1 Lent Year A 2/26/2023
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
Rev. Mark A. Lafler
Today marks the first Sunday in Lent.
A new season has begun as we take the journey of preparation toward Holy Week.
Lent is a time when we focus our attention on Christ with greater care and intention.
The themes are plenty:
Suffering, self-denial, and temptation…
Prayer, fasting, and reading of God’s Holy Word…
Sin, grace, and forgiveness…
All of these themes are mentioned in one way or another in our readings today.
And so I hope we are mindful of these themes and thoughts and lessons as we journey through this season.
One of the themes of Lent is acknowledging our wretchedness which was part of the collect for Ash Wednesday.
Wretchedness means to be extremely or deplorably bad.
Which I don’t think most of us would consider ourselves to be like this.
But if we take the comparison off of other humans
(Which we naturally do… compare ourselves with one another)
and compare us with God…
the good, loving, gracious, and perfect God…
When we compare ourselves to Jesus Christ…
The one who never broke the law of God…
Never sinned…
And gave up himself as a sacrifice for all of humanity…
Suddenly we don’t really look all that great…
And the word wretchedness is probably saying it lightly!
Lent reminds us that we have a problem called sin.
And we all have it.
St. Paul writes in Romans (3.22b-23)
…there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…
Every one of us has this internal disease of sin…
It is something we are born with…
It is something we want naturally to do…
It is something we do individually…
It is something we do corporately.
And not only do we have this problem…
We cannot fix it.
We cannot run away from it.
We don’t have the choice to simply remove it or just not have it.
We can’t really pretend it isn’t there… although many have tried.
We can’t reverse it by good deeds.
We can’t earn enough credits to have it removed.
The solution must come from someone who is not us.
We need someone outside of us to take care of the problem.
And as Christians we, by faith, believe and accept that person to be…
Jesus Christ.
Today, keeping on this topic of sin and redemption…
I want to focus on our second reading…
The reading from Romans chapter 5.
Romans is of course a theological rich book…
Greatly influential on the church…
And certainly, any Christian theology must wrestle with its topics.
Our reading in particular brings a contrast and comparison between…
Adam and Jesus…
Sin and Grace…
Death and Life.
In talking about Adam, our reading says:
…sin came into the world through one man…
And then…
death came through sin,
and so death spread to all because all have sinned…
So, through Adam all have sinned.
In theological terms, we call this original sin.
We understand sin to be something we are born with.
Adam’s sin has been imputed to all of us.
As our reading says:
…by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners…
We can see this same understanding of original sin back in the Psalm of David (51.5)… He wrote:
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Even in early Judaic writings it is written:
O thou Adam, what hast thou done?
For though it was thou that sinned,
the evil is not fallen on thee alone,
but upon all of us that come of thee.
(2 Esdras 7.118)
Sometimes in our contemporary Western mindset,
bent on the power of individualism and identity,
we struggle with the idea that we are sinful because of the first sin of Adam…
We didn’t choose that…
We didn’t do that…
But alas, that is not the way it works.
Pelagius, the early fifth-century British monk , denied original sin…
In his view, Adam was simply the first sinner,
and everybody ever since has followed his bad example.[1]
The Church deemed this as heresy…
It is not what the scriptures teach…
And Pelagianism has been rejected by the Church universally.
So we are all tainted because of Adam…
Whose sin also brought death…
And we suffer the consequences.
This is also why it is important to understand sin not just as an individual problem, but a problem we all have collectively.
Sin has entangled upon us all…
Uniting us together in it.
Again… we may struggle with this in our western individualism…
But we corporately sin…
Failures collectively.
Racism is not just an individual sin,
but a sin we have as a nation together…
and really around the world.
In the Christian Church, the sin of abuse is not just a denominational problem,
but a problem we have as the whole church.
Whether we are talking about the sin of…
Not caring for human needs and suffering…
Polluting God’s creation…
The prejudice in our world…
We are all in this together.
We are bound in this together.
And it all stems from one person… Adam.
And that is half of what our reading from Romans is about.
The other half of our reading from Romans is about another person.
And his name is Jesus Christ.
St. Paul wrote:
For if the many died through the one man’s trespass,
(That’s Adam)
much more surely have the grace of God
and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ,
abounded for the many….
more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace
and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion
in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
Just as sin came into this world through Adam…
impacting all of us…
So God made a way through Jesus Christ for all to be saved who call upon his name.
Jesus is the new Adam…
The one who bears salvation and is redeeming all things.
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes:
God has always dealt with mankind through a head and representative.
The whole story of the human race can be summed up in terms of what has happened because of Adam,
and what has happened and will yet happen because of Christ.[2]
Just as one person did it wrong
and got us in all this trouble with sin and death,
another person did it right and got us out of it.
(Romans 5.18, The Message)
You see what became broken in Adam,
became fixed in Christ.
When Adam’s sin brought death,
Christ’s death brought life.
Adam begets sin and death,
Christ begets grace and life.
God’s throne is a throne of grace!
A throne of forgiveness…
A throne of mercy…
A throne of love.
We are no longer bound by the curse of sin through Adam…
We are children of God…
The seed of Abraham…
Co-heirs with Christ Jesus…
As believers of Jesus Christ…
As the one’s who profess Jesus as our Lord and Savior…
Being made born of the Spirit…
Being washed in the waters of repentance…
We are now clean and made righteous because of Jesus Christ…
We are a new creation…
And we are walking in the mercies of God’s grace.
…just as by the one man’s disobedience
the many were made sinners,
so by the one man’s obedience
the many will be made righteous.
(Romans 5.19)
The story of the Bible is a story of redemption.
A story of God reconciling his creation.
A story of forgiveness and love.
And we are in this story.
Walking in its ever-unfolding chapters.
So, as we embark on this Lenten journey…
As we fast and practice self-denial…
As we take on more through prayer and reading…
As we practice the attitude of Christ in our behavior…
May we remember that this season isn’t just about how wretched we are…
But also, about how amazing God’s forgiveness is…
How powerful is His grace!
I pray that you turn to him in this season…
To truly meet him in the disciplines of our faith…
And also, know him in the power of his Spirit.
May you truly know the depth of his grace in your life.
Amen.
[1] John R. W. Stott, The Message of Romans (Downers Grove: IVP Press, 1994), 150.
[2] Ibid., 152-153.