Fourth Sunday of Lent Year B 2024
Lent • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 12 viewsOur passages warn us of three mistakes: (1) assuming our nation is God’s people, (2) assuming that God will not judge us, and (3) thinking that judgment is God’s end game. Rather they call us to self-examination and repentance, to humble dependence on on God’s grace and to the realization that our hope is in God’s love, God’s sending his Son to save, and our destruction is in the rejection of his light and our own withdrawal into the darkness of hell.
Notes
Transcript
Title
Title
Repentance Leads to Grace
Outline
Outline
There are three mistakes that we can make about God
There are three mistakes that we can make about God
The first is to assume that our nation is God’s people
The first is to assume that our nation is God’s people
Israel was people-become-a-nation, they were called into covenant with God, and so the covenant people were in fact a nation.
As a nation we were, of course, influenced by European Christendom, but by then it was through the lens of the Enlightenment. Also, no European nation could legitimately claim to be God’s people. Instead, we are a new covenant people who are called out (ecclesia) of all nations as the people of God.
The implications are that the virtue of patriotism/love of country is conditioned in that we seek its good both according to God and for the sake of God. And it is also conditioned by the fact that our true loyalty is to a King and to a people scattered throughout all countries.
It is also clear that the Church has had to rule in some instances due to a vacuum of functioning government, but that when it does so beyond the particular emergency it almost always becomes corrupt, for that is what power and wealth do.
The second mistake we can make is to assume that God will not judge us.
The second mistake we can make is to assume that God will not judge us.
As we saw in 2 Chronicles he did just that with Israel and Judah, two in a long list of nations and empires that had risen and fallen. In the case of Israel and Judah it was destruction for 140 to 70 years, but even then the restoration was as a province rather than an independent nation. Many other peoples and nations were just destroyed, e.g. the Hittites. And the unified Judah was destroyed again in AD 70 and then ultimately in 135, this time without any prophet talking about restoration.
But, turning to the Church, if “princes of Judah, the priests, and the people add[..] treachery to treachery, practicing all the abominations of the nations [in our case the abominations of our culture]” that segment of the Church or even the Church as a whole could “go into exile” or suffer destruction. And while we realize that suffering for the sake of Christ and suffering because of rebellion against Christ will look similar from our perspective, such suffering has happened: think of the Protestant so-called Reformation and the suffering of the Polish Church under Hitler and then Stalin.
It can happen to us or we might suffer when judgment comes to our nation.
The third mistake is to think that judgment is God’s end game.
The third mistake is to think that judgment is God’s end game.
For Israel and Judah there was a Cyrus, but for us Paul puts it better: “God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”
We were in a place of judgment, that is, we were dead, and including us in his chosen people, his ecclesia, God - sheerly because of his mercy - “brought us to life with Christ” and did much more.
God’s plan is mercy, God’s plan is love, God’s plan is salvation. As long as there is the possibility of “believing in the name of the only Son of God” - that is, as long as we are outside of hell - there is hope, not because of us, but because of God.
There are some implications to all this for us to reflect upon
There are some implications to all this for us to reflect upon
First, it calls us to self-examination and repentance. As we saw yesterday, the problem with the Pharisee was that he was thankful for his religious observance (and therefore judgmental of others) rather than repentant before the living God. As long as we are not aware of our humble dependence on the grace of God, we are in danger.
Second, the only real solution to the danger of judgment or destruction, national or ecclesiastical, is deep commitment to Jesus, not a political program or agenda (again, within or without the Church).
God loves the world - destruction is the result of our sin, not God’s desire. God did not send his son to condemn the world - condemnation is the result of our rejection of the Son - but to save or rescue the world. Our destruction, whether temporal or eternal, unless it is suffering for Christ, is not due to God’s failure to enlighten us or his sending us to hell, but rather to our choice of hell because we preferred darkness to light, because we did not want our works revealed so we could repent of them, because we went deeper and deeper into hiding from God, from the light until we were in hell, that is, as far as we could get.
That, my friends, is the basis of the new evangelization as it was the basis of the old evangelization. It is the foundation of the advice the Church gives to politicians (advice, not telling them what to do). It is the hope of the Church that the Church with God wants to make the hope of the USA and every other country of the world. And it is the light we want to shine in the darkness as Western society and much of the world with it sinks into the darkness of its own collapse.