Lent’s Focus is Jesus Because Jesus’ Focus is Your Salvation – Sermon for the 1st Sunday in Lent

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us….” – John 1:14

We begin the reading for today with the famous Old Testament story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his Son Isaac. Just like with Ash Wednesday, if we draw the wrong conclusions from this first lesson, we can drive the season of Lent “off the rails” too.

This is because the point of this story is not how Abraham used His “will power” to make the right choice but how God is faithful & involved in the lives of His people.

In short, God is the focus of the story, not Abraham.

In that regard, the Bible can really be properly understood in one sense as the story of a loving God who is intimately involved in caring for His creation, particularly for His children.

In the OT, He is the One who led His people out of Egypt and then established David’s kingdom.

In the NT, He is the God who raised Jesus from the dead. And, in both testaments God is revealed as the God who acts & is involved in what we call history; in real time & space.

So despite our human pretensions to godliness, it’s not us but the Creator God who’s in control.

We can see this truth validated in the progress of the Gospel. It is an indisputable fact that throughout human history, the preaching of the Christ crucified has had a huge effect not only on individual people but also on the entire range of human institutions, cultures, ideas, & so on.

Indeed, it’s not exaggerating to say that everything we know has been shaped by the Gospel.

It’s also true to say that this has often been not because of the Church but in spite of it.

This is the case because the perpetual temptation the devil puts before us sinners is to follow our religious impulses because he knows we naturally associate Christianity, which is not a religion, with religion. In other words, the devil is always tempting us to make it all about us.

Perhaps the epitome of succumbing to this temptation is to make Lent into a time of self-focus.

Satan wants us to spiritualize, internalize or spatialize the Gospel. Which is why, as Luther once said, God directed the Holy Spirit to create the written Bible. God did this, Luther said, to bring the narrative back to the truth when it starts to go fake because it reveals the God who is temporalized & engaged in the real world of people & events including the Word & sacrament.

In plain terms, that engagement, Luther said, has its focal point in the person of Jesus. All of the Bible & its meaning is to be understood in terms of the Word made flesh & His Gospel.

That being said, we can now see also our Gospel reading for today in its proper focus.

It may seem odd to return again to many of the events of Jesus’ life that we’ve heard about lately: His baptism by John, His temptation by Satan, & the beginning of His public ministry where He proclaims: “Repent & believe the Good News for the Kingdom of God is here!”

But we need to recall that the season of Lent follows immediately after the season of light, Epiphany. This is no error either. The early Church set the calendar that way intentionally.

As John also wrote in his first chapter in v. 10:: “The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.”

In short, Lent is the season that tells the story of how the world rejected the light, preferring darkness instead. Simply put, Lent highlights two things: Our bondage to sin (which leads to death) which has its ultimate manifestation in our crucifixion of Jesus and God’s gracious response in His resurrection of Christ. When we put these two things together, Lent becomes the story of how God refuses to give up on His Creation & humanity despite our sinful rebellion.

This is why we can’t begin Lent by setting Abraham up on a pedestal as a shining example of either a person who made virtuous choices or as having unwavering personal faith either.

There are plenty of examples in the book of Genesis that show Abraham doing exactly the opposite of both. The story of how Abraham lied to King Abimelech about Sarah being his sister in Gen. 20:1-16 and how Abraham doubted God’s promise of a son & subsequently followed Sarah’s bad advice to conceive a son with the servant girl Hagar in Gen. 16-18 come to mind.

In practical terms, we can say that the “fall” into sin, as shown in these acts by Abraham, is the self, as Luther once put it, turning inward upon itself.

The result is a distortion of our love.

We become concerned first with ourselves. We seek to protect the self & seek its welfare to the exclusion of our responsibilities to love God & the neighbor. The most damaging form of this self-love comes, ironically, in the form of religious spirituality which, in its most destructive form, becomes an attempt to keep God off our backs by pushing Him out of the world & our lives.

With this in mind, we can start to see Jesus’ road to the cross more clearly. The God who refuses to stop loving & giving His life to His creation, His people & to you, comes into the world to do & proclaim exactly what humanity claims it wants from God: Fellowship, healing, protection, provision, love, forgiveness, and, most of all, life.

But as John also said in Ch. 1, v.11: “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

The cross is proof of this. Our free wills collectively voted there to preserve ourselves. It was unthinkable that we place our ultimate fate in the promises of a failed carpenter from Nazareth. We put our bets instead on ourselves & our ability to choose rightly; to rely for life on our virtue.

This is sin. The result of it is death. In this case, the death of God’s own beloved son; the One whom we should’ve listened too. This should have sealed our fate but God did something new.

He did something totally unexpected. He did something we sinners, bound up in our own self-serving immortality projects, could not have dreamed of. He did some free-will choosing of His own. He decided not to let our sin & the death it results in have the final say. He chose to vindicate Jesus, because of His determination to do His will, to forgive sinners even if it meant suffering & death on a cross, by raising Him from the dead – to return to us with Words of peace.

What this means for you today is that God is still intimately involved in His creation. Just like He demonstrated in the resurrection of Jesus, His love for you & determination to be with you is even greater than the power of sin & death that we are in bondage to.

Through the cross, He defeated them for the world & for you specifically. In the resurrection, He brings this new reality to you in the form of His kingdom, meaning in the form of His presence in your life.

He first announced His presence to you in your baptism where He declared that the work of Christ crucified was for you & that He therefore claimed you forever as His beloved child. He also gave to you in those waters His Holy Spirit to lead you back here, to His Church, to continue His work of baptism by placing in your ears His Gospel Words that forgive your sin.

And, in His most tangible physical form, He comes to you today in His Holy Communion to unite again His very own body & blood with yours so that you may have His life in abundance.

Lent, therefore my fellow Christian, is you being brought by God’s grace – delivered through Word and sacrament – to a place of repentance & faith. It is a time for you to remember & celebrate the fact that salvation is not a consequence of my decisions or actions but God’s.

It is a time for you, His chosen heir, to hear again the story of Christ; who is the human form of the Word of God’s decision to be loving & faithful to His Creation, His people & to you forever.

Amen.