Homily for
The First Sunday in Lent
Sunday 5 March 2017
The Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
A Parish of the Diocese of Bethlehem and The Episcopal Church
Readings:
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Preaching Series
on the Creed
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I believe in God, the Father
Almighty, creator of heaven and earth…
This past Wednesday we heard in the
Invitation to Lent the reminder that traditionally this season is a time of
preparation for baptism. It is a time
for learning the faith. Given the fact
that at Easter we shall renew our faith in the renewal of the Baptismal Covenant,
I think we would do well at recalling our Baptismal faith. With that in mind, from now through Easter,
we shall be considering the Baptismal Creed, known better to us as the Apostles’
Creed.
Today we consider the first line of
the creed:
I believe
in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
As Christians, we need to be aware
that this one sentence speaks volumes. The
mere fact that we acknowledge our belief in God is radical. There are a growing number of persons among
whom we live who do not believe in the existence of God. Others haven’t even given thought to whether
God is real, for either way is in their opinion irrelevant to their daily life.
For us, the whole of our confession
of faith depends upon those opening words of the creed in which we say “I
believe in God.” We could say this this
one line is the creed itself, and that everything that follows is simply an
explanation to the creed. Everything
that follows speaks to who God is and why God is both relevant to us and
desirable by us.
Earlier I said there are a growing
number of persons who don’t believe in God.
But I want you to recall also that there are plenty of people who do
believe in God. We need to be even more
aware of those who believe in God than those who don’t. For those who don’t, there is no temptation
whatsoever to believe that we as Christians share an understanding in common. That temptation is very real for us, though,
when we consider those who simply believe that God is real.
As Christians, we say far more than
simply that God exists. There are people
who speak of God simply as a force, even as a creative force that is the cause
of creation itself. But for these ones,
God is a thing, something we would call “it” when speaking of such a god. But we believe far more of God than
this. We believe that God is a being and
not a thing, one who longs to be in relationship with us, desires to be
personal with us. We acknowledge this
every time we profess our faith in the creed by speaking of God as our
Father. We speak of God in this way for
no other reason than that Jesus models this for us and teaches us to call God
our father and to believe this to be so.
And this is only one such image that the Scriptures use to speak of a
relational God. Through the prophets,
time and time again God speaks of himself as husband to the people whom he has
taken for himself as a wife. In the
Gospels, Jesus speaks of Jerusalem and laments over the people whom he has
longed to protect as a mother hen protects her young. In the Revelation to St. John, the vision
contains images of Jesus as the bridegroom and the Church as the bride of
Christ. And though it is not in
Scripture, the early church fathers often spoke of Jesus and the Eucharist as a
mother feeding her infant child from her breast.
The fact that we believe in and
cling to this relational God and cherish the God who desires to be in personal
relationship with us then impacts what we mean when we speak of God as the
creator of us and all that exists.
First, we are mindful of the fact
that God created us precisely to call us into relationships marked by
love. God loved us even before creating
us, and created us to show us that love, in the hopes that we might love as we
have first been loved.
From this then we see that
everything else in creation has been intended by God to be a gift given in
love. Creation is not an accident. It is an intentional gift as given from a
parent to a child, from a husband to a wife, from the lover to the beloved.
In these Lenten days, look around
you as the signs of springtime will increase more day by day. All of this is a divine gift given to us by
God who longs to show us daily the depths of the love he bears for us. And the best part is simply this; the best is
yet to come. These Lenten days, indeed
the days of this life, are preparing us for the celebration of the
Resurrection, the very last piece of the Creed that we will ponder on the Feast
of the Resurrection. But this is not the
celebration of the Resurrection for which we are being prepared. It is the celebration that will occur when
the new creation is revealed, the gift of God created in love by a God who
knows we will have a share in this gift not for a time, but forever. If this creation is this lovely, and this filled
with signs of the love of God, what shall that creation be like when it unfolds
before our very eyes.
Father
Timothy
Alleman
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