1. Fifth Sunday in Lent
   1. Last “normal” Sunday in Lent
      1. Next Sun – Palm & Passion Sunday – we will read together the Gospel account of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution. 
      2. And that’s our gateway into Holy Week and all its rich and varied liturgies, arriving at last at Easter. 
   2. Gospel today points us forward – but I want to pause where we are, and reflect on how we’ve been worshiping together in Lent, and particularly on the Litany of Repentance that we use at the beginning of worship in this season. 
2. The Litany of Repentance 
   1. Longstanding practice of the Church to begin worship in the season of Lent with some kind of “penitential order” – a piece of liturgy that invites self-reflection and offering up our sins to God. 
   2. The Prayer Book invites the use of the Decalogue – the Ten Commandments. You may have done that in other places, or here in earlier years. 
      1. This year we had them in the lectionary just weeks ago – the broadest outlines of the way of life that God asks of God’s people, during their wilderness journey. 
      2. Thou shalt not make any graven image, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not bear false witness, honor thy father and thy mother, honor the sabbath day, and so on. 
      3. Relevant and important, of course! But can also feel a little abstract. 
         1. I can always reflect on where covetousness, or bearing false witness, are part of my daily life.
         2. But I haven’t murdered anyone, or made any graven images, lately… 
   3. We use the Ash Weds litany. Written for this prayer book (the 1979) by one of the folks deeply involved in that project, Massey Shepherd. 
      1. I’ve been hearing it, praying it, it on Ash Weds my whole life, and I find it very powerful.
      2. Many of its biddings call my attention to the places where I fall short of my intentions, and God’s desires for me, in daily life. 
      3. Got permission from Bishop Miller some years back to use this at the beginning of Lent worship instead of the Decalogue. 
      4. Today I’d like to reflect on the Litany a little in light of the lectionary texts of the day. 
3. When we pray the Litany of Penitence, and respond with recognition, acknowledgement, and repentance – visibly or inwardly – we are living in, living out, some small part of the vision of the prophet Jeremiah: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts… No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” 
   1. This text seems to anticipate a change in the relationship between God and humanity, a movement from a law of external rules to a law of the heart. 
      1. A theme the apostle Paul develops in some of his letters, as he describes his own journey of faith. 
      2. But it is a mistake to map this onto the movement from Judaism to Christianity. 
         1. For one thing, Jeremiah is speaking 600 years before the time of Jesus. 
         2. For another thing: Judaism was also always intended to be a religion of the heart – and Christianity has often failed in the direction of acting like a religion of external rules. 
   2. Over the course of the Old Testament, God forms, and renews, covenants with God’s people over and over and over again. Again and again, God’s people fail, turn away, lose the plot; again and again, God calls them back, in anger, anguish, and love. 
   3. This is an unusually hopeful bit of the book of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah spent his prophetic career trying to warn Judea’s rulers that they had strayed so far from God’s ways that they were facing certain doom. 
      1. That they were, in fact, about to be conquered, dragged into exile, with Jerusalem and the temple destroyed – which happens, in Jeremiah’s lifetime. 
      2. Punishment or natural consequences – splitting hairs…
   4. In today’s text God speaking through Jeremiah is addressing the reality that the Great Temple will be destroyed, and the Tablets of the Law, lost. 
      1. BUT that doesn’t mean God’s people will lose their connection, their covenant relationship, with God. Rather, they will need to take it in – and live it out – in new ways. To internalize it as a way of life that they can carry with them, in new places and circumstances. 

4. I find it very powerful to pray the Ash Wednesday litany together, in this season. I sometimes wish we could keep doing it – though if we did it all the time I think we’d stop noticing it! 
   1. But during these Lenten weeks as we listen, reflect and respond, we are allowing ourselves to be formed by it, which is the point of liturgy, of praying in these set patterns week by week. 
   2. We hear, and receive, and respond, and become, slowly, incrementally, people who don’t have to be told God’s ways, but have them written in our hearts. 
5. Let’s look, now, at this rather challenging text from the Gospel of John. 
   1. You may well wonder: Did those poor Greeks ever get to meet Jesus? It seems like they are left standing at the edge of the crowd, forgotten, as the story moves on. 
   2. Jesus’ response to Andrew and Philip isn’t as irrelevant as it sounds. Jesus hears the arrival of these Greeks as a sign that his earthly mission is all but fulfilled. 
      1. “Greeks” may literally mean people of Greek language and culture, here, but also, “Greek” is shorthand in the New Testament for any and all non-Jews – as in Paul’s famous text: In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. 
      2. The hope that Israel’s God will become known and honored among all peoples of the world has a deep history in the Hebrew Scriptures.
      3. An easy example: Song of faith from Isaiah that we sang in Epiphany: Nations will stream to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning. 
      4. The Gospels understand Jesus as a next step in the fulfillment of that ancient hope. 
         1. In Luke, Zechariah sings that Jesus will be “A light to enlighten the nations.”
         2. Matthew tells the story of the magi, wise scholars from other nations who come to honor Jesus.
         3. And in John, these Greeks come seeking him – and Jesus understands this as a cue that it’s time to turn towards the cross, towards fulfilling the holy narrative that his followers will go on to share far and wide. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 
   3. Jesus continues: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
      1. An echo of what we heard several weeks ago in the 8th chapter of Mark’s Gospel: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” 
      2. The Greek word translated as life here isn’t zoe, which simply means life. In both Mark and John, Jesus uses the word psyche (psoo-kay), a many-layered word that can mean life-force or breath, or the soul as the seat of feelings and desires, or the essence of self apart from the body. 
         1. So, for example, when George Harrison sings about “the people who gain the world but lose their soul,” that’s  also a fine translation. 
         2. We’re not talking about literal physical life here, but a more encompassing sense of who you are and your way of living. 

5. 4. This is a hard teaching! The idea that if we love our life – if we try to save our life – we will lose it. 
      1. Let me make this personal: I love my life! There are things I don’t love about the larger world and the times we’re living in. But overall, I love the life I am getting to live, and feel grateful for it. 
         1. Do I think God doesn’t want me to love my work as the rector of St. Dunstan’s? My roles as daughter, wife, mother? Moments of deep sharing and growth with colleagues and friends; moments of rewarding, important work; moments of joy and wonder at God’s creation? 
            1. No, I think God wants those things for me. For us.
         2. I also don’t think Jesus really wants us to hate our lives. I think he’s using some poetic hyperbole here, as he does sometimes. 
            1. I’ve known folks going through seasons of hating their lives. It does not seem to me that that state of mind makes someone more open to God’s call. 
      2. What I think Jesus does mean is that we have to be open to laying things down, letting things go – possibly including BIG things –  to follow where God leads. That we should be careful not to love the good things in our lives so much that there’s no love left for other things – things at might lead us outside the comfort and pleasure of our lives as they are now. 
         1. One of the core messages of the Gospel – especially the part of the story we’re coming up on now – is that there are things worth giving up everything for. Worth dying for. 
            1. And if we want to be followers of Jesus, we can’t close the door on the possibility of being called into those moments or movements. We have to be people with the will and capacity to choose change, growth, transformation, that may take us outside our comfort zones.
   5. The reason I find the Ash Wednesday Litany so powerful is that for me, it does a great job of pointing out some of the places where my comfort with my life as it is, and various distractions and desires, could stand in the way of my discipleship – my readiness to go where Jesus calls me. 
      1. If I imagine my life as a kind of Venn diagram, the overlap of the circles is the stuff that God and I both care about, like doing my ministry here, with and for you, well; and doing my part to care for my loved ones. 
         1. Then on one side there’s the stuff I care about more than God does. In the language of the Litany, stuff like that intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and self-indulgent appetites and ways. And there’s always envy of those more fortunate than ourselves. 
         2. And on the other side there’s the stuff God cares about more than I do. Again in the language of the Litany: Indifference to human need and suffering. Lack of concern for those who come after. Prejudice and contempt towards those who differ from us. 
         3. I wonder which phrases resonate with you, hit you in the heart or gut, week by week? … 
         4. I wonder what dying to those urges, attachments, habits, could look like? 
         5. I wonder: If we could lay them down – plant them in the earth, like seeds – what fruit they might bear? 
   6. When we talked about this text at Zoom Compline on Wednesday evening, one of us wondered out loud: What life do you love? 
      1. I don’t how ready I am to lay down, set aside, or even substantially change my life, to follow where Jesus leads or calls. 
      2. But the Ash Wednesday Litany gives me words to reflect on some places where I love my life – where I might fight to keep my life as it is – for reasons that matter to me and not to God. 
      3. Growth in Christ means slowly, haltingly, year by year, expanding the overlap zone in that Venn diagram. 
6. Which brings me – briefly, I promise – to a third text. Not Hebrews; he’s doing his own thing. But this morning’s Collect. It’s on the front of your Sunday Supplement. 
   4. The Sunday Collects are a set of prayers from the prayer book, assigned to each Sunday. They are tied to the church year – this is the collect for the fifth Sunday in Lent – but not to the lectionary scriptures, since that’s on a three-year cycle.
   5. The collects vary widely in age and, frankly, quality. Some of them are pretty boring. But I rather like this one. 
   6. It’s one of the old ones – there’s a version of it in a book called the Gelasian Sacramentary, from the 8th century or earlier. Thomas Cranmer translated it from Latin for the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549. 
   7. Here’s the version from the 1662 version of the Prayer Book – quite similar to what’s in your bulletin today: 
      1. O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men, graunt unto thy people, that they maye love the thyng, whiche thou commaundest, and desyre, that whiche thou doest promes [promise]; that emong the sondery [sundry] and manifold chaunges of the worlde, oure heartes maye surely there bee fixed, whereas true joyes are to be founde; through Christe our Lorde.
   8. God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners…  I love the word “unruly” there – perhaps this wasn’t the original sense, but to me it has almost a playful feel. It makes me think of a classroom full of kindergartners who don’t want to do the assignment. Not necessarily bad or ill intentioned, just… unruly. And yes, my inner life feels like that sometimes! How about you? 
   9. Then the prayer says, “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise…” This is such lovely, generous language to me – not punitive; not “Bend us to your will” or “Scare us into obedience.” Instead, the prayer asks for inward transformation into people who want what God wants, for ourselves, our neighbors, the world.
   10. I love the next part too: “that… our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” We’re not trying to avoid the fires of hell; we’re responding to the promise of holy joy. God’s purposes are for healing, renewal, goodness, and delight, and in this collect we pray to be able to see that and be drawn towards it. 
   11. It’s a good collect for Lent. It’s a good collect, perhaps, for daily or at least weekly use. 

6. 9. I prayed it on my own at the beginning of worship; let’s pray it together now… 
   10. Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The history of our collect: 

https://liturgy.co.nz/reflections/easter5

WorkingPreacher commentary on Jeremiah:

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-jeremiah-3131-34-21