflect on the way we live our lives, and to repent of our lack of love. Lent is a season of covenant making, a time for us to renew the promises made at the time of our baptisms. This season will last for forty days and nights at the end of which we will walk the way of the cross with our savior Jesus Christ, before entering into the joy of the resurrection, the promise that love has triumphed over evil and death. But the journey we are on together, to become more perfectly the person we were created to be so as to live out our calling as God's holy people, is one that will take the rest of our lives. We will walk the walk together. We will encourage and forgive, laugh and cry, support and be supported. We will make mistakes but we will always try again. We will fail to be as engaged as we should with the things that concern God, but God willing, we will not lives as hypocrites, as people who say we desire to follow God, but are only concerned for ourselves.
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