A sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, February 18, 2024. The scriptures are Genesis 9:8-17, Psalm 25:1-9, 1 Peter 3:18-22 and Mark 1:9-15.

This year, on Ash Wednesday, we again offered ashes on the front patio, at the gate. Between the cold weather and the competing activities of Valentine’s Day, I don’t think we had quite as many people outdoors as some years. I did meet a Turkish neighbor who explained that while she’s not Christian, she likes the idea that ashes remind her to live each day to the fullest. “It’s a kind of ‘memento mori,’ right?” she asked.  “Well, yes, in a way,” I tried to explain, and gave her what I hoped was a good, proper ash cross on her forehead.

Christians took up ashes from Jewish customs around grief, the idea being that ashes show one’s remorse for sin, and one’s reliance upon God for life and renewal.

Today’s scriptures give us another important symbol, and one that the scriptures tells us was given by God: the rainbow.

The rainbow serves as a reminder, pointing to something in the past, but it also serves as encouragement, pointing a way forward. Even if we can’t see the end, even if the end of the rainbow shifts as we move along, it still urges us to look, to dream, and to imagine what lies ahead. It encourages us to trust where God leads. The rainbow is a good image for our beginning of a new season of Lent.

A contemporary hymn writer captures the tone of this season as he sings,

This is the day for new beginnings.
Time to remember and move on.
Time to believe what love is bringing;
laying to rest the pain that’s gone.
[This is a Day of New Beginnings, by Brian Wren]

A “time to remember and move on.” It’s the rainbow, again. Remembering and moving on. Both are central to the spiritual life and the season of Lent itself can help us to remember and to move on.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is baptized. A voice is heard from heaven saying, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And before the water even dries or the voice of God fades away, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Into the desert, he goes for 40 days and there he comes face to face with all kinds of temptations. Does that not sound a whole lot like the life we live? At some point we all probably know that phenomenon of one minute, knowing we are God’s beloved (we can feel it, we don’t doubt it, everything is going right), but then in what seems like all too after, we find ourselves surrounded by temptation. There are all kinds of temptations, but most of them are symptomatic, nagging, sorts of things. Perhaps the greatest temptation is more subtle—it has to do with forgetting. In the midst of temptation, we can forget who we are, and momentarily, we can forget who God is.

“Remembering” is so much a part of our faith tradition. Over and over, again, scripture says, “Remember!”

Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt.
Remember the covenant I made with your ancestors.
Remember not the former things.
Remember the devotion of your youth.
Remember the law.
Remember those in prison.
Remember, I am with you always.
Remember me when you come into your kingdom.

In Mark’s version of the temptation story, we’re not told how exactly how Jesus was tempted, or really how he faced down the temptation. But we know that he survived it alongside the wild beasts, and he even felt the presence of God’s holy angels.

Matthew and Luke both give us more details about Jesus’ temptations. They say that when the devil suggests that Jesus ignore hunger, listen to his stomach, and turn stone into bread; Jesus remembers. “It is written,” he says to the devil, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” The devil shows Jesus the kingdoms of the worlds and suggests to Jesus they could be his for the taking, but again, Jesus remembers the first commandment, that God alone is Lord of Heaven and Earth. God’s will be done. And then when the devil tries to get Jesus to jump off the tower of the temple and summon up angels to carry him to the ground, Jesus again remembers scripture. 

But he also remembers more than scripture. Jesus remembers who he is, he remembers his baptism and that he is a child of God. He remembers whose he is, that God is watching, is waiting and is even now, aware and present and offering his love.

Martin Luther writes that he sometimes fought off the devil by shouting at him, “I am baptized.” That’s what we do when we make the sign of the cross, and when we dip our finger in holy water and place a little on our foreheads: we are reminding ourselves that we are baptized, that we are loved, and that God is in charge. In the same way, when we see a rainbow, we can recall the covenant God has made—that God will always take care of us and that God is with us. We have not only the old covenant (God’s promises to the people of Israel), but we also have the New Covenant, God’s promise in Jesus Christ sealed and shared with us in the sacrament of bread and wine. Memory keeps these signs and sacraments close by us.

Baptism, Holy Communion, symbols of faith help us to remember. But God also gives us other “memory helps.” Spiritual disciplines like prayer, meditative reading, fasting, keeping a journal, studying, hospitality, almost any activity that is given over to God, and that allows us to give ourselves over to God can be a spiritual discipline. Practiced– that is done over and over again– spiritual disciplines remind us of God. They remind us of our reliance on God, of our need for God, of our connection with God.

In the days ahead, as we practice spiritual disciplines, as we notice the symbols of the season, perhaps giving some things up and taking on other things, may God sharpen our memory and make us alert and awake to temptation, that we might remember the covenant God has made with us. May God strengthen us in the face of every temptation.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.