Homily preached by The Rev'd Susan Kraus

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

Evensong Homily: The Second Sunday of Lent – February 17, 2008

In the name of God, to whom all honor is due, now and forever. Amen.

Here at St. Paul’s on the Green we often welcome those who enter our doors with the message of God’s “unconditional love.” As I understand it, this is meant to be a message of good news, words chosen to express something of the height, depth, and breadth of God’s love for the human beings God has created, and so it is a good message.

I hear a somewhat similar message in today’s non-Christian, popular spiritual thinking and writing – a message that the “universe” is loving, benign, and somehow concerned about the happiness of each and every one of us. This may sound like good news, but from the standpoint of the Christian faith, this is an inadequate message.

May I offer you a different message, one unlike that of any other organized religion or popular spirituality, a message of such substance and mystery that we cannot plumb its depths, the message of what might be called God’s “conditional love”?

From the beginning of Advent, when we honor the incarnation of God in Christ, to Good Friday, when we gaze upon the innocent Son of God hanging on a cross, we bear witness to the astounding good news of God’s “conditional love.” For, according to the Christian faith, God was willing to freely subject Godself to the conditions of human life. God, the creator and sustainer of the universe and all life, the eternal God before whom was nothing, without whom is nothing, God the ground and purpose of all, the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end – this God willingly “came down from heaven and became incarnate from the Virgin Mary.” God accepted the conditions of the human life God created, from the vulnerability and dependency of infancy and all through the life of Jesus Christ. And astoundingly, God also accepted the conditions of human sin, which God did not create.

Think with me for a moment about the life of Jesus. He taught and fed and healed people until he was weary. He needed solitude for prayer, yet the people often crowded in, seeking his gifts. He was lucky if he received a tithe of thanks from the people he healed – remember the ten lepers who were cleansed and only one gave thanks? Jesus was misunderstood, even by the disciples. He was hated by the religious leaders he challenged, and accused of blasphemy when he asserted that he was God’s son. Jesus prayed that the Father would save him from the cross, and while his closest friends slept, he agonized over the reality that he would not be spared. Jesus then suffered the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter and the others who fled when he was arrested. At the end he was mocked and tortured and killed. Christ came down from heaven and submitted himself to the limitations of human life and to the cruelty and injustice of human sin. This was the free choice of God – God’s “conditional love” made visible in Jesus Christ.

Tonight’s passage from the gospel of John speaks about honoring God. To truly honor God, we must honor God’s Son, Jesus, in whom we see God the Father. And to do that means nothing short of transformation into the likeness of Christ. This is not a “feel good” message! For we are sinful human beings, liable to be selfish and to forget that we are God’s creatures, with a tenacious capacity for hurting one another and ourselves. The Christian life is not about thinking that we are fine just the way we are. Not because we have to be “good enough” to earn God’s love, but because we are called to engage in a process of clearing away whatever blocks us from receiving God’s love.