This week's sermon, following the last post....

(if you go to Emmanuel, Killingworth, don't read this!)

 

Lent 2, 2022

      Where I come from, in Southern West Virginia, my people (WASP’S through and through) said ‘reckon’ a lot.

      “Think it’s going to rain tomorrow?” you might ask.

      And the answer would be, “I reckon.”

      I asked my wife Bern if her people (Italian-Hungarian-Roman Catholic Americans) ever said ‘reckon’.

      She said she never heard the word until she was in high school with WASP’s!

      In the Old Testament lesson today, God tells Abram (not yet “Abraham”) that his descendants would be ‘more numerous than the stars in the sky.

      Abram believed God and (I quote) “God reckoned it to him as Righteous.”

      “Reckon” has several meanings. Among them are—“to believe something is true or possible” (‘I reckon that we are lost’) and “to calculate sense” (‘they reckoned it to be a mile’) and to “regard or think of as so” (‘I reckon it will rain tomorrow’).

      And God ‘believed it was true’ that Abram was ‘righteous’.

      What do you think God ‘reckons’ about you and me?

      Are we ‘righteous’?

      Who knows, but God?

 

      In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees, who had yet to turn against him, came to tell Jesus that he should leave where he was because Herod wanted to kill him.

      But Jesus says, “Go tell that fox….”

      I love that—go tell that fox.

      Foxes are cunning and dangerous.

      I was once walking my dog, years ago, in a cemetery in Cheshire when a fox suddenly appeared.

      The fox looked and me and at Bela and sat still for a while.

      We stared at each other for what seemed like five minutes. Then the fox thought better and disappeared into the woods.

      Bela looked at me and I looked at him. I shrugged and Bela barked and we went home.

     

      Lent is a time to look at the fox—the Devil, the Tempter.

      We must stare the Tempter down and move on.

      “Temptation” in English, means something that will lead us into sin or evil.

      But the Greek word is “per-i-zine” which means, literally, “to test or to try.”

      It is not a totally negative concept.

      We’ve all passed ‘tests’ and survived ‘trying times’.

      Lent is meant to test and try us, not defeat us.

      Jesus says he wants to gather us “under his wings as a hen gathers her brood under her wings”.

      But we will not be able to do that until we can say, “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

      Lent is the time for us, through prayer and meditation and self-denial to say that.

      “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

      Say it with me:  “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

      We are now under God’s wings.

      Alleluia! Easter is coming! I reckon….