Sermon 2.8.26 Spiritual Discernment: Let Me Go There
- standrewcin
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Today, Jesus is talking to us about being salty, about not losing our flavor.
Now, does anyone else think that it’s strange that when we have Jesus telling us to stay salty, that no one ever talks about Lot’s wife from Genesis 19?
Do you remember the story?
They are escaping from Sodom and Gomorrah and they are instructed not to look back.
But Lot’s wife looks back and she turns into a pillar of salt.
So, Jesus tells us not to lose our saltiness, but apparently, there is also a way to be too salty. There are extremes on either side, and neither is wholly good. I’ll come back to this thought in a minute.
We are nine days away from Shrove Tuesday pancakes, which means that we are 10 days away from the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday.
Lent is a time of fasting.
In fact, the reason that we have things like Shrove Tuesday pancakes, like Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), or Carnival, as they call the celebration in other parts of the world, these huge celebrations is because in preparation for the fast of Lent, it was important to get rid of all of the sweets and the meats before the fast.
If you’re not allowed to have those things during Lent, then you better get them out of the house: “Lead me not into temptation.”
Although we don’t necessarily go through our cabinets like that in most American families,
My wife’s Greek family has stories of her great-great grandmother, Panayiota Skunzos, who came over from Greece to help raise her grandchildren.
At the beginning of Lent, she would go over to each family’s house to check their cabinets to make sure they weren’t breaking the rules of fasting.
Our very fastidious Yiayia wanted to make sure as Jesus admonishes in today’s gospel that not one letter, nor one stroke of a letter pass from the law.
On the other hand, the prophet Isaiah asks us if our fasts are really the type of thing that the Lord desires:
This following all of the rules set down year after year.
Doing the things, but not looking for them to change our lives.
He says, “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fightand to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do todaywill not make your voice heard on high.”
In other words, he sees the Hebrew people of his day getting so into the rules and regulations of fasting, so that they can tell each other they’re doing it incorrectly.
Factions of believers setting themselves up as the right way, so that they can tell all the other that they’re wrong.
In Jesus’ day, two of the main factions were the Pharisees and Sadducees, always quarreling about who was right and who was wrong.
We don’t know anything about that today though: people from opposite extremes castigating their neighbor.
And so Isaiah asks the question that God asks:
“Is such the fast that I choose,a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,a day acceptable to the Lord?”
Is the whole point just to make ourselves look good? To make ourselves look humble and lowly before God, but not to let God’s Way get deeper into our hearts?
So again, we have two extremes: the fastidious adherence to the legal requirements of fasting, or a life where being set free from legalism and snooping yiayias, we disregard the merits of having set standards of behavior.
What I want to suggest to you today, as we look toward those days that will bring us once more to the foot of the cross, is that we need a sense of balance between extremes.
Now let me be really clear.
By balance, I don’t mean complacency.
I don’t mean unreflectively standing in the middle, or taking no stand.
There are things that we can and must call out.
There is no place for racism in our personal or national discourse.
We should not accept one president tweeting vile images of another president. The fact that we have to say that out loud is just wild.
We cannot and should not accept anti-semitism or islamophobia, or dehumanization in any form.
That is not what I mean when I speak of balance: ignoring extremes as if they don’t exist, or we can’t say anything about them.
To have balance means to weigh the extremes and to hold them in tension, so that we can discern the right path forward that denies extremism its power.
The Apostle Paul, speaking to one of the earliest Christian congregations in the world at Corinth tells them that their power lies in having the “mind of Christ:” in their spiritual discernment.
Our fast days that are quickly approaching, the season where we give things up, or take on a discipline to bring us in closer communion with God, just like our whole life,
Is a time of spiritual discernment.
What is God calling me to?
What does it look like to do God’s will at this moment in my life?
How do I become a better follower, a better disciple of Jesus?
Where can I put myself “out there,” out on a limb, out of my comfort zone?
In his poem The Coming, R.S. Thomas explores Jesus’ own discernment before He entered the world to become our savior.
In an imagined conversation between two of the persons of the Holy Trinity, God and Jesus are discussing the earth, which God had created.
It is an earth that is hungry for the return of Spring, and a people that are thirsting for the redemption of God.
The poem is not sad, but it has a melancholy to it, because it points to a world that was already preparing the tree that would become Jesus’ cross before he entered the earth, and Jesus comes down anyway.
It goes like this:
“And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The Sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.”
Jesus looked at our world of extremes, at scorched land at serpent rivers.
He sees the bare tree still growing that will become his cross.
He sees people reaching out for a world that is better to the tree that will bear their salvation.
He knows the risk, he discerns the need that stands there,
And he says, “let me go there.”
In world of extremes, spiritual discernment, having the mind of Christ, is to know that there are risks, but to “go there.”
It is to seek that which “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor human heart conceived.”
You are in a particular place with particular gifts.
The wisdom of the world will tell you to stay comfortable, avoid risk.
The Spirit of God is calling you today to use your gifts, to find out what your deeper purpose is and to go there.
To do anything else is to be salt that gets trampled underfoot.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I was placed here on this earth to be unflavored salt underneath somebody’s foot.
St. Andrew’s as we look toward the coming of a Holy Lent, I call us into a time of spiritual discernment.
How can you go deeper this Lent?
How can you choose the fast that God chooses?
How can you develop the mind of Christ that already dwells within you?
I don’t have a ready-made answer for you.
But, I invite you to enter the journey anew as we set our sights toward Jerusalem.
Amen.
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