We have access to wonderful background materials that expand on the readings and the prayers for each Sunday and festival in the church year. These usually come with a brief and usually helpful introductory synopsis of the day’s theme. I particularly liked today’s summary [printed at the top of the first page of the Celebrate insert], not because I enjoyed it, but because I think it accurately captures one of the main messages of the readings: “The warnings are plentiful and blunt on the third Sunday in Lent. Lent is a season of repentance. Cut it out or get cut down! The warnings are accompanied by God’s invitation to attentiveness: ‘Incline your ear, and come to me; listen so that you may live.’”

What we discover there are two things that typically are hard for us to accept: 1) that there are dire consequences to our persistence in sin and thus to our deafness to God’s commands; and 2) that we really must listen to someone who knows us and our condition better than we know ourselves, to one who has the power of life and death over us. How hard it is for us to take seriously what we just prayed: “Help us to hear your word and obey it.”

We follow many paths that lead nowhere and we are tempted by many ideas, passions and dreams that simply cannot deliver on what is promised. We are restless and impatient and discontent, and we don’t want to be told anything. So we are constantly moving on to what is sure to be the perfect job, the perfect relationship or the perfect location where all problems will be solved. In the church we become serially enamored of the cause of the month, and we surf the waters of popular religion, positioning ourselves to catch a ride on the next spiritual wave. But all this restlessness is just avoidance. Obedience requires commitment and openness to being taught and led. It’s also called “faith,” because faith leads to obedience and obedience is a sign of faith. Obedience has become a dirty word, because we’re pretty sure we know a better way.

“Why,” Isaiah asks, “do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

We are forever working to invent the better spiritual mousetrap. We don’t like anyone, including the church, to tell us what we should believe. Belief, after all, is a private matter and it’s strictly my own business. But can this innovation and willful self-preoccupation satisfy? We spend our spiritual capital for that which is not actually bread, for things that that are temporal, temporary and ephemeral that cannot feed or nourish or give us life. Luther said that our greatest sin, the original sin in fact, is that we desire to be like God, that we fail to let God be God, who alone can give life. Presumption is our greatest temptation and our folly.

I ran across the following quotation from the famous English writer, G.K. Chesterton, in a newsletter I subscribe to. Keep in mind that the following piece was published in 1905.

“The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty….Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy or religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”

“Seek the Lord,” Isaiah says, “while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” Isaiah then continues, speaking the word of the Lord particularly to those who persist in following their own imaginations, throwing off dogmas and creeds, sitting as God contemplating all: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The true test of faith is where we put our trust, how we arrange our priorities, and how we choose to live our lives. Since such things are impossible for us to invent, we usually go around in something of a fog—could that be the cloud Paul talked about referring to the Israelites in the wilderness? Paul, addressing a troubled congregation in Corinth, did not hesitate to point out in some detail just where the problems lay for them: the Corinthians desired evil and so became idolaters; they indulged in sexual immorality; they put Christ to the test; and they did nothing but complain. Yet, for all that they were quite sure they were standing fast. Paul saw through their prideful self-deception and gave them this warning: “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” Overconfidence is usually overcompensation, and thus fear. Self-indulgence is another word for idolatry. But with Paul’s warning there is also hope. It is not inevitable, Paul indicates, that the Corinthians will fall. If their faith is right, Paul says, they will be able to stand, even as they are being severely tested: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

Paul, while not for a minute overlooking the Corinthians’ sin, their idolatry and their immorality, appeals to God’s overwhelming and abiding faithfulness, because the God of Israel, though constantly being put to the test by his people, will never forsake them. Just so, the gardener in Jesus’ parable of the fig tree, for exactly the same reason, appealed to the owner of the barren tree not to cut it down before it has a chance—at least one more chance—to bear fruit. Jesus’ appeal in that gospel reading to repentance is urgent and clear, repent or perish, he says. But because God does not want any to fall, God will give yet another opportunity for sinners to get a new heart and to change their ways. Paul gives the Corinthians another chance to stand firm, to renounce their idolatry, their self-indulgence and their lack of faith, and he gives them encouragement and support by assuring them that with God’s help they will be able to stand the test. And the prophet Isaiah, appealing to disconsolate, disobedient and idolatrous Israel to listen carefully once again to the Lord, urges the Israelites to gain wisdom and insight into God’s purpose, into his plan and promise for them, and so discover a new life within the covenant God had established and to which he promises ever to remain faithful, even as he requires their obedience.

And so it comes down to us. Though we are constantly being tested and tried, still we can be assured that we shall not be tested beyond our ability to bear up under temptation, to see the error of our ways, and so to be able to stand the test. But we also are always testing God’s patience through our self-will, our idolatry and our disobedience, through our attraction to various distractions and indulgences that cannot possibly give us any real or lasting satisfaction. Out of his abundant store of forbearance and love, God offers yet another opportunity for us to repent of our poor choices and bad decisions, of our stubbornness and our presumption, to turn to him in repentance and faith, to listen and to obey, and thus to find life.

-Amen-