[Mcgregorpage] McGregorPage #650, Lent 1, 3/1/09

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First Sunday in Lent – March 1, 2009

Genesis 9:8 17
Psalms 25:1 10
1 Peter 3:18 22
Mark 1:9 15

Time Out

The sights and sounds of evil are pervasive in our society.  I mean our daily exposure to the willful abuse of one human being against another.  The news displays crimes against persons.  TV dramas act out violence against persons.  The emphasis on sexual images does violence to the fully human nature potential in people.  I tuned in Public Television in flight from all of that and saw the placid face of Bernard Madoff then a documentary on Guantanamo.

Alas we are people of unclean thoughts, and we live in a land of unclean thoughts    to paraphrase Isaiah.  Is there a remedy short of dropping a hot coal on our brains?  When Eve and Adam coveted God's ability to know good and evil, it must have been the knowledge of evil that most intrigued them.  We are now so full of the knowledge of evil that our minds and hearts yearn for a moment's rest.

Could we find rest from the knowledge of evil by meditating on Baptism?  Could we find, in treasuring our own baptism, a cleansing of our minds?  Would it help to take the immediate memory of our baptism to the wilderness with us the way Jesus=2
0did?  Is the season of Lent such an invitation?

What about God's tolerance for the evil of human kind?  The Flood Story is about the limit of that tolerance.  Peter connects the Flood Story with Baptism.  Says it "prefigured" Baptism. God saved eight people from the evil generation around them by means of water.  God saves us from the evil generation around us by means of water through Baptism. Then, does Baptism replace the destruction of the human race as God's response to our evil? 

When I was baptized, was I participating in the salvation of the whole human race?   Was I actually doing something on behalf of everyone as well as myself? Peter casts Baptism as we normally think of it, a benefit to the one being baptized, Viz. "as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ..."  But, could "good conscience" not work both ways?  Baptism permits God, in good conscience, to allow human life to go on in spite of our continuing rebellion.  

So, instead of furtive glances at the heavens to see if it is today that God's wrath will descend on us; instead of thinking that the gaping hole in the ozone layer and the disappearance of green frogs and the emergence of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics are harbingers of death and pestilence on the horizon, we might look rather to our Baptism and God's invitation to lead lives of purity and discipline as Jesus did     not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world. 

0AMay these thoughts strengthen you. 
 
An Open Letter to Fellow Pastors 
>From Roland McGregor, United Methodist Pastor 
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