Pope John Paul's recent journey to the Holy Land raised again the vexing question of relations between Christians and Jews. It seems that the pope is trying to make it clear that it is not right for Christians to hate Jews or to look down upon Jews in any way or to join in persecuting them

. Though I am not a Roman Catholic, I applaud what the pope has done in that area. Hating Jews and hanging onto demeaning stereotypes about Jews is wrong. It is not a particularly good idea to hate anybody, of course, but it is especially absurd for Christians to line up against Jews.

We worship the Jewish God. We read the Hebrew Bible. Our Saviour is the Messiah of Israel. Our most brilliant teacher says that the Jews are going to be in heaven right along with us righteous Christians whether we like it or not.

In the past, a certain amount of anti-Semitic feeling among Christians has been rationalized by referring to the gospel stories of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Good Friday. The Jewish leaders wanted Jesus dead, and they manipulated both the Romans and their own people to make it happen. One of his Jewish disciples sold him out for thirty pieces of silver.

The same Jews who cheered him on Palm Sunday damned him on Good Friday. Their shouts of "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who Comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the Highest" on Sunday had tuned into "Let him be crucified, his blood be on us and on our children" five days later.

It is very convenient to blame the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus — and blaming them has obvious and substantial scriptural support. Annas and Caiphas and Judas Iscariot were indeed not Scotsmen, or Pennsylvania Dutchmen, or Welshmen, or African-Americans, and they were certainly not Englishmen. They were undoubtedly and unmistakably Jews. The Jews killed Christ. So let's all hate the Jews.

On Good Friday, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked the contemptuous question, "Am I a Jew?" Am I a Jew? To blame the Jews for the crucifixion is to say, "I am not a Jew. If I had been there on that Friday morning in Jerusalem a couple of millennia also, I would not have gone along with what the Jews were doing. If I had cheered for him on Sunday I would have cheered for him again on Friday. Am I a Jew?"

As a matter of fact, yes you are a Jew. Every Christian is a Jew, because he becomes an honorary member of God's chosen people through baptism into Jesus Christ. You are also a Jew in the more negative sense that the Holy Week story does indeed display.

The Jews didn't kill Jesus just because they were Jews, the Jews killed Jesus because they were human beings. They were showing the human attributes of resentment and disappointment. Jesus didn't do what they wanted him to do. They wanted him to raise an army and fight the Romans, but he said his kingdom was not of this world.

The Jews of Holy Week were showing the human attributes of hatred and revenge, "He let us down. He didn't run the world the way he should have. Let's kill him, let's not believe in him any more. Let's not go to his church."

They were showing how easily human beings are led when they have lost their heads to revenge and resentment. "Our leaders say we have to get him, so let's get him. Sure he answered some prayers and did some miracles and gave us some great Bible lessons -- but what has he done for us lately? He deserves to die."

To read the story of Holy Week and to come out exonerating oneself and blaming the Jews is to miss the point entirely and to fall headlong into the mote and beam problem. One of the besetting sins of human beings is that we condemn in other people the shortcomings we cannot face in ourselves.

If there is something within us with which we have a hard time dealing, we notice it in other people and then judge them and hate them for it. Jesus asks, "Why do you notice the mote — the speck of dust in your brother's eye, when you cannot perceive the beam -- the log -- in your own eye?"

If you find yourself particularly aggravated and moved to righteous indignation by what you consider a horrible sin or shortcoming in another person, that is a signal to you that you may not be dealing properly with that same sin or shortcoming in yourself. That doesn't mean you are necessarily wrong about the other person; just that you need to look inside yourself first. Yes the Jews killed Jesus, but the fact is what made them do it would have made me do it too if I had had the chance.

Jesus says, "Deal with your own logs, before you presume to judge the specks of others." The only proper reaction to the painful stories we hear on Palm Sunday is "If I had been there, I'd have cheered him on Sunday, just like everybody else. If I had been there, I'd have damned him and called for his execution on Friday, just like everybody else. And he would forgive me for it, just as he forgives everybody else." That is why he has to die.

The Collect: ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility; Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Phillipians 2:5-11

The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:1-54.

The Lenten Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are pentitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The word "passion," as in 'Passion Sunday," means endurance, going through, putting up with, suffering. Today we begin a process that will take us through next Sunday and then on to the following Friday, Good Friday. Passiontide is when we think about Jesus' suffering — how "for us men and for our salvation... (he) was crucified, ..under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried."

Jesus' suffering was not an abstract matter. He suffered because he committed what was a capital crime under Jewish law. He suffered because the Jews were able to convince the Roman occupying government to do what they themselves were not allowed to do -- to execute capital punishment upon Jesus as retribution for his crime.

This morning's gospel provides the evidence of the crime of blasphemy. Jesus uttered the personal name of God, which was against the law, and he applied God's name to himself, which compounded the offense.

There is a sense in which this crime merely provided a convenient pretext for getting rid of Jesus, who had antagonized the Jewish leadership in a number of other ways. They believed he was guilty of many things. The blasphemy was one they thought they could pin on him for sure.

To understand what is going on, we must take a trip back to the Garden of Eden, and then stop off at the Mount of Horeb. In the garden, we discover that God places a great emphasis on the names of things. He shows he has given Adam the power to rule over creation when he lets Adam give the animals their names. The power to name is the power to rule. To know a name is to exercise a measure of control.

Mount Horeb is where Moses was tending sheep during his exile from Egypt. God spoke to him out of a bush which burned but did not burn up. God told Moses that he was the God of Israel's forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He wanted Moses to be the means of his rescuing Israel from their slavery to Pharaoh and leading them to the Promised Land.

Moses was in no hurry to do all that, so he tried to stall God off by saying, "The people of Israel will ask me your name. What do you want me to say?" God replied, "I AM THAT I AM," "Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel; 'I AM hath sent me unto you."

God's personal name is "I am." "I am" in Hebrew is probably pronounced "Yahweh," or, more popularly but less likely, "Jehovah." The name tells us that God's basic nature is that he is — he exists he was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. I am that I am. I shall have been what I shall have been.

In today's gospel Jesus continues to argue with his Jewish opponents — quite nastily in this passage. He says they are not of God. They say he is a Samaritan bastard and that he is possessed by a devil. He says if someone pays attention to what he tells him he will never die. They ask him who he thinks he is if he is pretending to be greater than Abraham or the prophets. He tells them they are liars.

Jesus furthers the provocation by saying, "Your ancestor Abraham knows me, and he's glad about it." Abraham had lived about as long before Jesus as Jesus lived on earth before us. So the Jews say, "You aren't even fifty years old. How can you say you know Abraham?" Jesus replies, "Before Abraham was, I am." The Jews pick up stones to throw at him to punish him for this capital blasphemy, but Jesus gets away.

The evidence that Jesus said God's name and then applied it to himself supports the charge of blasphemy. Some time later he goes even farther, saying publicly to the Jews, "I and my Father are one," and privately to his disciples, "He who has seen me has seen the Father."

So now we know the specific grounds on which the Jews convicted Jesus. He broke the law against uttering the divine name, and he boasted of a characteristic which belongs only to God: living forever, having been alive long enough to know Abraham. As a crowd member yelled at him, "You are only a man, but you are trying to make yourself God."

Christians know that the claims the Jews found blasphemous are, in fact, true, Jesus is God. He knows Abraham. He is one with the Father. He is the way the Father shows himself to us. The Christian religion hangs upon the idea that Jesus is God who has become a human being to reconcile God to man and man to God in his own body.

Jesus accomplishes the reconciliation in his passion, by dying on the cross. He had to get onto the cross somehow, and the charge of blasphemy is what made it happen. Today's epistle calls Jesus a priest. He is a priest, because a priest offers sacrifices, and Jesus sacrificed himself.

God the Father's name is Yahweh. God the Son's name is Jesus. The name Jesus means "Yahweh is salvation." The archangel Gabriel told St. Joseph, "Thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins."

He saves us from our sins because he dies to forgive them and promises to take us to heaven despite them. In his passion is our salvation. In his death is our life, "At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow."

The Collect: We beseech thee, Almighty God, mercifully to look upon thy people; that by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore, both in body and soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

The Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15

The Gospel: St. John 8:46-59.

"Jerusalem, my happy home, when shall I come to thee?" The person who composed that hymn was not referring to the problematical, largely Arab city in the state of Israel that the pope just visited. The hymn is talking about heaven, and it is meditating upon how nice it is going to be to be in heaven, and how interesting it is going to be to see so many famous people from the Bible up there.

But. the hymn calls heaven "Jerusalem." The New Testament's identification of Jerusalem with heaven begins with today's epistle selection from St. Paul's letter to Galatians. It reaches its consummation in St. John's description of the end of all things in the book of Revelation: "I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."

One of the large, overarching themes of the Bible is the movement of God's people from the country to the city. Mankind starts off with Adam and Eve in a. garden, but the final destiny of mankind lies in the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem.

Israel was a nomadic people, and their national identity was forged as they wandered in the wilderness for forty years. But King David conquered the heathen city of Jerusalem in the eleventh century B.C., and he made it his political and military capital. When King Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem as a place for God to live, Israel had finally settled down with permanent central institutions in a city which focussed their collective attention.

Earthly Jerusalem's New Testament importance comes, quite obviously, from the fact that Jesus died and rose again and ascended into heaven there. He goes to Jerusalem to die for Old Testament reasons. Jesus tells his disciples, "It cannot be that a prophet perish outside Jerusalem."

In this morning's epistle, St. Paul builds a large and imposing structure on a story from the Old Testament book of Genesis. What he has to say about the contrast between Jerusalem on earth and Jerusalem in heaven is part of the structure.

His overall intention in Galatians is to address the question, "How can I get into a proper relationship with God?" St. Paul says that we have two basic choices: either we can try to earn the relationship by our own efforts; or we can accept what God has done for us in Christ.

We can either act as though the sure road to salvation is through impressing God with our many admirable accomplishments and our general wonderfulness, or we can accept the fact that we cannot please God by anything we do.

We can either proclaim, "I am good" or, at the very least "I'm not so bad." Or we can say, "I'm not much good at all, but Jesus died for me." We can continue to try to assert our own control over the situation, or we can relax in the confidence that God can run the universe better than we can, so the best. we can do is either cooperate or just get out of his way.

In Genesis, God tells Abraham that he is going to have many descendants. His wife Sarah is long past the age of childbearing, so they laugh, and then they decide to help God out. Since they are certain that God can't possibly mean that Abraham's child is going to come from Sarah, they agree to let Abraham try to impregnate Sarah's slave girl Hagar. A child born of that union would be as legitimate as a child born to Abraham and Sarah.

Hagar has a son named Ishmael. Sarah gets jealous. God insists that the son through whom Abraham is going to have all the descendants be through Sarah. Abraham and Sarah conceive a son Isaac. Ishmael picks on Isaac, and, at Sarah's behest, Abraham throws Hagar and Ishmael out of the household.

St. Paul sees this story first of all as an object lesson about why it is better just to go along with whatever God says. He takes off from there to use the story to reflect the contrast between the law and the gospel, between bondage and freedom, between contracts and promises, between false motherhood and true motherhood, between the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem, between the flesh and the spirit, and between the covenant with Moses at Mount Sinai and the covenant in Jesus' blood.

That is a lot to wring out of one soap opera-like episode. But his simplest point is the clearest, God knows what he is doing. Don't complicate it. Just accept it. God saved us and forgave us and promised us a ticket to the heavenly Jerusalem when Jesus died on the cross. Don't complicate it. Just accept it.

In today's gospel, Jesus feeds five thousand people with five dinner rolls and two fish. He takes a little bit and turns it into a lot just as he did when Abraham and Hagar produced all the Arabs and then Abraham and Sarah produced all the Jews.

Later on, just as he did in the feeding miracle, Jesus will take and bless and break and pass out some other bread. He will hold up that bread to his disciples and say, "This is my body. Do this in remembrance of me." We take him at his word. Don't complicate it. Just accept it. Like his Father, he knows what he is doing.

The Collect: Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

The Epistle:  Galatians 4: 21

The Gospel:  St. John 6: 1

There is vague exorcism-like language in the Prayer Book's baptism and healing services and in the prayers I use when I bless someone's house. I have performed what are more like full-bore exorcisms only three times in my years as a priest — about once a decade on average, and only one of them was in California.

That doesn't mean I don't take the devil seriously. St. Paul says we are in constant battle with devils, and I know he's right. The devil wants to cause trouble — he wants to divide people, to get us fighting with one another over anything that will keep the pot stirred, and to do what he can to keep people from their simple and ordinary Christian duties of coming to church, reading their Bibles, praying, and giving money away.

If you find yourself strangely prevented from doing any of those things, you should recognize who has hold of you. As St. Paul puts it, "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities (and) powers." We can win the wrestling match if we arm ourselves with Christ, but if we become overconfident in our ability to resist we shall wind up worse off than we were when we started.

The woman who addresses Jesus at the end of today's lesson is a particular favorite of mine. After the exorcism prompts Jesus to do some teaching about the demonic, she pipes up with, "Your mother must be so proud to have a son like you." She sounds at first like a typical, polite, nice religious lady — saying nice things to the nice holy man and throwing in a good word about his dear old mom.

But the fact is that she has interrupted him and changed the subject. Anybody who has ever attended any sort of religious education class knows that similar things happen all the time. Either someone craves attention and tries to take over the class with constant chatter, or the subject under discussion becomes so personally threatening that someone tries to move the conversation onto safer ground. The woman displays the boring, everyday power of the demonic even more dramatically than the dumb man did.

The devil has been clever in creating the idea that he does most of his work in a red suit and behind puffs of smoke. That throws us off his scent that we might also detect in two other sorts of people.

One actively demonic sort of person is always looking for other people's points of vulnerability and weakness. He figures out what those points are and then sticks his knife into them whenever it is possible. When people are being attacked at their weakest points, we know the devil is loose.

A more passive, but no less demonic, person is the one who sees trouble all around him in the lives of people with whom he lives and deals, but sees no connection between himself and the trouble. That sort of person says, rather constantly, "How can there be all these messes around me when I act only from the purest and most selfless motives?" An overwhelming lack of self-insight or of any idea of how one affects the people around one is again a sure sign that the devil is loose.

After Jesus performs his exorcism, the crowd is divided between those who accuse him illogically of using demonic power to cast out demons and those who, as St. Luke says. "sought of him a sign from heaven." Making a dumb man speak was amusing, but what have you done for us lately?

Jesus' response to the demand for a sign does not come until after today's selection ends. When he is done fending off the interrupting woman, he says, "This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it but the sign of Jonah the prophet. For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so shall also the son of man be to this generation." (St. Luke 11:29-30.)

He is referring to the fact that God sent Jonah to the pagan city of Nineveh to tell the people there to repent and they repented. Heathens repented at the preaching of Jonah, so why don't Jews repent at the preaching of Jesus when Jesus is greater than Jonah? A good question.

The most powerful defense we have against the devil and demonic power is repentance' — 'turning around — admitting our sins and stopping, and claiming the forgiveness that comes from the cross. The devil would like us to think there is no such thing as sin. If we insist upon believing that sin does exist, he wants us to persist in our sins and rationalize them and learn to recognize sin primarily in other people.

Eve told God, rather lamely, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." The devil works mainly through guile and deception. So St. John writes, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

The Collect: We beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants, and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty, to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

The Epistle: Ephesians 5: 1

The Gospel: St. Luke 11: 14

Why should we want to get "closer to Christ?" He is the source of everything good about existence, that's why. We live by his power, and we make it through life far better if we seek his help. We have three basic ways of getting at him. They are the Bible, the sacrament of his Body and Blood, and praying.

First, you've heard enough from me to know how important I think the Bible is. The remarkable attendance at our classes here shows that most of you agree. Second, there is no way to get closer to Christ than the actual act of eating his Body and drinking his Blood at the altar.

He says himself, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you do not have eternal life in you." The candle shines in the chancel to remind us that he is here in sacramental form in the consecrated wafers we store in the tabernacle -- the box on the altar. God is everywhere, to be sure, but he is especially present in the elements of Holy Communion. "This is my body."

It is prayer as a means of getting closer to Jesus on which I want to focus this morning, because prayer is the issue today's gospel raises. Jesus is traveling north of where he grew up when a. heathen woman approaches him and asks him to cast a devil out of her daughter.

Jesus ignores her, and the disciples beg him to tell her to get lost. He seems to agree with them as he replies, "I have been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel" -- that is, I am here for the Jews, not for Gentiles like her." She tries again and says quite directly, "Lord, help me."

He spits back, "It isn't right to take what belongs to the children (that is, the Jews) and give it to a gentile dog (rhymes with witch) like you." She is right back in his face with, "That may be true, but even dogs get to eat the scraps that fall off the dinner table onto the floor." Jesus replies, "Touché -- you. can have what you want."

As far as the overall message of the gospels goes, this story makes the point that the ministry of Jesus the Son of David is to Gentiles as well as to Jews. The woman in the story is one of the few Gentiles with whom Jesus deals directly. But the apostles -- especially St. Paul -- will extend his work to Gentiles after Jesus goes back to heaven. We should be grateful.

But the story is also hilarious. Nobody stands his ground with Jesus in a more determined fashion than this otherwise unknown Gentile woman. She won't take no for an answer. She is so confident that Jesus is going to do what she wants him to do that she endures the cold shoulder and the active insults and slights and just keeps on keeping on until she prevails.

And so, weirdly enough, we see that it is indeed a story about prayer -- about how to get closer to Jesus. There is implicit advice here which he makes explicit in other places. If the prayer you are talking about is the kind of prayer in which you are asking God for something, you have to be persistent -- you have to keep after him -- you have to nag -- little as I like to see nagging held up as an admirable form of behavior.

But asking for things is not the only kind of prayer there is. Prayer is, at the most general level, talking with God, keeping in touch with God through Christ. St. Paul tells us to pray without ceasing -- and he doesn't mean to spend all your time rattling off the shopping list of things you want God to do for you.

We all have relationships which mean something to us. We know that the relationships have to be cultivated -- we have to see the other person, call to say hello, get together even when there is nothing in particular we want. Our relationship with Jesus needs to be like that. And if we are not keeping in touch on a regular basis, it will be harder to connect with him when some sort of crunch or crisis comes along.

I'd like to make a special pitch here for the book that (other than the Prayer Book and the Bible, of course) has done the most for my own prayer life. It is called, variously, The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim's Tale. It is the story of a nineteenth-century Russian peasant who hears St. Paul's words "Pray without ceasing" and sets out to find out how to do it.

The technique the peasant learns involves repeating the phrase, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner" over and over again. By a mystical work of the Spirit, that prayer descends eventually from the mind and lips into the heart. One realizes then that the prayer is going in one's heart all the time. I have recommended that book and its prayer technique to any people, and I can look around this church and see people whose lives have been changed by it.

So if you want to get closer to Christ, one very good way to do it is to read The Way of a Pilgrim and give its profound advice a try. You will find that it is far more than just another crumb that fell off the table.

The Collect: Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8

The Gospel: St. Matthew 15:21-28

One of the tremendous values of a religious point of view is that it gives you a way to interpret the facts of your existence. It gives you a frame of reference — a context into which everything fits. The point of view Christianity offers goes something like this: you can understand everything that happens in your life in terms of the plans and purposes of a loving father. The loving father gives us guidelines about how we should behave. We are free to cooperate with him or not, as we choose.

When we find that we are not living up to the guidelines and not cooperating with the overall plan, we can get back on track just by asking him to forgive us and take us back. He will always forgive us and take us back. He loves us, that's why.

This morning's gospel brings us to the very deepest roots of the Bible's explanation of what human existence is all about. One of the central points of the Bible is that if you want to know who God is and how he operates in your life, the best place to start looking for the explanation is in the history of Israel, his chosen people.

God reveals himself to Israel in the things that happen to them. He is in the facts. The Old Testament gives us the facts about what happened to Israel, and it also gives us interpretation — spin, if you will an explanation of what the facts mean. We see pattern and meaning in Israel's history, and that helps us see the pattern and meaning in our own histories — in the facts of our own lives.

One of the central events of Israel's history was their forty years of wandering. It took them forty years after God led them out of slavery in Egypt to get themselves to the land of Canaan --Israel-- the territory God promised to Abraham. If they had set out to get from Egypt to Canaan as fast as possible it would have taken them weeks, rather than years.

The first great interpreter of God's activity is Moses. The Book of Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Old Testament. Among other things, Deuteronomy gives us Moses' explanation and interpretation of what the forty years of wandering were all about and why it took so long.

Moses tells the Israelites, "The Lord your God led you on this long journey through the desert these past forty years, sending hardships to test you, so that he might know what you intended to do and whether you would obey his commands." That is, God's purpose in the wandering was to send hardships and then find out how Israel would deal with them whether they would remain faithful to him or not.

The story St. Matthew tells us in today's gospel is intended to show us that God put Jesus through exactly what he put Israel through. They took forty years, he had forty days, but who's counting? His hardships come through three tests the devil gives him. Jesus responds to each of the tests by quoting a verse from the Old Testament.

If you go to the Old Testament and look up what Jesus says, you discover that all three quotations come from Deuteronomy. In each of the three Deuteronomy quotations Moses refers to specific hardships God sent Israel during their wanderings — hardships with which they did not deal well.

Well, so what? The point of this is that God's purpose in our lives is the same as his purpose in Israel's wanderings. He sends hardships to test us to see how we will react and whether we will keep on trusting him.

Jesus is believable as the Messiah of Israel, because he experienced what they experienced. Jesus is believable as man as well as God, because he has the same experience we have. Hebrews reassures us, "(He) was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."

Israel did not remain faithful to God at all. Every time a hardship came along they fell apart and asked what God could possibly be up to. Their reaction should sound familiar to us, because we act just as they did.

Seeing this testing through Jesus provides us with at least two insights. First of all, he died to forgive us. We don't have to be afraid to look at the fact that life brings us hardships and tests, and we don't have to despair that we don't always react to them with confidence and trust.

God is not trying to catch us out so he can keep us out of heaven. Instead of being tests we dare not fail, we learn to see that the hardships build our character and our resolve and bring us closer to Jesus.

Second, we are in him and he is in us. We can't endure the hardships on our own and remain faithful. We can't resist the temptations ourselves mainly because we don't really want to. We can't interpret what is going on in our lives by ourselves. We need help. He'll give it to us if we want it.

So the forty years and the forty days give us another way of looking at our lives — and another interpretation of the facts — another insight into what God is doing in the things that are going on. He is sending hardships to test us to find out what we will do. The big question in Lent is — "So, what are you going to do?"

The Collect: O Lord, who for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights; Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness, and true holiness, to thy honour and glory, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 6:1-10

The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:1-11

Today he says to his disciples, "Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted upon; and they shall scourge him and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again."

Another image of Lent is what we shall hear about in next Sunday's gospel: Jesus' forty days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness. That mirrors Israel's forty years of wandering and being tested, and it reminds us that our own lives are full of testings and temptations.

So we are to walk up the hill with Jesus toward his humiliation, his execution and his resurrection. We are given forty days in which to do it, days in which we are to be particularly aware of how God tests us in this life, and how the devil tempts us away from God.

Those duties should lead us to ask, "What should I do for Lent?" The answer is three-fold. First, you should do whatever will bring you into closer contact with Christ, and what will help you to understand and share more deeply in the great events of the end of his earthly life. Second, you should look inside yourself to figure out how God is testing you and how the devil is tempting you. Then take positive action to make you rely upon God more to help you pass the tests and resist the temptations.

Third, and finally, you should keep in mind that the main point of Christian discipline — Lenten or otherwise — is to increase charity, as St. Paul points out in today's epistle. Charity means acting at all times for the good of the other person — putting his needs ahead of your own, acting as Jesus always acted.

St. Paul says, "If I pray like an angel, and it doesn't help me have more charity, I might as well be banging a gong! I can give clever sermons and offer brilliant arguments in favor of Christianity, and see God's purposes clearly, and have so much confidence in God that I can make mountains jump into the ocean — if I'm that much of a spiritual star, but I don't love my neighbor, it all adds up to nothing. And even if I actually go beyond tithing, and give it all away, and throw myself into the fire for God — if I don't put my neighbor ahead of myself, I may as well not have bothered with any of it."

The Prayer Book tells us to start on the path to greater charity by cutting back. The idea is the less attached we are to feeding our faces, the easier it will be to do good for others. So the Prayer Book tells us to eat nothing at all on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and to practice abstinence on the forty days of Lent (Sundays are always excepted).

It is clear that the first thing we should do is to cut back on our intake of food and drink. Some people will find it easier to give up a specific item or category, others will find a general overall reduction more helpful.

There is not any way to get closer to Jesus or to understand God's purposes in your life better if you don't come to church every Sunday (and also on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) and then pray and read your Bible every day. Church attendance, prayer, and Bible reading are essential. If you find those enterprises uninviting, maybe you should think about whether you have any real Christian commitment at all.

If this is the year you want finally to get serious about all this, I recommend a limited start. At the same time every day mornings being far better than evenings -- say the Lord's Prayer slowly; bring to your mind and then lay before God all of your concerns about the day ahead; and then read a psalm, slowly. The next day do all the same things, and also ask yourself what God did about what you prayed about yesterday.

If you get going that way, you can add more as you go along. It is extremely important to start with something you can manage so you don't give up right away. Coming to our Bible classes Sundays and/or Wednesdays and feeling free to ask whatever questions you have will help. I'm happy to talk with you privately about any of this any time.

I trust we can spend the forty days of Lent together walking with Jesus up the hill to his death and resurrection. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Or at least I hope so.

The Collect: O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth; Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43

We find Jesus' most famous parables the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican — only in St. Luke's gospel. I don't have much of a clue as to why that is true, and neither does anybody else. We know St. Luke was not one of the original disciples, but he did know St. Paul later on, and we suppose that he also knew the Virgin Mary because he is the only gospel writer who tells us about some things only she could have told him.

Whatever the reason for all that is, today's gospel lesson is the first parable Jesus tells in St. Luke's gospel. It is also one of the few Jesus explains -- like the parable of the wheat and the tares which we heard a couple of weeks ago. And like the parable of the wheat and the tares, today's parable of the sower is not one of the more difficult ones. We might well wish Jesus had saved his explanations for parables whose meaning is not quite so obvious.

But his explaining the easier parables reminds us that the main purpose of the parables is not to teach but to separate — to be a way of finding out who gets it about God and who does not. Today, between telling the parable and explaining it, he quotes from the Old Testament book of the prophet Isaiah: "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand."

That is a paraphrase of how God described Isaiah's mission as a prophet to him. He was going to go out and preach; nobody was going to pay enough attention to what he said for them to understand it; and that would reveal how faithless God's chosen people had become. Isaiah had a depressing and dreary assignment from God.

Today's parable is about a man who sows seed which falls onto four different types of ground. The first three types of ground are not receptive to the seed for one reason or another, but the fourth is good, it responds to the seed, and it yields a great deal of fruit.

Jesus says that the seed is God's word. The seed that falls by the wayside stands for the people who hear, but then the devil takes the message out of their hearts. The seeds that fall on rocky ground represent people who are receptive to the word as long as things go well for them, but who fall away when their faith is tested in any way. The seeds that fall among thorns represent people who hear the word, but who can never make a real commitment, because money and pleasure and other concerns conspire to make them drift away.

Our natural inclination is to identify ourselves with the good ground into which the seed falls and then produces lots of fruit. But the truth is that we represent all four types of ground at various points in our lives. Sometimes we are indeed receptive, and the word of God takes root in us and flourishes. Other times we let other things get in the way of coming to church every Sunday, and praying and reading the Bible regularly. Other times we question God and rail at him when things don't go our way. Still other times we open ourselves up to pure disobedience and evil.

Right now we should be looking toward Lent, borrowing from the parable, as the time to cultivate our hearts. We want to get rid of the rocks and the thorns, so we can be receptive and good ground, so God's word can take root in us so we can do what pleases him more and more.

Just before Jesus tells this parable, St. Luke tells the story of a person who is the supreme example of what God wants a Christian to be. She is the incarnation of what good and receptive ground looks like in real life.

Jesus is at dinner at the house of a Pharisee — a righteous man. A woman in the town who was no better than she should be hears that Jesus is there. She comes to the house, cries, wipes his feet with her tears, dries his feet with her hair, kisses them, and then pours expensive perfume on them — quite a remarkable and extravagant display.

The Pharisee thinks to himself, "If Jesus were really the prophet and holy man everybody says he is, he would know that this woman is a tramp, and he wouldn't let her touch him."

Jesus has a pretty good idea of what the Pharisee is thinking, so he says to him, "Let me tell you a story. Two men each owed money to a third man, One owed him five hundred dollars, and the other owed him fifty. Neither of them had enough money to pay, so he cancelled both debts. Which one of them do you think will love him more?"

The Pharisee replies, "I guess the one who owed him more," Jesus says, "That's exactly right. I came to your house, but you didn't wash my feet, or kiss me, or give me oil to cool myself off. She has done all of those things, and she has done them out of love."

"Her tremendous display of love reveals that her tremendous number of sins have been forgiven. Someone who thinks he doesn't have much for which to be forgiven will love relatively little."

So if you really want to be good ground, the thing you need to do is cultivate yourself to be like her -- examine your conscience, assess what you are really like, ask God for forgiveness, and he will give it to you. "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little."

The Collect: O Lord God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do; Mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 11:19-31

The Gospel: St. Luke 8: 4-15

Today's lessons appear to make points that contradict each other, and that always makes for an interesting meditation. The epistle seems to be telling us that Christians have to be highly disciplined and need to keep at their discipline all the time or they run the risk of being lost. The gospel, on the other hand, suggests that it doesn't matter much when you decide to pull yourself together. God will take you in at the end the same way he will take you in at the beginning.

St. Paul is writing to his problematic church in Corinth, and he is trying to persuade them to take him seriously. In chapter nine of his first letter to them he goes on for awhile about why clergymen should be paid for what they do, and then he turns around and says he won't take any money from them.

Then he describes his own strategy for dealing with people, which he summarizes in the familiar phrase "all things to all men." We normally use that phrase negatively to describe someone who has no fixed principles and is willing to compromise anything to get people on his side. St. Paul uses it positively, as a way of describing how one has to meet everyone at his own level to be able to communicate the gospel to him.

Then comes today's epistle selection. St. Paul says that being a Christian is like being in training to compete in a footrace. You have to subject yourself to discipline — the exercises and roadwork of the runner; the church attendance, prayer, Bible study, self-examination and tithing of the Christian.

There are two significant differences. First of all, only one runner can win any given race, but in the Christian race everybody who makes it to the end is a winner. The other difference comes in the prize.

In first-century Greek athletic contests, the prize for winning a footrace was a wreath of laurel leaves. Laurel leaves don't last forever they rot, they are a "corruptible crown," as St. Paul puts it. The Christian is in training for a prize that will last forever the prize of eternal life -- a crown that will never rot, or fade away.

St. Paul's greatest fear is that after he has preached so cleverly and effectively to others, he himself may be lost at the end. That will not be because God is fickle, but because his own discipline and sense of purpose may itself fade away.

The gospel is the parable of the workers in the vineyard. A man who owns a vineyard hires some workers first thing in the morning and agrees to pay them what the King James Version calls "a penny." That is a coin equal to a fair days wage. He hires other workers throughout the day, ending with a group that winds up working only one hour.

When the time comes to dole out the wages, the ones who worked only an hour get a penny. The ones who have worked all day assume that they will receive proportionally more, and they are disappointed and angry when they, too, are paid a penny.

The owner tells them, "You have no right to be angry. I told you I would give you a penny if you worked all day, and I have done just that. You have no call to be jealous, because I have been generous to these other people."

It is a good idea not to push Jesus' parables beyond their breaking point, but it is pretty clear that the vineyard owner represents God, the penny is salvation, and the workers who are hired are human beings whom God calls into a relationship with him.

God calls some people early — they could represent the Jews who were God's chosen people from the time of Abraham. He calls other people later on — they could represent the Gentiles, who get to be chosen only after Jesus comes to earth and most Jews reject him.

The different times of hiring also stand for the fact that people get themselves straightened out with God at different points in their lives. Some are pretty well on board from their childhoods on, others take longer, some don't come around until they are approaching their deaths.

The fact is that no matter when you let God put you right with him, you get the same reward. There is no such thing as being more saved or less saved, or more united to Jesus or less united, or more a member of the church or less a member. The advantage of doing it early is that you have more time in this world to enjoy the relationship to God that will carry on into eternity.

So the lessons don't really contradict one another. They merely focus upon two different facets of what the Christian life is like. Pre-Lent - the "gesima" season -- is the time to shift gears away from the more joyful seasons of Christmas and Epiphany to get ourselves ready for the more rigorous fasting season of Lent.

So we need both insights. St. Paul's ideas about discipline and the dangers of being lost remind us that Lent will be the time when we try to face what draws us away from Christ and make a sincere effort to eliminate it. But the message of the gospel has to remain before our eyes as well. God will accept us and save us whenever and however we decide to turn to him.

"Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain."

The Collect: O Lord, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people; that we, who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness, for the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: I Corinthians 9: 24 - 27

The Gospel: St. Matthew 20: 1 - 16