As you’ll know if you have taken part in the Lectio Divina sessions which Dean runs on Zoom during Lent and Advent, dwelling thoughtfully on a Bible passage can sometimes result in a word or a phrase gaining your particular attention. The words in today’s Gospel that grabbed my attention were repent and manure. 

Our reading from Luke begins with Jesus responding to a question - why do bad things happen to people such as the pilgrims massacred on the orders of Pontius Pilate or the eighteen who died when the Tower of Siloam collapsed? Jesus emphatically attacks the belief that bad things happen to people because God is punishing them. The slaughtered pilgrims were no worse than other Galileans, and the people killed when the Tower of Siloam fell on them were no worse than the other inhabitants of Jerusalem. He goes on to say:

“unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

And then he tells them a parable to make them think about what repentance involves - the parable of the fig tree. The fig tree in the parable has failed to bear fruit, but it is given a second chance, and the second chance isn’t a mere stay of execution - it involves the care of the gardener who says to the landowner

Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.

So what might the mention of manure tell us about repentance? I think that it can help us to move beyond thinking of repentance as only meaning saying that you are sorry. Think back to when you broke a school rule, or perhaps a school window, and you got a row from a teacher or from the janitor. You were expected to placate an angry authority figure by saying how sorry you were. When we confessed our sins earlier in the service, we were saying sorry but we weren’t doing so to placate an angry authority figure. Remember the opening words of the Absolution:

“God, who is both power and love…”

In confessing we were opening ourselves up to that power and love. Our confession wasn’t just an exercise in self-awareness about our shortcomings and misdeeds, though that is important. Confession, repentance involves opening ourselves up to the power and love of God. Becoming receptive to the goodness and the love that can nourish our growth. Hence the manure in the parable of the fig tree. 

The Greek word that St Luke uses which is translated as “repent” literally means “change your mind”. This is not changing your mind in the sense of choosing an alternative, opting as I did Tuesday for the salted caramel brownie when the waitress told me that they’d run out of scones. This is changing your mind in the sense of changing your whole way of thinking. Holding together your sense of your own shortcomings, your need for the power and love of God and the possibility of being receptive to that power and love.

For the fig tree in the parable, manure is a source of nourishment. Today’s readings from Isaiah and from the First Letter to the Corinthians support that theme.

The prophet uses the metaphor of food. 

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!

St Paul writes about how human beings can go badly astray but we would be misreading him if we all that we took away from the passage was a series of “Don’ts” - don’t indulge in sexual immorality, don’t put Christ to the test, don’t complain. He emphasises the resources, the nourishment that are available to us, reminding the members of the church in Corinth of a story with which they were very familiar - the forty year journeyings of the Hebrew people in the wilderness, when 

…all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. 

The spiritual food and drink which can nourish us if we are receptive. 

Actual food and drink loom large in the Gospels, especially in Luke. There are eight occasions in this Gospel when Jesus shares meals with friends and strangers and two other occasions when the sharing of a meal is implied. And the list of ten doesn’t include mentions of food in parables, notably the feast that the father of the Prodigal Son holds for his son, with the fatted calf as its centrepiece - a parable which speaks eloquently of repentance as a change of mind and heart and the loving, generous response of God to that. 

The sixth of  the eight shared meals in Luke’s Gospel is, of course, the Last Supper - the loving self-giving of Jesus in which we are invited to participate. That’s a reminder that everything we are doing together this morning - confession and absolution, the hearing of and reflecting on scripture, prayers for the church and the world and the celebration of the Eucharist.  The Eucharist is, as Rowan Williams memorably puts it: 

“…the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self-enclosure and self-absorption.”

It is a vital way of becoming more receptive to the power and love of God and enabling and strengthening that change in our way of thinking and acting which is repentance.

OK I have a confession to make. I really tried very very hard to write a heavy serious sermon about today’s Gospel – the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain. And no matter how much I tried the more difficult it seemed to become. So, late last night I decided to give up and instead say something about Lent. Believe me it was much easier and this isn’t a heavy serious sermon at all.

I know that Ian and the choir are expecting – perhaps challenging me - to give words of wisdom about what was going on with Abraham and making complicated sandwiches by cutting animals in half. But no – I just wonder whether, as he wandered in the desert, he found some of those ancient herbal remedies made illegal by President Nixon’s war on drugs.

I actually asked AI for a sermon – and one arrived, it was quite good as well, but it would be cheating. I know a church where the rector finds a sermon on google each week and the person in the choir who is first to find where it comes from gets a prize. (The rector doesn’t know – choirs can be naughty.)

But I did find inspiration in an article I read (in the New Statesman no less) and a couple of short pieces on the radio. I learned a lot about Lent that I didn’t know before. 

We talk about the forty days of Lent, forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter – but if you check the calendar you will see there are actually 47 days. The first Sunday of Lent used to be called Quadragesima – forty days between it and Easter, but that’s not right either. Some argue that if you remove the Sundays then you get to forty, so the Sundays don’t count as Lent. And over the years people have questioned which day marks the end of Lent; is it Maundy Thursday, Holy Saturday or Easter Day itself. And when does Easter Day begin? Sunset on Holy Saturday or dawn on Easter Sunday. 

The better explanation I heard on Radio Four is that forty days and forty nights – in good biblical tradition – just means after a while. Not a little while, but a good stretch of time. 

And then, do you know what the word Lent means? Where it comes from, its etymology? 

It’s from an old English word Lencten which means spring and its roots are from a Germanic verb meaning to lengthen. And there we have it, the days are lengthening, and we are moving into spring. 

So how did Lent, meaning Spring, come to be taken over by the church? 

To find that out we need to go back hundreds of years, even thousands. Humans became farmers rather than hunter gatherers. Resources were scarce – farm animals and farmers families all needed to be fed – so the animals were slaughtered and our ancestors feasted. (Well perhaps feasting is a bit of an exaggeration – but they ate as well as they could.) Fresh meat for as long as possible – then cheese and salted bacon in the tough first months of the year. Then came Collop Monday when left-over bacon or beef was used up, followed by eggs and dairy on Shrove Tuesday.

After that was a time to ration their food supplies until the new harvest. Animals by that time were either pregnant or had given birth. They came first. Food that was left was given to them.

So abstaining or fasting in Lent – or spring – really had nothing to do with religion or the church. It was a natural and essential part of the annual agricultural cycle. Abstinence during Lent or spring was completely natural to our Christian ancestors and the need for it was supported by the Church. There are lots of descriptions of fasting in the bible, including Jesus fasting forty days and forty nights. It became a religious requirement as well as a farming necessity. People were encouraged by state and church to eat fish. Then when Easter arrived it marked the end of fasting and brought the joy of a feast. 

The reformation – and turnips – put an end to most of that. Turnips made it possible to keep more animals alive over winter. The church of the reformation saw fasting and fish eating as popish threat. Fasting and its big sister feasting were ways of bringing people together and were seen as a threat to the new religion. Feasts and fasts were banned – it’s within my lifetime that Christmas became a public holiday in Scotland and was recognised by our national church. (I remember an elderly lady from one of the outer islands in Shetland telling me that if the minister came along that was their Christmas day ruined.)

Lent, lengthening days, springtime. The time when our forebears fasted because they were running out of food and what little they had was needed for their livestock. Lent, forty days and nights in the church calendar – but forty symbolises a while, a long time, even a lifetime. And it is good to spend these weeks until Easter studying, reflecting, praying, giving something up, giving something away, giving to charity. 

So there we have it; Lent - days lengthening, spring arriving. A time to reconnect with the world around us as winter gives up its hold and we welcome Spring (officially the first day of Spring is Friday this week, the 21^st). 

Lent; forty days and nights to reflect on our lives, our relationship with God and with the people around us and far off. Forty days and forty nights, a handful of days, a while, a lifetime. 

And remember, just like our ancestors we need to make time for feasting, God, our God, is faithful, the days will lengthen, the sun will shine…

…the first rule of our celebration is to begin by giving thanks to God.

I said I wasn’t going to be heavy or too serious BUT…

Three Sundays ago, we celebrated the words of St Paul: The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. We shall be changed. 

I talked then about the parallel universes, the created world as we know it and the new creation to which we also belong here and now. I said that our Eucharist is a thin place where the two worlds, the old and the new, intersect, come together. 

The Transfiguration Gospel tells of another thin place, a coming together of these two worlds. Peter, James and John witness Jesus transfigured, transformed, changed – they see him as he is in the new creation. His face changed, his clothes dazzling white – they saw his glory. 

I’m pretty sure that this is what Paul means when he says we shall be changed. The dead shall be raised incorruptible and shall be changed as Jesus was changed on the Mount of Transfiguration. No wonder the three disciples wanted to stay there. 

Graham Kendrick catches it in his hymn Shine Jesus Shine:

As we gaze on your kingly brightness
So our faces display your likeness
Ever changing from glory to glory
Mirrored here may our lives tell your story
Shine on me, shine on me.

We are inhabitants of both worlds. Sometimes in the thin places we catch a glimpse of the glory of our parallel world, of our new creation. And because we belong to both, sometimes it is we ourselves who are that thin place where others glimpse the unconditional love of God and the wonder of the life that is to come.

I never thought I’d say this, but Kendrick gives us a prayer we might want to reflect on as the days lengthen, the sun begins to warm our bones and we prepare to celebrate Easter and the promise of eternal life:

Blaze, Spirit, blaze
Set our hearts on fire
Flow, river, flow
Flood the nations with grace and mercy
Send forth your word
Lord, and let there be light.

We shall be changed; and in the power of the Spirit, we are called to be the agents of change, the ambassadors of the Kingdom of God.

One of the things I enjoy doing is making my own bread. I admit to cheating as I use my bread maker to make the dough but the combination of flours and seeds is my own. I also shape the dough and over bake it rather than let the machine create a ‘sponge’. I cheat because I don’t have the strength in my puny wrists to really knead the dough, properly. I am, however grateful, for the machine as I am still able to make organic bread, fresh when I need it. Being a bread maker if I had to choose a phrase from today’s readings it would be the sentence from Luke’s Gospel account, where Jesus answers the devil, saying:

“One does not live by bread alone.”

On the surface those seven words seem to be obvious. A diet consisting of only bread would be pretty sparse and boring, lacking in long-term nourishment, essential minerals and vitamins. It would keep you going but it would  not really sustain you for months on end. 

Bread and water has been used as a traditional punishment meal for centuries and the bread used would have been pretty rough and hard. I don’t think that Jesus means us to take his words literally. If so, why does he use that reply to the Devil, when that malign influence tempts him to turn a stone into a loaf.

Jesus’ reply is, I think, very clever. He is actually answering the Devil’s question on many different and complicated levels. Firstly, he is saying that; ‘Yes’, he could change the stone into bread but why? For bread on its own is not much of a meal and if he really wanted to be could do more than change a stone into bread alone. There are here, echoes of the water into wine at Cana - when Jesus produced something of great quality out of relatively nothing.

Secondly, his reply to the Devil, that ‘One does not live by bread alone’ implies that, even with food that is not enough to really sustain one. for total nourishment one needs something else and that is God. Recognising that God is more important than bread is also to recognise that in God one is fully fed at all levels of one’s being. In his reply to the Devil, Jesus is talking about spiritual nourishment not just physical nourishment. He implies that without God the body would be sustained but not thrive. One can feed the physical hunger but not the spiritual yearning. It is here that we come to the nub of the Devil’s question and Jesus’ answer.

The Devil is being wily. Trying to tempt Jesus into giving into him and all that he offers, rather than remaining true to God. He is offering Jesus’ tired body and soul all that it could desire. It might be a great temptation for a man in a reduced state, as Jesus would have been after 40 days in the wilderness. Yet, Jesus remains true to God. He does not waver in his answer and he in essence basically says:

“You can give me everything but without God it is nothing.”

Without God life is not complete or fulfilling. Even if the Devil offers everything, his gifts would be mere bread and poor bread at that.

Jesus’ comment in the Gospel that without God, we are nothing, alongside the other two readings heard today, seek to remind us that it is God who fulfils our deepest needs. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans tells us that:

“God is generous to all who call upon him.”     Romans 10:12b

God he says is impartial and treats all of his children equally and without distinction. In Deuteronomy the writer encourages us to remember all that God has given to us time and time again. Not just to us but to our ancestors and descendants too. God, the writer implies, never forgets those he loves and as such we are called to be grateful.

Jesus’ seven words this morning are an encouragement to us to remember and to give thanks for all that we are and for all that we are repeatedly given. God does not give us bread alone, he gives us an abundance of life and many life enhancing gifts. Jesus is telling us to remember those truths.

Lent is a good time to spend time reflecting on God’s good gifts to us and to give thanks for them. Part of our Lenten repentance is to acknowledge that we are quite likely to often forget to be thankful and to hanker after bread alone when what we need is something much richer and spiritually deeper; such as love and friendship. 

Try to spend time this Lent pondering on your lives and the good things you have experienced and been given. Give thanks to God for them, be grateful for them and try to be aware of the times when you have perhaps taken God for granted and say; ‘Sorry’; and to say ‘Sorry’ in ways that enable you to share your gifts with others.

This morning’s readings at first glance seem to have little in common with each other but taken as a whole they speak of new life in different forms. We have Joseph meeting his brothers. The same brothers who thought him dead, now have him restored to them but in a very different form to the boy they tried to get rid of. St.Paul is discussing what resurrection is all about and in Luke we have Jesus encouraging his audience to to follow new ways. All in all they echo the resurrection and what it might mean when we use the phrase ‘new life’.

New life means, I think, changing ones ways and following paths closely aligned to the paths of Christ. Doing good to others, being prepared to give others a second chance or turning over a new leaf in one’s own life. All this involves doing things differently or living life in a way that you haven’t done before. That can mean clearing out the things, all the baggage we carry emotionally or the people who drain us rather than give us life. A sort of ‘Spring Clean’ now and again does not hurt us and it can lead us to a mini resurrection, as we discover new pursuits, new relationships, or skills we didn’t know we had. It can also re-vitalise existing friendships and spur us on to achieve those goals we have been putting off. With Lent approaching it is a good time to reflect on one’s life and to have that ‘Spring Clean’ of one’s inner being. 

I wonder how many of you, many decades ago, were caught out in some naughtiness and heard one of your elders saying “Woe betide you if you do that again!” Don’t worry - I’m not asking for a show of hands. That recollection came to me when I turned to today’s Gospel, in which Luke has Jesus use the word woe several times.

The next thought that struck me is that it isn’t at first clear how our three Bible readings fit together. There’s clearly a link between the curses and blessings of which Jeremiah speaks and our Gospel passage from Luke in which Jesus contrasts those who are blessed and those whom he addresses using the word woe. Today’s Epistle, that passage from the first letter to the Corinthians in which Paul asserts the truth and the significance of the Resurrection, seems at first hearing unconnected to the other two readings, yet it is the key which unlocks their importance for us and which enables us to see the contrast between them. 

That there is a contrast between Jeremiah and Jesus becomes clear when Jeremiah’s curses are contrasted with Jesus’ use of the word woe. The Hebrew word which Jeremiah uses means bitter, savage condemnation with no possibility of forgiveness. When an older relative said “Woe betide you…” in response to our juvenile misdemeanours, what they meant and what Jeremiah is saying was: “you’ll be punished!” When Jesus speaks of woe he is expressing sorrow. One might legitimately translate Luke 6, verse 24 like this:

“I sorrow for those of you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”

Jesus isn’t threatening punishment. He’s expressing something much more subtle, he’s blending two things which we sinful humans find it difficult to hold together - judgement and empathy. Much that is wrong with our public discourse and our discussion of social issues stems from our inability to understand that judgement and empathy aren’t polar opposites, that they can and must work together. 

The judgement in Jesus’ words about the rich is clear - they have received their consolation - they have got what they wanted, but they haven’t wanted the right things. Their desire has been misdirected. The same applies to all the others about whom Jesus uses the word woe - the seekers after material comfort, entertainment and popularity. And how contemporary those desires seem. Yet the judgement is blended with compassion.

“I sorrow for those of you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”

Jesus’ approach poses questions that we need to ask of ourselves. Am I being judgmental in a way which lacks compassion?  Am I going to the opposite extreme and allowing compassion to elbow aside moral judgement. To wrestle with such issues is part of our Christian calling. As we look forward to Lent, these questions might be a fruitful agenda for self-examination every time we watch or listen to a news bulletin or engage with social media.

And then we turn to the Beatitudes, the blessings that Jesus confers on the poor, the hungry, the sad, the marginalised and the persecuted. On one level he is radically attacking the view which prevailed in those days that wealth and happiness were signs of God’s approval - and not just in those days, for what we now call the Prosperity Gospel still finds expression in some Christian denominations. Jesus is also demonstrating solidarity with those who suffer. He has no fixed abode, no regular source of income; he experiences grief, sorrow and temptation. He knows what it means to be unpopular and he will die like a slave or a criminal on account of his actions and beliefs. 

The Beatitudes are statements of faith, not descriptions of current experience. They seem to invite a negative response from those to whom they are addressed, those whose lives are difficult, diminished, uncomfortable or imperilled - those who have reasons not to feel blessed  and yet they are also an invitation to trust in God, to have the trust of which Jeremiah speaks:

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD.

And that is why the compilers of the Lectionary chose today’s reading from 1 Corinthians to point us from Jeremiah to the Gospel. The Resurrection of Jesus is the basis of our trust in God. Without the Resurrection there would be no Gospel to read, no Church in which it is preached and shared and the Beatitudes would, with all the teaching of Jesus, be lost to posterity. 

Those concerning whom Christ expresses woe have been captivated by the things of this world. Those whom Christ calls blessed have been distressed by the adversity they have experienced. Our calling is to have faith not in ourselves, nor in our experiences and circumstances, whether good or bad. Faith isn’t about what happens to me, it’s about what happened to Jesus Christ. Through Lent, which begins in two and half weeks, and Holy Week  and the commemoration of Christ’s passion we look forward to Easter and to the Resurrection, God’s vindication and affirmation of the blessings and promises in today’s Gospel.