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Lent 1

Deuteronomy 26
4When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, 5you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, 7we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’ You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. 11Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.


It wasn’t even Lent yet, and already people were giving stuff up. Take Monday, for example. It seems you can give up being Pope for Lent, or give it up for good, something that seemed to take people by surprize.

That is, unless you are the senior Vatican-based journalist who sat though enough press briefings in Latin that she decided to learn it and in doing so got the jump on all the other reporters too lazy to do the same. People who know dead languages are feeling very smug this week, Carmen included.

Our new premier took office the same day, and was forced to give up her post-victory glow in favour of the less-than-fun job of confronting teachers, transit-advocates and everyone who is still mad about a couple of power plants. The Star—entirely too preachy—repeated the predictable line that ‘winning the leadership was the easy part.’

And at the very same moment, somewhere in the western Caribbean, the other big news story of the week was brewing, where some would begin the season of Lent giving up toilets and the little folded towel animals that the cleaning staff like to leave on the bed. If you were watching CNN, you might think this was a disaster rather than a mishap, with lawyers ready for the inevitable class-action suites and panelists suggesting everyone should get free cruises for life.

Now, to put this into perspective—which seems like a very Lenten thing to do—the World Health Organization says that around the world 2.6 billion people (that’s billion with a B) lack access to basic sanitation. But the biggest news for past week was 4,100 people didn’t get the cruise experience they paid for. To be fair, CNN did manage to find one passenger (who obviously doesn’t have a lawyer yet) who said it wasn’t really that bad on the ship.

I might even take this a step further and argue that Carnival Triumph isn’t really a cruise ship at all, it’s a metaphor. Maybe all cruise ships are metaphors, because they represent the extent to which we in the developed world float around on a sea of relative prosperity, briefly looking in on exotic (and less advanced) ports of call, and then retreat quickly to the safety of the ship for a multi-course meal and a stroll around the deck.

Now for those of you on hypocrite watch, I have taken a cruise or two in the past. But the great thing about being a minister is you can partake in worldly things and all the while be busy judging all the people around you. Of course, now that Lent has arrived I can give up judgement and hypocrisy and focus instead on who might be next pope, promised before the end of Lent.

One of the things we won’t focus on this morning is the reading from Luke, so well read, but kind of overdone. The temptation story appears every single year on this Sunday, and in many ways it’s just too easy as a Lent 1 theme. So setting aside temptation, we are left with “a wandering Aramean was my father.”

Now, I fear that Carmen has given up being helpful for Lent, because when I asked her what an Aramean was, so just give me a blank stare. To be fair, it is exam time, and all her stressed out Hebrew students obviously have her stressed out, so we will let it pass this time and turn to Wikipedia instead.

It turns out that pretty much everyone is an Aramean. The Arameans, just as Deuteronomy suggests, wander from some distant place (likely in Syria) and began to mingle with all the other nomadic peoples in the Bronze Age Ancient Near East. And while the Arameans as an identifiable people vanished, their language took off, with Aramaic becoming the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent.

So, Deuteronomy is part history, and part law review, and part preparation for entering the Promised Land. It records a series of farewell discourses from Moses, and sets out how to safeguard all the important work God has done to rescue the people from slavery in Eqypt. It contains warnings and prohibitions, and words to be recited in particular situations, such as the Shema, quoted by Jesus and close to his heart: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”

The part we heard this morning, chapter 26, is part of the ritual preparation, a primer on gratitude, that gives specific words to be spoken as the offering is set before God and dedicated to God’s glory. But for the Israelites, this is more than just ritual, it’s family history, recorded in rich symbolic language:

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.

And while we hear a short summary, the first listeners heard Abraham and Sarah, receiving God’s blessing in old age, and Isaac, subject of God’s greatest test of obedience, and Jacob, cleverly taking his brother’s birthright, but becoming Israel after truly wrestling with God. And Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery, only to become second to Pharaoh, but doomed by foreshadowing to become the forefather of a race enslaved by future Pharaohs.

When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, 7we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

And while we hear harsh affliction, the first listenings heard the shouts of the taskmasters, and the command to make bricks without straw, and the death of boys that somehow posed a mortal threat to Pharaoh. And while it would be easy to believe that God was somehow indifferent to the cries of those who suffered in Egypt, we learn that it was just the opposite.

The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

It almost sounds easy. Once more, the poet finds a concise way to capture the Red Sea, the hunger, the gifts of manna and quail, the cloud by day and the pillar or fire by night, and the final step, entry into the land, a land that is so many things but can be always best summarized by ‘milk and honey.’

***

A passage about ritual gratitude seems unlikely as a reading for the beginning of Lent when we typically focus on ‘giving up’ and felling guilty. It’s become like a more troubling version of Advent, seemingly set aside to prepare for the worst while doing our best.

Yet we, like our Aramean forebears, have the benefit of knowing the end of the story. And while we understand the need to hear the whole story, to travel up to Calvary and the cross, we also know that it ends with an empty tomb and the salvation of us all. So we can make Lent 1 about gratitude if we rehearse the whole story, if we recount the more recent salvation history and make it our own once more. We have the template, and we have the story, so we have everything we need to give thanks:

A wandering Judean was my saviour. He went down to Egypt and lived briefly as an alien, but returned to Nazareth, to become a great teacher, mighty in the power of God. When those representing the new Pharoah in Rome were threatened by him, and the seemingly religious ones too, he was treated harshly and afflicted, crying out through the pain to say ‘forgive them, father, they know not why they oppress me.‘ He died and was buried, but the Lord brought him from death’s tomb with an outstretched hand, and signs and wonders, making an end to death, that each of us may know a land of milk and honey.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:12 AM