strangers on a road

 

SERMON PREACHED at St ANDREW’S, CROMWELL

and at St. COLUMBA’S, WANAKA           

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 23^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 116: 1-4, 12-19

1 Peter 1:17-23

Luke 24:13-35

 

 

Some stories from the scriptures are so well known that were it not for protocols I would be tempted to say that you know the story, let’s move right along. I suspect I’m not allowed to do that, protocols forbid. Still: a) I am under strict instructions from your vicar to keep it short, and b) short is exactly what I want to do. So here’s a compromise. 

So basically let us believe for a moment that we’re hearing this story for the first time. First we could ask how the story sounds to Luke’s first, intended audience in the first century, then how it sounds to us,  his accidental audience, hearing it for the first time today.

I don’t know you well enough to encourage an interactive sermon on this occasion, but it would be lovely to hear your feedback sometime about these first impressions regained, as it were, from a too familiar story.

For me the clue is often taken from a wonderful literary scholar whose approach to works of literature was simply to say “if something strikes you as strange then it is probably designed to have you take a second look.” So, because we can’t really be interactive, I will just give you a couple of my responses based on that methodology.

Firstly, there’s nothing particularly surprising about a couple of travellers walking along a road. Twelve kilometres was not a particularly arduous walk in the first century, roughly the distance from my house to the CBD in Dunedin, a walk I take from time to time. Walking and talking are not particularly unusual or mutually exclusive activities, even for allegedly multi-task challenged males. Actually I happen to believe one of the walkers was female, but that’s another story.  Admittedly as an introvert I don’t encourage strangers to start talking to me as I walk, but it is one of those things that happens. I am reminded of the fellow passenger on a bus across outback Australia who once asked me, “is that an interesting book you’re reading?” I can think of few more depressing opening lines.

I do think there is a little embellishment, probably from the author Luke himself, when the travellers ask the stranger, with some surprise, whether he has not heard of the things going on in Jerusalem recently. I believe it’s a literary tool that Luke uses to add dramatic emphasis to the story, which you may remember, he was writing at least ostensibly for someone called Theophilus. Luke just wants to add some dramatic emphasis to his story.

The response of the stranger however is a little unusual, and it is unsurprising that later the travellers will speak of their hearts being on fire as he unpacked the story that they themselves had told. I kind of like it too when gaps in my knowledge I fleshed out by a vivid co-conversationalist.

Then, it is true, things become a little surreal. There is nothing particularly surprising about asking the traveller to stay for a meal. It is a little more surprising that he disappears in a puff of unreality leaving the travellers, Cleopas and possibly Mrs Cleopas, somewhat bewildered. Apart from anything else I think Luke is telling us that it is okay if somethings don’t fit into our minds.

More important is that the travellers’ eyes and ears have been suddenly opened in the breaking of bread and wine. Overwhelmed by the sense of the risen Christ and his presence in this simple rite, they rushed the twelve kilometres back to their friends to join in a fellowship of resurrection joy, and to acknowledge that the women who were after all the first witnesses to the impossible event, were right after all.

And that is pretty much where I would like to leave story except that, were I hearing this for the first time and deciding to make a movie or a stage play out of it, I would probably have those women roll their eyes meaningfully at the formerly sceptical followers of Jesus, who had refused to accept their testimony that divine love will conquer even the deepest darknesses if we only get it, if only we let it, and seek the power of God to help us be grasped by this new reality.

we just ain't that smart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 6^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

 

 

So what is this resurrection thing? One certain answer is that I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Actually nor was anyone. Matthew suggests a couple of soldiers were hanging around, but they were asleep. I even suggest it was lucky for them that they were. This moment in cosmic history was too big for human vision. Or human understanding.

Perhaps since I’m doing a lot of work on the thought of Bishop Allen Johnston at the moment I may be permitted to quote him?

There are many divergencies between the gospel narratives of the Resurrection but there is one point on which they are without doubt: the strongly attested fact that the grave of Jesus was empty. It is absurd to suggest that this in itself proves the Resurrection. It does, however, emphasize the identity between the risen Lord, who is the object of faith, and Jesus of Nazareth. Had it not been for this identification, what justification would there have been for the writing of the gospels?

Strangely Jesus was not immediately recognisable, but the gospel is emphatic that the person a handful of women, and later a handful of men, met on the first day of the new creation was absolutely the Carpenter of Nazareth, absolutely tangible (though he asks Mary not cling to him), absolutely an event in human and cosmic history.

I think their point is that we just won’t ever get it, intellectually. Human beings on the scale of things aren’t that smart. Our absolutely desevration of the garden God has given us to live in is a reminder of that. Our greed, our disinterest, and a myriad other faults serve to remind us that we just aren’t that smart. Certainly when lined up against the smarts of the author of a rather big universe. Or universes.

So in the end the gospel writers – and they are all we have because the soldiers were snoozing – give us the language of the heart. Language of the heart that those first rather clutzy and very frightened witnesses were prepared to go on and die for. Language of the heart that transformed and transforms human lives. The followers of Jesus went on to tell a new story. I quote Johnston again:

They affirmed that death had been conquered; that by a tremendous manifestation of his power God had raised Jesus out of the home of departed spirits. They did not imagine that Jesus, like a ghost, had returned to spend some further period on earth. They affirmed that death hath no more dominion over him, that the universe had become a new place, that the new world order was already here, because Jesus had risen from the dead.

And I’m not going to explain that. On good days, though, I let myself be seized by it. And I’m hoping you do. Perhaps most often I am seized by it, in the days when I am in pastoral rather than educational ministry (but should we split the two?) when I stand at a graveside and whisper, stutter, proclaim those same worlds of hope we just heard read, from Peter’s epistle, stuttering to those who gather and to the unseen departed the words of faith,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

I don’t what it all means. I know that it gives a hope that is far more than pie in the sky, because it is a hope by which shattered lives are healed, strength to carry on dispensed, energy to proclaim often risky justice, reconciliation, love birthed.

I hope in the past two years I’ve been able to share hints of that energy. I’ve not been your vicar, but hopefully I’ve been a fellow-traveller and hopefully I’ve been able to be a bearer of light. There’s no magic wand for tomorrow: there never was. The world is changing, the church is changing, but the hope that transformed our handful of frightened followers of Jesus is not changing. The strength for the future is God’s, not mine, not even yours. I can’t lead you into the tomorrow of this faith community but I firmly believe there is one. And I believe whatever happens to this place, this organization, even to us, that future is bright with the light of the risen Christ, who in all the uncertainty neither leaves nor forsakes us.

come, all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

PALM SUNDAY (April 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Isaiah 50: 4-9a

Psalm 31: 9-16

Philippians 2: 5-11

Matthew 27: 11-54

 

I have always claimed that I never refer to or repeat my old sermons, and I hold to that claim. There is though no doubt that on Palm Sunday, if I preach at all (and if we had the full liturgy I would not) that I come perilously close to it.

For 36 years, as a friend reminded me this week, I have at this liturgical celebration focused on my belief that this is the Sunday we celebrate getting it wrong. Or, more precisely, we celebrate our encounter with Jesus despite getting it wrong.

Perhaps I should explain. But I do want to address a misconception first. An awful lot of Christians get excited because they discover that a handful of passages, like the so-called “servant song” that was read from Isaiah just now, appear to predict the future Christ as narrated in the Christian gospels. I feel we need to be more honest. The gospel writers turned to passages like these and framed their Jesus stories in the terms of the constructs they found there.

Certainly Jesus was a servant like no other. Self-sacrificial, suffering, loving. Whatever Isaiah’s vision was about, it's wonderfully matched the first Christians’ experience of Jesus. But Isaiah had neither crystal ball not even divine insight, at least in so far as such insight provides unambivalent interpretation. Jews and Christians will and should interpret Isaiah’s poem very differently.

Paul, utilising a poem that he in turn may have either written or stolen - acceptable in days before intellectual property acts - sees this in terms greater still. This is the one who strode across, as it were universes, yet he so empties himself of all that he can be that this week we see him executed on a cross. He empties himself, as Wesley put it, of all but love. And we are the beneficiaries of that love, for it draws us mysteriously, inexplicably into the heart of God.

So why for 36 years have I taught that this is the Sunday we get it wrong? We stand with the crowd, and the crowd alas are terribly wrong. We stand with the crowd today and we will stand in the crowd on Friday. Samuel Crossman, in the seventeenth century, got it so terribly right. “Then crucify was all our breath, and for his death we thirst and cry.” It is thus because we look for a saviour in the glamour of human kingship: a Trump, a Putin, a Jacinda, a Kennedy. The radical shifts of politics left and right across the globe and across institutions in recent years suggest we live in an era desperate for salvation.

And always we will be let down.

Until after Good Friday. And it is to the depths of that day and its implications that we are invited to travel in our readings and in our liturgy this week, even if it is in shadow form. In that way we can find the God who dies for Ukrainians, yet also for Russians trapped up in someone else’s war, who dies for transgender persons, but also for women fearing that some transgender persons may just be exploitative and predatory persons dressed in another guise, who dies even for what are now called CIS White Males like me who are only too aware that some of the accusations directed at us ring only too truly.

So in this week of the passion we are invited to know that there are no limits, nor party politics, neither male nor female Greek nor Jew, slave nor free capable of blocking out the irrepressible love of God.

jesus wept

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Alban’s, Kurow

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 26^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Ezekiel 37: 12-14

Psalm 95

Romans 8: 8-11

John 11: 1-45

 

It’s too easy after 2000 years of conditioning to forget that gods of the ancient world were not supposed to weep. It wasn’t that they were without emotion. They could be angry, jealous, biff a few thunderbolts around. But crying? That was beneath their pay scale. This was particularly so of any god who claimed to be Boss God.

It was just not the done thing. Real gods could not show anything that could be interpreted as weakness. This passage in John 11 breaks a whole heap of protocols. We have the God carrier, the God Man, the Lord himself weeping. But we have at least one other protocol broken too. As with the Samaritan woman, we find a strong woman daring to break expectations. It was incidentally one of the great innovations of feminist theology to recognise and affirm that sin for women, or perhaps for womankind, was not so much stroppiness but submission, token acquiescence to a dominant male narrative. 

I would leave that for another time, except insofar as in the past few weeks we have seen or referred to the incredible strength of the Samaritan woman who argues with Jesus, the Syrophoenician woman who argues with Jesus, the brave women who will carry the gospel message out into the world, despite their fear and marginalisation, on the first Easter morning, and now brave Martha who is willing, as we know from Luke’s gospel-account, to be recognised as a disciple, and is here willing to confront Jesus with her rage.

Martha an Mary alike overstep the boundaries of submission. They expresses their grief and her rage to a man in whose presence they would be expected by society to remain silent. He in turn is not afraid, to absorb like a lightning rod their grief.

Mary and Martha had no hope with their brother gone, so her desperation can come as no surprise. She already had the idea that Jesus had some kind of mastery over life and death greater than any human she could conceive of. Why now, she howled, were she and her sister to be left with nothing?

It is also one of the most poignant verses in the Bible. John is telling us something here that is critically important. Jesus wept. Decent gods even in the first century didn’t weep. They were not particularly interested in absorbing human pain. But something is getting turned upside down here.

Martha and Mary are trapped in that visceral grief which really knows no measurement. We humans have the capacity to feel deeply our losses – partner, parent, above all perhaps our children or our grandchildren – there are no words sufficient. This grief is what Jesus encounters in the bereaved sisters. Traditional gods of the first century remained unmoved by such a scene, our silly human problem not theirs. Jesus wept. But his tears are not the final word.

Jesus calls Lazarus out of death. I don’t know what that means. The gospel writer is at pains to demonstrate that the situation was pretty unusual, that human decomposition was reversed. Of course Mary, Martha and indeed Lazarus are one day going to have to experience this scene again in all its dimensions. One day we will too, and there are dimensions of it that we will have already experienced in our lives.

But there is a still greater extent of divine love which is yet to be revealed in John’s telling of the gospel. Soon God in Jesus, Godself, will enter that same experience of brokenness, desertion, even Godforsakenness, and death. We will too, though thanks be to God we are unlikely to feel the utter desertion, the utter Godforsakenness of the death of the crucified Messiah.

Technically the experience Lazarus undergoes is a remarkable resuscitation, not resurrection. He will undergo the dying journey, the death journey again. This experience that John relates, whether we see it as a metaphor or, as I am happy naively to prefer, as a literal if unique event, This scene reveals only a foretaste of the absolute and unparalleled depths to which God in Christ will journey in order to bring resurrection light and life to human experience. Those themes of light and life have been reverberating through John’s gospel telling from the very beginning, those famous first eighteen verses. Shortly in the events of Holy Week and Easter we will read not just the deadness of Lazarus and the brokenness of Mary and Martha but the absolute hell depths of every curtailed life and every crippling grief. And though it is beyond words, it is there that a greater light and life will break out, and the weeping women will experience not only the reversal of Lazarus’ life and death but the beyond words restoration and resurrection of all life.

It is to that life and life we are invited each day.

imprenetrable darkness: meet inextinguishable light

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Martin’s, Duntroon

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

1 Samuel 16: 1b, 6-7, 10-13a

Psalm 95

Ephesians   5: 8-14

John 9: 1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38

 

According to my flash new watch, which came I might add as a freebie, I am afraid of the dark. Now in my day – I’m not sure when that was or maybe will be – but in my day a watch was designed to tell us the time. The time appears on my watch to be a quite minor and unimportant function. However it does tell me my pulse rate, and I know that it is completely wrong when it attempts to tell me that my pulse rate soars disturbingly on the long dark section, about 17 minutes, of my pre-dawn morning walk. It tries to tell me that during that 17 minute section my predawn pulse reaches the same heights as it does on some of the steeper sections of my walk. The 12% gradients in fact, though I have to admit that I made that bit up because working out a gradient is way beyond my pay scale mathematically speaking. But the bit about the pulse is absolute truth, er, more or less.

Now I know that this new watch is spouting total nonsense, because I’m a big tough bloke, and a big tough bloke does not harbour secret fears. So of course my watch is wrong when on the flat bits of my walk it tells me that for 17 minutes my pulse, my pulse which normally rests around the mid-80s as I saunter along in the daylight, soars to the levels that it reaches on a reasonably steep hill, and hovers taunting me from the low one hundreds. I think the reality is that my watch knows that I am really very brave but wanted to provide me with a sermon illustration about humanity’s instinctive relationship with the darkness, formed back in the times when we were dwelling in forests and caves surrounded by tigers and bears. It, the watch that is, just wanted to remind me of those times, and of course I wasn’t scared at all because I’m tough and brave and modern.

Though I must admit I remember with some distress the dark, creaky dormitories and rattling sash windows of my preteens prep boarding school. I’m told one or two of my friends found those a little creepy. Not me of course. Although I am glad that I didn't have an irritating watch that measured my pulse and told me lies.

There is as some of you will know a prayer in our prayer book, in the late evening compline service, that draws a link between the darkness of the coming night and the darkness of the world and indeed of our own lives. Perhaps I’d be fibbing if I did not confess to a few darkness fears, which of course I don’t experience on my predawn walks as the shadows dance and loom and leer and I hear footfalls when no one follows me. 

But I’ll confess to some more serious fears nurtured by the images that I often mention, beamed into us on our internet news feeds and old fashioned television news services. Fears of global warming, of toxic sludge, of exterminated species, and of what French GP cum novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline called, somewhat poetically, “the insidious cancer cell even now crawling through the pathways of our body.” Except he used less polite terms.

For the mediaeval monks night was preparation for death, and each dawn was a celebration of resurrection. Earlier still the church fathers and mothers found in the rites of Lent a minidrama, an enactment of the slow human journey from birth to death to rebirth and resurrection. They knew that lifelong journey towards the light to be a journey towards the inextinguishable light of resurrection. They saw that resurrection light, the light that according to the author of the biblical book that we call Revelation, that resurrection light that shines on the coming City of God with such penetrating clarity that that city has no need of any other light. They saw that resurrection light pre-enacted in the experience of the blind man who encountered Jesus as he waited, sightless, by the side of the road. They saw in the anointing of that man by Jesus, anointing with dirt and saliva. They saw in that scene both an echo of God’s own creation of human beings from the dust of the earth and an echo of the rites of anointing at baptism that marked our entrance into the coming eternal New Heavens and Earth.

And so this passage came to be read at the more or less midpoint of Lent, reminding us and those who were preparing for baptism that the light of Christ penetrates and overcomes all darkness of human experience just as John, the author of the Fourth Gospel foreshadowed in his opening 18 verses.

The message for us is that this man is brought from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, that same journey on which we are called by the patient voice of God. The invitation that to us is to trust God in the darkness of an uncertain world around us, the uncertainties of our own life and the life of our communities, and to surrender our fears and any other darknesses of our life, to the searing and inextinguishable light of the risen Christ, the Lamb who is the light of the world.

AMEN.

fesity bloody women!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5^th) 2023

 

 READINGS:

 

           

Exodus 17: 1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5: 1-5, 11

John 4: 5-42

 

 

Firstly let it be said that I think it is ambitious at the best of times to expect listeners to get their heads around John’s tightly packed, tightly constructed biblical passages. Each scene is a deep lesson in faith and in life, and some of the longer scenes, like that of our gospel reading today, could sustain several weeks’ unpacking in a university lecture format. I have six minutes. Or so. So for a start let’s park the other readings. They too are worthy of deep digging, but not today.

What is John telling us? To use the interpretive keys favoured by the diocese at the moment, what is weird, what is wonderful, what is a third W that I can’t recall but I’ll call it what is what? 

Or maybe just what is going on, what is Jesus even doing?  John flags this clearly: “Jews do not share things in common with a Samaritan.” No contact, see? Nada. 

This is a pretty fearsome woman – we’ll come back to that in a moment – and she knows that by customary law this is pretty much her well. A self-respecting Jewish man would back off. Not ask for a drink from her billy can out of her territorial well. Certainly a holy man, who may or may not be claiming to be some sort of messiah. Actually a decent self-respecting Messiah should get out of here 

… or she should, maybe? Something has to give. 

But she’s nothing if not stubborn. “Mate,” she would say, if she were Australian; “Bro,” perhaps, if  kiwi. Though that’s a bit more of a bloke thing. “Get your own water. From your own well.”

Irresistible force: meet unstoppable object. In moments Jesus is treating her with the deepest respect. She is worthy of theological argument. They engage, parry, seemingly enjoy. As we think of Afghan women being denied an education, or American women being denied life choices around their own bodies, we find Jesus inviting this woman to present a case on equal terms. And she does.

I suggested she is pretty fearsome. There’s a funny thing, here. Alone, I think, amongst the co-conversationalists of Jesus, this woman hears the claim “I am he.” I am God. 

It’s a reverberating moment though complacency makes us miss it. When this to us nameless woman starts to refer to the expected Messiah he cuts across her dialogue with unstoppable words: “I am he.” And, more than that, in echoing the great self-referencing of the God of the Hebrews, he effectively says, in Yoda terms, “God I am … I am God.” 

There are according to scholars, seven “I am” sayings in John’s gospel account, whereby Jesus of Nazareth claims to be an aspect of God. Bread of Life, Light of the World, Resurrection and Life, and so on. Yet here, in a risqué conversation, alone with, effectively, an enemy woman, he makes the first and forgotten “I Am” claim: “I am Messiah.”

Alone with a stroppy woman. No wonder Christianity majored in silencing women for the best part of twenty-one centuries. We silenced this nameless woman by portraying her as a loose woman, a whore, and a whole heap of other derogatory allusions. Forget that: she is a strong woman, an intellectual, and absolutely nowhere is it suggested she is somehow morally vapid. Married many times in a society where a woman was property like a cattle dog or a used car, this woman has been handed from husband to husband as, basically, breeding stock. And amidst all that she has nurtured a fierce intellect, and dares to challenge on equal grounds a male stranger at a well.

I have a fantasy. We know from the end of Mark that it was women who first dared to tell out the terrifying good news that the tomb was empty, the clutch of death mysteriously defeated. I don’t even know what that means. They did. We know they had stayed with Jesus when the men had fled. Mary, mother of Jesus, a Mary or two more, the woman with the sensuous hair, perhaps that wonderful feisty Syrophoenician woman who dared to argue with Jesus about the crumbs of salvation – perhaps this woman too – were those who gathered silently at the tomb, then fled, terrified, then overjoyed at the resurrection news. And blurted it out against all odds.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think women are perfect. Nor do I think this woman is more important than the Christ. Sorry. But women – most of you are women in case we hadn’t noticed – are no more imperfect than men, and on this day a woman dares to argue with God, as Abram once had, and prevails. 

Weird, wonderful – and the what? The what is a what are we going to do about following in her footsteps, telling out the mysteries of the God who enters every human soul and redeems us with irresistible – (in a good way) – irresistible love?

 

psychedelic breezes?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU, SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5th) 2023

READINGS:

Genesis 12: 1-4a

Psalm 121

Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17

Matthew 17: 1-9

The Transfiguration is one of those surreal moments in which we, and for that matter the gospel writers, really cannot conceive or convey what is going on. I have been known to refer to them as “sacred mushroom moments” but of course I wouldn't do that here!

That said I admit that I am a lover of the psychedelic 60s. There is much that is beyond telling, and that era went down its own majestic rabbit holes of exploring the wildness of the human mind. Turn on, tune in, drop out, in Timothy Leary’s famous mantra of that decade, is a mantra that it is undoubtedly a good thing I came along too late to learn. I was too young to indulge in the psychedelic breezes that were blowing then. Yet in all seriousness they were the desperate attempts by a counterculture to fine meaning, love, joy, in life where society seemed to offer none. 

Perhaps I digress. I am not here or anywhere advocating psychedelic or hallucinogenic substances. I am saying however that there is much that the words of human conversation cannot convey, and the psychedelic poets of the 60s and the inspired writers of sacred scripture found themselves trapped in the same morass as they tried to find ways to express the inexpressible.

For this Transfiguration scene, common to Luke, Mark, and Matthew in their telling of the Jesus story, is telling us something, but it is something beyond words. It is prefiguring that other beyond-words sequence of scenes that began with the event no human eye could witness, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that first inexplicable Easter morning. I don’t know what happened on that Day, or, rather, I don’t know how it happened. But I know the frightened few became the bearers of resurrection hope, hope, justice, righteousness and life-laying-down-love from the moment that they learned that the man of Nazareth had shattered the cords of death.

And this was all prefigured, in its lesser way, in our surreal scene of Transfiguration. But why? Why are we being told about Peter, James and John and their encounter that was beyond words, their encounter with indescribable holiness on a mountain top, shortly before the terrible suffering and execution of their friend and leader?

I suspect if there is to be one central takeaway from this surreal scene it is simply that Peter, James and John, and of course Jesus, came down from their mountaintop experience. They came down with a new instruction which they heard, as they understood, directly in the voice of God. “Listen.” 

Soon they were to encounter that greater moment, the resurrection, which takes place after those protracted scenes in which we see revealed the extraordinary pains that divine love undergoes to bring about hope for humanity. With the suffering and death of God behind him, Jesus is prepared to add to that message “listen,” to add to that message the new command, “go, tell.”

It is worth noting what the disciples were not permitted to do at the time of the Transfiguration. They were not permitted to remain fossilised, memorialising nostalgically some moments in their past, like burnt out rock stars or sports men or women recalling their long-gone finest hour. They are told to listen, and later, after seeing the extremes of God’s love they are told to proclaim. To proclaim that love even to the ends of the earth and the end of time.

The sequence is critical. Listen. Pause, reflect, listen again if you like, for that is what Lent gives us a chance to do. And only then are we sufficiently renewed in faith to proclaim hope to the world.