Genesis 12.1-4, Psalm 121, John 3.1-17
The Second Sunday of Lent, 5 March 2023
Eldroth, Clapham
I’d like to begin with a few words about the Psalm, because it is a popular one with people around here. Often requested at weddings and funerals, most recently at the service of thanksgiving and commemoration for Robert Hird, who lived all his life at Rawlinshaw Farm, Austwick.
As I said at that service, for a Dales farmer like Robert, it’s an everyday thing to lift up your eyes to the hills. It’s a thing which you do at the start of each day, when you may be lifting up your eyes to hills drenched by rain, or covered in snow, or occasionally even scorched with sun. It’s a thing which is done when you’re setting out from the farmhouse wondering what you’ll find when you get up to the high places: what those creatures have been doing overnight, what unforeseen tasks might lie ahead.
I lift up my eyes to the hills;
from where is my help to come?
My help comes from the Lord,
the maker of heaven and earth.
It’s the same whether we’re a farmer or anyone else who spends our lives beneath Ingleborough; for whether the times are good, or the times are hard, that view is so uplifting in itself; it’s no wonder that some people tell me that while they don’t often go to church, they do find their spiritual uplift whilst walking out on these hills, or even just gazing on them through their window.
Those who are Christians will share such experiences, but we are also daily uplifted by the thought that the God who created this good earth, with its wondrous hills, is the One who helps us through our times on his good earth, is the One who welcomes us to heaven when our time has come.
We may view Lent as being a sober time, a time for recognising our shortcomings and repenting of our failings. That’s certainly a part of it, inasmuch as Lent is a time in which we’re invited to self-reflection before God.
But Jesus was clear that ‘God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’
And this means that we must also view Lent as a time of uplift: because we’re seeking God’s help with our intention to turn around and start over again, and we should expect his blessing as we do, because that is something which God longs for us to do. Far from stopping to condemn us for our sins, Jesus described this new beginning as being ‘born from above’, sometimes translated as being ‘born again’.
Now we might want to ask, as Nicodemus did, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old?’ After all, we can’t go back into our mother’s womb.
Which is of course, true. But the sort of rebirth which Jesus was talking about is the same sort of rebirth which we could say we experience every morning:
When we rouse ourselves from sleep, and open the curtains on a new day;
When we lift up our eyes to the hills around us, to the big light in the big sky.
The sort of rebirth which Jesus was talking about is the kind which helps us to face the unforeseen tasks which might lie ahead, which gives us the strength to embrace the difficulties we expect will be coming.
The Lord shall keep you from all evil;
it is he who shall keep your soul.
The Lord shall keep watch over your going out
and your coming in,
from this time forth for evermore.
So yes, you can be born after having grown old. There’s even an argument that having grown old you’ve a deeper understanding of what rebirth means in practice. For we have each been through many new beginnings over our span of years. Some of them accidental, some self-imposed, some of them leaps of faith. Whether through changes in family life, or job, or home: we’ve all made new beginnings; we know the challenges and the trepidation and the joys involved in being born again.
Look at Abram, seventy-five years old when he left his old home to set out on a journey of faith, drawn by God’s promise that his new home would be a place of blessing for him and for all people.
On our journey through life we look up. We look up to the creation around us in all its beauty and wonder, and that helps us know our place within it. We look up to Christ upon the cross in humble recognition that all that self-giving love which took him there is love for us, it is a love which longs for our companionship with him now and through eternity.
So whether the times are good for us this Lent, or the times are hard, let us keep looking upwards, in hope and praise, in confidence in God’s new beginnings.
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