2 Lent c 2025

By The Rev. Dr. Molly Scherm

​Our readings this morning speak to us of unease, of longing, waiting, and lamenting.  As is so often the case, scripture touches the realities we are living in our own lives.

We’ve heard two stories.  Both of them involve longing and waiting, and they shine a light on what it is to live in the complexities of being faithful.

The first of the two stories involves a moment of encounter between God and Abram from the book of Genesis.   Abram had been spoken to by God twice before, at this point, but while God had spoken, Abram had not responded with words.  Now, Abram replies to God.  

He has a burning question, an unfulfilled longing he can no longer keep silence with:  he has no heir, no inheritance.  

For Abram’s people, having “everlasting life” consisted in having the legacy of descendants to carry on one’s memory, and an estate to provide for them.

At the point of today’s passage in Gen. 15, God had already promised heirs and land, but to Abram, the promise is not really real.  He has heard God’s promises, but has no lived reality through which to make sense of them.  For Abram, they are empty words.

He has been faithful: he has followed God’s direction in leaving his home without knowing where he is going, traveled to places appointed, and continued through various challenges and hardships. 

But he is having an increasingly hard time trusting the promises when there has been no confirmation IN EXPERIENCE.  Abram has been waiting, and waiting is eroding his confidence.

So God reiterates the promise:  

“Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be.  I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.”

But still Abram longs for a sign, and questions:

"O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?"

And so Abram and God enact a ritual.  To us it is a pretty strange ritual, but it is customary to that time and culture.  When two parties are making covenant, they jointly offer animal sacrifice, splitting animal carcasses into two and passing between them.   The act symbolically states their willingness to suffer same fate as the split carcasses if they should dare to break their covenant promises.

In the Genesis text, a flaming torch – foreshadowing the pillar of fire that will indicate God’s presence in leading Israelites in the wilderness after their delivery from Egypt – passes between the parts, signifying God’s commitment to God’s promises.  The storyteller doesn’t tell us, however, whether Abram’s disquiet was eased by the vision.

Today’s gospel also speaks of longing and of waiting

Jesus’ daily ministry involved the work of healing, providing what was needed to those he met.  He demonstrated the presence of God’s Realm, God’s Kingdom, breaking into the world by his acts of providing what was needed - 

• exorcizing demons where they had devastated people’s lives, feeding             where there was hunger, bringing acceptance and forgiveness to the 

        marginalized and outcast 

• and always, healing – bringing wholeness.  

Jesus does these acts of deliverance and healing as demonstration of his message of God’s love and God’s nearness.

At the point at which we listen in on today’s story, Jesus is also traveling gradually toward Jerusalem – the city that had historically rejected and killed the prophets.  He had received recent news of Herod’s beheading of John the Baptizer, and now a group of  Pharisees inform him that Herod wants to kill him.   

Jesus knows, in general at least, that this is the fate he is traveling toward, but has his own timetable.  He has more work to do before his work is complete – today and tomorrow (he says)- … and on the third day I will finish my work. 

Third day refers to the time of resurrection.  Jesus’ work includes his daily ministry AND his arrest and death and resurrection, which will allow his disciples to finally understand the whole point of his life and teaching, that God’s Realm is present here and now.  Jesus’ ministry does not end with his death, but is completed on the third day.

Just as Abram longed for an heir and a legacy, and for certainty regarding God’s promises, Jesus expresses, in response to the news of Herod’s dangerous intentions, his own longing.   
    
His response to the Pharisees’ reminder of what lies ahead is compassion.  

• Jesus wishes he could save Jerusalem from its own history and its own impulses.  
• Jesus longs to comfort and protect the very city that wants to kill him. 

He envisions Jerusalem as brood of vulnerable chicks that need protection of mother’s  wing to save them, and envisions himself – in beautiful feminine imagery - as that sheltering mother.

Abram longs for an heir, a legacy, understanding of G’s promises.

Herod longs to eliminate Jesus as a threat.

Jesus longs to protect Jerusalem from its own worst inclinations.

Longing for that which will bring us respite from the worries and fears of life is always a part of the human experience.  Often we long for relief from the difficulties of our personal lives, for ourselves and those we love

• for resolution of illness and conflict, 
• for peace in living with losses and challenges that we cannot change

In this time in the history of our nation and the world we are also living with tremendous anxiety (and often with anger) in relation to the ways in which the policies and practices of our nation have shifted.  We read in the news, daily, of the loss of protection for the vulnerable in our nation and world, of the loss of livelihood for many, of the abandonment of measures that support the wellbeing of our environment.

So, much of our longing, like Abram’s, is for assurance that the future is not as bleak as it looks.

For Abram, and for the author of the psalm we sang together this morning, the answer is that we must maintain trust in God to provide what we need, and that we must accept God’s timetable, rather than our own.  Honestly, it is hard to feel reassured by this when we see suffering, and fear that terrible mistakes are being made in our world.  At the same time, there is some relief (for me, at least,) in knowing that even as we are obligated to do what we can do to work for what is right, at the end of the day, we can leave it in God’s hands.

From Jesus we learn two things. 

• First, we learn that compassion for those who make our lives difficult is the way of 

love that leads us more deeply into God’s Realm.  Now is the time for us to commit ourselves deeply to prayer for those in the government, as well as those in our personal lives, who frighten and anger us.

• In addition, we learn from Jesus that while we wait for God’s time to come, for the 

completion of God’s salvation, we have the work of everyday ministry to do.   For us, even as we long for “justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24), we are called to put one foot in front of the other by feeding the hungry and reaching out to the lonely and reducing our carbon footprints.

And in these troubling times, we need to up our games by calling out for the justice we long for, by sending our postcards to the White House, and calling our representatives, and signing petitions. 

As we continue to move forward with as much patience and hope as we can muster, let us remember and find comfort in the words of the psalm we have sung together this morning:

The Lord is my light and my salvation; 
whom then shall I fear?

One thing have I asked of the Lord;
one thing I seek; *
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life;

O tarry and await the Lord's pleasure;
be strong, and God shall comfort your heart; *
wait patiently for the Lord.

Amen

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