Sunday: 1st Sunday in Lent
Reading: Mark 1:9-15
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

"You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." When we read that passage last time, on the 11th of January, we were pouring warm water into the font, the light of Christ was jumping from the paschal candle, and the church was rejoicing in the baptism of Helen Ramona. We are in no place to do a baptism today. The sanctified waters have receded into the sand. The flowers, long dead, have given way to these sticks. The organ has gone silent and our familiar familial gathering around the open table has been replaced by a stark orientation towards the emptiness in the East-the emptiness in which God resides. We have been driven out into the wilderness. No baptisms today. Who would want to be baptized under a barbed wire crown of thorns?

One could say that the focus of this sermon should be on the part of the gospel that follows Jesus' baptism, when the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by Satan. I'll let you all make your own connections between our lent and Jesus' forty days. I'm interested in the phrase, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." It keeps confronting us. At the Baptism of Christ, "You are my Son, the beloved." Last week, at the transfiguration, "This is my Son, the Beloved." Today, the First Sunday of Lent, "You are my Son, the Beloved." I like the way it sounds, could it be referring to me, to us? Am I God's beloved? If so, couldn't we do away with all of this penitential lent stuff?

Recently I was having coffee with a gentleman for whom I hold considerable respect. Most of us would probably identify him as a conservative, although honestly he sits at about the center of American Christianity. It being shortly after the flap around which cleric would pray at Obama's inauguration, we were on the topic of Gene Robinson, the first openly Gay bishop in the Anglican communion. My companion criticized Robinson for his frequent use of the phrase "You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased" to refer to himself, other LGBT folk, and by extension all humanity. Here is an example of what Robinson says, "The God I know says to me, just like we hear God saying at Jesus' baptism, that you are my beloved, and in you I am well pleased. That's a very, very different God. Imagine the difference between a parent who loves you for you who are, and one that says I'll only love you if you change." My coffee companion claimed that the phrase about being beloved was aimed at the sinless Jesus and not at the sinful lot that is the rest of us. I think he was wondering how Robinson could so easily dismiss sin and claim that we are well pleasing to God. Is there no room left for sin? Let me tell you, Gene Robinson is right. We are God's beloved. God's love for us is not predicated on a need for change. Even my boy John Calvin would agree with that. He says, "...being reconciled to God through Christ's blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a judge a gracious father." Gene Robinson says that God is "a parent who loves you for who you are" and John Calvin says God is a "gracious father." I am not so foolish as to think that Robinson and Calvin would agree on much, but I do think they are getting to the same point. God loves us because God loves us-full stop. In baptism we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ's own forever, not provisionally held by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ's own until we screw up.

But Robinson overplays his hand-intentionally, I assume, for legitimate pastoral reasons, but still he overplays it. Humanity might be beloved and well pleasing in God's sight, but not in our human reality. Have you read the newspaper recently? The Tribune has an article today about three kids getting shot accidentally when one gang member missed another. Have you considered the records of recent Illinois governors? Not well pleasing. More immediately, we had a couples' workshop yesterday here in this space where we talked about our propensity to criticize and become dismissive and distant. Behind closed doors I am often less than charitable in describing those that rub me the wrong way. And, oh, I covet. I covet Jim's Iphone. There is a dissonance between how we are viewed in God's eyes (as beloved and well pleasing) and how we think and act. The way Calvin explained the difference is by distinguishing between justification and sanctification. God does engage us as "gracious father" but we still need to "cultivate blamelessness and purity of life." Whatever you think of Calvin, it is a helpful distinction.

God does not impose on us the necessity to change but offers a lifetime of opportunities for growth and transformation. One of those opportunities is lent. The church in her wisdom has given us 40 days to take stock, to honestly cultivate blamelessness, to focus on penitence. We haven't said the confession in church throughout the season of epiphany. That was not an oversight-it is because we believe that the overarching reality about God is that God loves us because God love us. But the confession comes back during Lent in a big way (today it took the form of the great litany-remember the part about asking deliverance from evil and mischief, pride, vanity and hypocrisy?) Because God loves me and not so that God will love me, I can confess where I fall short and seek to become the person that God created me to be. In recognizing my weakness, I can seek to make real in my life the blamelessness and pleasure with which God views me.

I encourage you to embrace the barrenness of lent, to allow yourself to look at your dark side, to consider where sloth, worldliness, and love of money corrupt you, where you have become hard of heart, to think about those for whom you have contempt. And then confess and seek new life. For even that which is good is corrupted in us. John Donne put it this way, "O Lord, thou hast set up many candlesticks, and kindled many lamps in me, but I have either blown them out or carried them to guide me in...forbidden ways. Thou hast given me a desire of knowledge, and some means to it, and some possession of it, and I have armed myself with thy weapons against thee." Turn the same lens on your life. Do it with abandon. You have nothing to lose, for God would greet even the most notorious sinner with these words, "You are my beloved, with you I am well-pleased."