2nd Sunday in Lent

Luke 13:31-34; Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

We have made it to week two of Lent, and so now we are getting to the meaty part of the season.  We are well on our way, but we still have a long way to go.  This is where the rubber begins to hit the road so to speak.  10 days in, our Lenten practices are either starting to become habits or falling by the wayside.  It’s that time when we really want to start seeing results for our activities but they may not be here yet.  Our journey to the cross has really only just begun, but very often we wish the destination would come sooner, that change would come faster.  If only Easter would arrive as quickly as this the sudden change of seasons that came upon us this week, and yet we are still here waiting another month to enjoy our resurrection joy.

And Jesus knows this.  This is not news.  We are not unique in trying to rush the process.  Our Gospel lesson this week reminds us of this simple fact.  It begins with some Pharisees warning Jesus Herod is trying to kill him and urging him to leave off his mission and flee.  But first, let’s take a moment to look around a bit and see where we are.  Jesus in our story today, like us, is right in the middle of a very long winding journey to Jerusalem and the cross.  He set his face toward Jerusalem and announced his intension to go there to be crucified, killed and rise from the dead on the way to the Transfiguration four chapters ago, but it will take him 6 more chapters and many more teachings, confrontations and countless more healings, miracles and exorcisms to get there. And the Pharisees are hardly neutral actors here.  We are also in the middle of a chapters long series of confrontations, debates and theological discussions between Jesus and his disciples and the Pharisees and their disciples.  But it must be said that as much as Jesus and the Pharisees disagree on many of the finer points of theology and proper Jewish practice, there is one thing they definitely hold in common and that is their mutual dislike and fear of the Roman empire and the ever-present hand of its soldiers and lackeys like Herod and his corrupt court.

So the Pharisees come and warn Jesus that Herod wants to kill him.  Which is decidedly convenient for them too because him fleeing, or getting arrested solves their problem with this rogue preacher too.  Fundamentally, the Pharisees wants to force Jesus to make a choice, confront Herod or flee.  They want him working on the world’s timeline, where everything needs to happen right now.  But Jesus isn’t interested in the world’s timeline.  He works on God’s time.  He is unbothered by this whole ordeal and instead proudly declares “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.”  He will not be rushed.  He knows where he his going and what he is called to do and he is willing to wait as long as it takes to get it right and fulfill his purpose.  And he trusts in God’s protection of God’s purpose on God’s timeline.

And so next he rather ludicrously declares “Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must keep on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.”  Which is demonstrably untrue on its face.  His own cousin John the Baptist, a recognized prophet of God and foreteller of his own ministry had only months earlier been executed by Herod himself in Machaerus on the other side of the Jordan and far from Jerusalem.  And those Old Testament prophets who met with grim ends did so all over the place, in fact rarely were they executed in Jerusalem. 

So what is happening here?  In Jesus’s community, Jerusalem is the center of the world, the place where heaven and earth connect, the place God chooses to inhabit, to be in touch with humanity. This is the place Jesus is called to, this is the place Jesus is going, this is where Jesus was born to be and nothing, certainly not Romans, or Pharisees or anything else is capable of disrupting that before its time.  Jesus is working on God’s time and God’s time alone.  And he is absolutely unwilling to be deterred from this task no matter how much resistance he encounters.

And this is an important lesson for us on our Lenten journeys as well.  Because one of the major purposes of Lent and all of our Lenten disciplines is to fix ourselves to God’s time, which is fixed and deliberate, and irritatingly slow at times.  We tend to want to rush to Easter, to rush through the grave to straight to new life, to rush to the end of our current political crisis, to rush to the healing of our ailments, to rush through grief, to rush God’s plan for our lives.  And Lent says ‘today, tomorrow, and the next day I must keep on my path.’  Lent says it’s time to slow down, to count off each one of these 40 days, to be still, to pray, to fast and to strengthen ourselves for the journey to come.

It is a time to focus on God’s promises but also on God’s timing.  Today in our first lesson we heard an important part of Abraham’s story, where God promises Abraham, then still called Abram, descendants as numerous as the stars.  God makes real and visible his covenant with Abraham on this holy night, but it takes years, trials, tribulations, illegitimate children, kidnappings and all manner of other things just to get to Abraham’s son Isaac’s birth, not to mention all that Isaac and then his son Jacob and then his sons and the people of Israel in slavery went through after that.  Yet here we are.  God’s promise stands.  4000 years later, the promise stands in you and me and billions of others.  But happened in God’s time not ours.

And so this Lent we continue to stand in God’s promise.  We walk our 40 days together in this space of already and not yet.  We walk alongside Jesus once again toward the cross knowing that beyond it stands the promise of new life.   Easter joy is coming.  To our churches, to our lives, to our country.  But on God’s time not ours.  And so in the meantime we are called to continue our work alongside Jesus casting out demons and curing the sick, helping the poor and standing up for the vulnerable, welcoming the stranger and praising the Lord for as long as it takes until our Easter comes.  Amen.