The Third Sunday in Lent '23
A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 12, 2023
The Epistle, Ephesians 5:1-14 - The Gospel, St. Luke 11:14-28
The Rt. Rev’d Stephen C. Scarlett
I. Lenten logic
The Lenten gospels narrate a progression in the conquest of evil. On the First Sunday in Lent, Jesus is revealed in his wilderness temptation as the one who has the power to conquer the devil. On the Second Sunday in Lent, Jesus demonstrated his power to save us from evil by freeing the daughter of a Canaanite woman from demonic harassment. Today’s gospel reveals that exorcism is only half of our change. The departure of evil creates a spiritual vacuum that will be replaced by something. Next week’s gospel, the feeding of the five thousand, points to Jesus, the Bread of Life. The vacuum created by the departing evil must be filled by him.
This process is the essence of our baptism. In baptism, we renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. We professed our faith in Jesus. We were given the gift of the Holy Spirit to fill the spiritual vacuum. However, baptism merely initiates us into this pattern of change. If we do not continue to say no to evil and yes to Jesus, new forms of sin and evil can creep into our lives and take root.
This is a particular danger for religious people. It happens when we focus on the outward forms and doctrine of faith, but neglect what is happening in our interior lives and hearts. The practice of religion can become a cover for various sins. Today’s gospel highlights this point. The people who said the exorcism was performed by the power of the devil were the most religious people in Israel. They are a warning to us.
The illustration of the unclean spirit that returned with seven more wicked spirits is a commentary on Israel’s history. Israel’s initial exorcism took place in the Exodus. When God led Israel out of Egypt, he exorcised the evil from his people and made a covenant to live among them. God’s presence and covenant pointed to the eventual coming of the Messiah. Israel’s yes to Messiah would fulfill her destiny and vocation. Yet, here was Messiah, present to save Israel, and Israel’s leaders were rejecting him in favor of their self-made religion. This would lead to judgment. Thus, the last state of rejecting Jesus was worse than the first state of slavery in Egypt.
II. The religious danger of Lent and its antidote.
This highlights the religious danger of Lent—and the danger of religion in general. We can makes lists of things that we “do” or “give up” for Lent. But if they are not connected to the baptismal pattern of saying no to evil and yes to Jesus, they will become a manmade religion, about which we will feel bad or good depending upon our outward performance.
The presence of Jesus is disruptive. Jesus challenged the religious leaders to repent, but they were unwilling to change. Their religion guarded the status quo, highlighted the sins of others, and made them blind to their own sins. Jesus calls us to repent also. If we “hear his voice” and “harden not” our hearts (Ps. 95), the Holy Spirit will convict us of our unloving and slothful habits. He will uncover our unworthy motives. If we are unwilling to hear his voice and change, we will try to mute his voice and push away his presence by practicing a merely external religion instead.
We avoid this danger through a practice of prayer in which we listen as well as talk. This is why some practice of stillness and silence in prayer is essential. The constant noise of our world drowns out the voice of God. The busy-ness of our world enables to run away from our interior pain and disorder. Our unresolved wounds and sins lead to bitterness, resentment, anger, and guilt. Being still and silent with Christ brings us into an encounter with both Christ and our own internal world. This will not always be comfortable, which is why many people find it hard to do. It is easier to get busy and do some religious thing.
There is another issue that creeps in here. Facing our internal wounds and sins and the emotions associated with them can surface an unhealthy form of shame. This shame results from formative experiences that internalized a message we can call “anti-grace.” This message says, “It is not okay to be you. It is not okay to feel how you feel. It’s not okay to want what you want. It is not okay to be mad or sad about things that made you angry or that you lost.” Thus, when we sit with Christ and our natural and authentic emotions surface, there is impulse to push them away and run from them on account of shame and anti-grace. In a sermon about the conquest of evil, we should be clear about whose voice this is.
To be changed by Jesus requires a new experience of grace to replace the experience of anti-grace. Real grace is a paradoxical experience of embrace and conviction—and it must be experienced in that order. In Christ, God first embraces us exactly as we are, with all of our sin, interior messiness, and mixed motives. As Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” This is what we experience when we come to the altar of God. Jesus receives us and embraces exactly as we are—even if we are trying to avoid ourselves!
However, grace does not stop with the embrace—that would be mere sentimentality. As Christ embraces us and we see God as he is, in all of his love and beauty, we begin to see ourselves as we really are. This awareness of our sin and disorder that comes to us while we are firmly rooted in God’s love is the foundation for growth and change. For some people, the exercise of honest self-examination leads to self-condemnation. Being unable to look at themselves, people get defensive, blaming others, and guarding themselves from the shame that comes from the message of anti-grace.
Real change requires the ability to be self-critical without being self-condemning. This is why we must experience the embrace of God in Christ first, before we experience conviction of sin. In the embrace of God’s love we are free to face ourselves without condemnation. We are free to grow and change. This experience of grace fostered by a community that practices this pattern, embracing each other as we really are, without condemnation, to give each other space and freedom to grow.
As a biblical example, consider the woman caught in adultery in John 8. She was brought before Jesus in public. Her sin was exposed. She could not hide from herself. But what did Jesus say to her in her condition of nakedness? “Neither do I condemn you. Now go and be better.” This is embrace, followed by conviction. I’ve often wondered where the man was—you don’t commit adultery all by yourself! We could say he got away with it. But did he? Perhaps he spent the rest of his life hiding from God in shame, with no experience of grace and no change. The woman who was fully exposed also experienced real grace. This is a model for what happens when we bring our real interior selves to Jesus. This is authentic religion, and it is the antidote for a religion of merely doing things.
III. The epistle and our Lent.
The epistle today exhorts us to “Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and gave Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Eph. 5:2). Walking in love means living in a loving relationship with Jesus—with embrace and conviction as the new pattern for true religion. A good Lenten fast will lead us into a greater experience of this authentic love. As we detach from things, as we practice stillness and silence in prayer, our anxiety and unsettled emotionality will come to the surface. We must learn to bring these things with us into our prayer. As Isaiah 54:4 says, “Do not fear . . . for you will not be put to shame” (Isa. 54:4). And as our epistle says, “All things that are exposed are made manifest by the light . . . Therefore He says: ‘Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light’” (Eph. 5:13-14).
