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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

1st Sunday in Lent

Year B
February 18, 2024
Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart

Genesis 9:8-17
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15

I once heard a scholar wryly describe the dour Lent they grew up with as “a forty-day wake at the funeral for Jesus he never had.”

This Sunday we begin a season that many of us associate with sin and suffering. For many of us, Lent has emphasized the ways that our sin wounds not only the world but also wounds – crucifies – God’s own self. Indeed, Lutherans are known for taking sin seriously, and Lent is a profound time to do just that. However, the Lenten emphasis on sin is actually a remnant of a wider, ecological approach to the season.

This first Sunday in Lent weaves together themes of creation that we can follow all the way to Easter. But first, it’s worth telling the four-part story of how the theme of sin eclipsed almost everything else during Lent.

1. Easter as birthday of the cosmos, and baptism as return to Eden

In its earliest expressions, the ecological dimensions of Easter were much more prominent and continued the Jewish tradition that Passover was associated with the annual “birthday” of the universe. I noted in this past year’s Green Blades Rising Easter Preaching Helps:

The ecological layers required to calculate the date of Easter are beautifully deep! First, we wait for earth’s renewal at springtime (beginning with Jerusalem, therefore also throughout the northern hemisphere). Then we watch for equinox – when the plane of the earth’s equator directly intersects the sun, so that night and day are held in balance throughout the entire earth. Then we watch for the next full moon – mystically holding in balance night and day – a moment that also marks the beginning of passover. Then we wait for Sunday – the first day of creation and the day of resurrection – which, according to the most ancient way of counting time for Jews and Christians, begins with sunset on Saturday evening. St. Augustine wrote that all these layers of meaning are to be understood sacramentally, the entire cosmos participating in the meaning of Easter (Letter 55 to Januarius 1.2).

When those being baptized at Easter traveled from west to east through the font, some early preachers interpreted this as beginning a baptismal pilgrimage back to the Garden of Eden (“in the east”), our first home, now to be restored and renewed.

 2. Lent as “new member class” for those being baptized at Easter

The church invented Lent in large part to be a “new member class” for individuals and families who would be baptized at the Easter Vigil. Just as the creation was being renewed at springtime, so too were all those who journeyed to the font during the Lenten springtime. (“Lent” comes from “lengthen,” for the lengthening daylight of springtime.) The springtime readings reflected baptismal themes of water and rebirth.

3. Lent become a “membership do-over” time for serious sinners

When fewer full families were being baptized at Easter and more infants were being baptized soon after birth, the “new member class” of Lent still existed as a liturgical structure. So the structure remained in place but was repurposed over time: when people committed sins that were so serious that it seemed like they had forgotten or abandoned their baptism, the church excommunicated them before Lent and told them to “do over” the new member class during Lent. So they put ashes on these serious sinners on what became Ash Wednesday, and their sins were forgiven on Maundy Thursday so – while not rebaptizing them, of course – they could be fully readmitted to communion at the Easter Vigil.

4. Realizing we’re all sinners, everybody joined the “membership do over” of Lent

When people saw the ashes only placed on the people identified as serious sinners, they realized of course that we’re all captive to sin and so everybody – all of us sinners – should go through the membership do-over together. Happily, Lent was restored as a time for everyone to prepare for Easter. Sadly, because of this strange four-stage history, the only part of baptismal preparation that really remained was repentance for sin.

In our era, this Sunday – the first Sunday in Lent – can be part of our recovery of a more fully baptismal and ecological Lent and Easter. A few of the creation threads to follow this Sunday and through Lent and Easter:

The first endangered species act

Some have called our first reading from Genesis – the story of the Ark and the rainbow covenant – the first endangered species act. God saves every species on earth, and God makes this first of the covenants with “all future generations” and “every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” To be baptized is to be washed into the flood of God’s covenant with all species, all creatures on earth.

Waters of renewal all around us

 In the reading from 1 Peter, Christ is imaged as going below the waters of the flood to bring the Gospel even to those under the flood, and then as rising to the heavens where all things are held in Christ’s merciful reign. In this reading, baptism is a sign of God’s merciful, overflowing life extending to every dimension of the whole cosmos. As the fifth century inscription around the great Lateran baptistry reads: “Here is the fountain of life that washes the whole earth [cosmos].”

 

A wild baptism

In today’s Gospel text, preachers can help people perceive the wild mercy of God at Christ’s baptism: the edge of the wilderness, the Jordan River, the heavens opened, the Spirit appearing like an earthly bird that both blesses and then drives into the wild, Christ with his fellow creatures the wild beasts, and God’s care in the wilderness given by the mysterious angels.

The path ahead

Lent begins as a journey into the wild, and it continues along earthy paths through the coming weeks: 2) On the mountain in the clouds, the mystical secret of the transfiguration, 3) against the commercialization of religious, Jesus reveals the Temple of God as being made of living, earthly, creaturely, flesh, 4) the healing serpent in the wilderness, God’s love for the world/cosmos, light exposing and revealing what is true, and 5) the seed in the earth dying and being raised to bear abundant good fruit.

God’s blessings to you at this beginning of our journey to Easter springtime and the baptismal renewal of Eden’s garden.

Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart
Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart

Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart serves as Pastor to Emmanuel Lutheran Church, Two Harbors, Minnesota, and as Distinguished Affiliate Faculty at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. A recent migrant to Duluth, Minnesota, Ben is a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy and contributes to its Ecology and Liturgy Seminar. He is author of A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology (2011). A former village pastor to Holden, he now serves on the Holden Village Board of Directors.

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