Lent
1B 2015
Father Adam Trambley
Feb 22, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
Revival of God’s
People. Our prayer theme during this
first week of Lent is Revival of God’s
People. This theme comes out of the
Seek God for the City prayer booklets
that you should have received in the mail, or are at the entrances to the
church. We will look at these weekly
themes throughout Lent because they focus on areas that require transformation as
we prepare our hearts, our churches and our world for the return of Jesus. We want our world increasing to reflect the
Kingdom of God so that everyone can live lives of love, joy, peace and justice,
and that the world will embrace Jesus fully as our Savior and Lord.
The first step in praying for the light of the gospel to
reach the whole world is to pray for the full appropriation of that light by
those of us who are already Christians.
The revival of the world starts with us, and so we begin our Lenten
prayers by praying for ourselves and the church. We see this same movement in our Gospel this
morning. Jesus comes to be baptized and
receives an experience of God’s overwhelming love and power. Then Jesus is driven into the wilderness
where his own heart and soul is seared against sin and temptation, so that he
is ready to do the work God has in store for him. After that fortifying, Jesus goes out and
proclaims the good news, calling people to repent and recognize that the
Kingdom of God has come near.
Our prayers this week are that everyone who understands
themselves as Christian will have an experience of God similar to the one Jesus
had at his baptism. Through that
experience, we pray that they will be cleansed of sin, fortified against
temptation, and prepared to do God’s work.
Many people have had such a profound experience. Yet some Christians have
not, and some who have had encounters with God have become distracted or filed
them away amid the clutter of daily life to be brought out on special occasions
and forgotten about otherwise. So our prayers
at the beginning of this Lent begin with a longing for a revival in our own
hearts, with a desire for God to touch our lives in overpowering ways that
breaks us down, shake us up, and draw us into his heart. We want our prayers to
lead us and all God’s people deep into the fire of God’s presence where we are
transformed.
Experiencing the truly awesome love of God is where we are
shown our own sinfulness and failings in ways that they can be cauterized and
purified. God’s glorious light
illuminates our own darkness. We are
forced to let go of our deep-rooted pride and self-sufficiency because we
understand who we are as beloved, yet compared to God tiny, children of God. As we let go of our need to justify ourselves
and to justify our actions in the abundance of God’s love, we can be open
enough to see the effects of our sins on ourselves and others. We can see how we set up barriers between us
and God. We can see where our lives lead
us along paths to death instead of paths of life. Part of our fervent Lenten prayer is to encounter
God with such power that we and all God’s people become so clearly aware of
where we are failing that we truly repent.
We pray that God submerges us so fully in the fire of his glory that all
our sinfulness is illuminated and then burned off. We pray not only “lead us not into
temptation” but also for the flame of God to purify our desires and the
imaginations of our hearts that too often draw us away from loving God with our
whole heart and mind and soul and strength.
We pray that God would come to each and every one of us in this church
and in every church this Lent to purify us from sin and fortify us for his
ministry. These prayers are the prayers
we pray through the Seek God
resource, but they are also some of the first prayers in the Great Litany we
have just prayed together.
Then, as we have encountered God, we pray that God will lead
us into increasing encounters with him through persistent prayer and passionate
worship. Maybe it sounds odd to pray to
be drawn into prayer and worship, but as anyone knows who has intended to pray and
then found themselves dealing with all the other things around the house, or
who intended to get up and come to church but somehow didn’t make it, we need
God’s help to attend to prayer and worship.
We especially need God’s clear call for us to respond to him at the
levels that bring us to the kind of passionate intimacy that God wants all of
his beloved children to know. We want
God to draw us into regular prayer for his people throughout the world that are
broken and to whom our prayers can bring God’s love and healing and power. We want God to draw us into passionate
worship such that our experience in church is an outpouring of the love that God
has for us, or of the overwhelming gratitude that we have for God, and of the
joy overflowing our souls through the tears and songs and profound silence that
come when we feel ourselves in the presence of God. Maybe sometimes these experiences come at the
altar rail, or during a hymn or at some other time, but we pray that we will
look forward to every experience of prayer and worship because we recognize
that God is going to show up and do something amazing.
When we experience God regularly in prayer and worship, we
open ourselves up to God’s Spirit flowing out of us. We live into that promise of Jesus that
streams of living water will flow out of those that believe in him. We pray this Lent that we will become so
seeped in the God’s presence, that the waters of his life will flow from us and
provide healing and relief for the dry, desolate, and barren places around
us. We look to those times when in our
prayers, in our words, and in our deeds, others will experience the light of
God’s love and presence radiating out of our lives. We pray that husbands and wives, parents and
children, grandparents and aunts and uncles and all family members would be so
filled with God’s love for one another that the families of God’s people would
be strengthened. We pray that members of
the church, the household of God, would nourish and build each other up with
the gifts of the Spirit so that God’s people would be knit into the Body of
Christ.
Finally, we pray that God would come and dwell in this
place. We pray that God’s glory would
fill this sanctuary. We pray that God’s
people here would be so transformed and holy and loving that the world around
us would recognize that God is present here and come and see.
This Lent, we are praying for nothing less than the
transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God. Our prayers start this week with our revival
and the revival of the entire people of God.
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