Lent Sermon

Brilliant white light-flicker shimmers; steel-gray on the wind above soft-rolled, angry cotton, dirty and coldly clouding the wind-blown, wool-white blanket below, softly dusted spindly pine and desert scrub bric-a-brac over bedrock color of claret – no sound, all muffled soft, enwrapped in winter like an icy blanket. Call it imagery: visual, tactile, aural; call it figurative language in metaphor or simile; call it description – call it what you will, but recognize what it is…just a moment in time, a snapshot, going nowhere, doing nothing – a picture. In the world of literature, one might enjoy such a picture, but the argument could be made that, for all the beauty of imagery, plot is king. Plot paints the wintery, windblown, desert highland the canvas for the character: the lone rider, gun over shoulder, blood dripping from one boot, face hard-set into the sunrise, a pillar of smoke at his back, family and home burning and dead – it puts description, into the journey of story – with somewhere behind and somewhere to go – plot gives picture meaning. As we consider again the season of Lent, with its vivid visuals and the fetid features of sin, one very important thing to keep in mind is plot. Not just to get stuck in the descriptors, but to see them in the plots unfolding. We’ll attend to a small portion of Luke’s account tonight in that way: that we Don’t Passover the Plots in Lent. Luke writes in chapter 22:1-6…

Following our theme should be no problem – as you heard, even the most casual ear catches plots galore in the picture Luke presents. But first, maybe how we got here – the backstory? In establishing a plot, usually an author employs exposition or background information about the setting, the characters, the plo...

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... sin, the canvas of life: a pack walking together, at times limping and lame or strong, missteps and pitfalls around, but faces-sure fixed for a sunrise, the yawning maw of death at our backs, family and home waiting ahead – brilliant warm light-flicker shimmers there, no sound but joy, enwrapped in God’s love like a blanket. God puts the description of our sin into the journey of his salvation story. With somewhere behind and somewhere to go, God’s plot gives our pictures meaning. In literature, it’s sometimes called the “long-view” ending – it tells what happens to the characters a significant time into the future. The beautiful details of the image of Christ, our Passover Lamb, mean one thing for our future picture. Call it resolution, call it conclusion, call it the “long-view” ending – call it what you will, but recognize what kind it will be – a happy one.