Families in Transition: Sermon for 4 Lent, Year C

Transitions are difficult. Conventional wisdom and life experience both confirm this to be true. But nothing confirms this age-old truth more than having an infant and a toddler in the house. For them, and as a result for the entire family, transitions are not just difficult…they are brutal. Whether it is the transition from the bed to the breakfast table to the car for school, or from playing in the yard to the dinner table to the bath and to bed, transitions always seem to involve pleading, negotiations, bargaining, and meltdowns.

But children aren’t the only ones who struggle with transition. Adults do too…we just act out in different, sometimes more subtle ways than toddlers do. We adults are not immune to the disorientation and anxiety that transitions cause us.

Our scripture lessons today have a lot to do with the difficulty of transition. Our lesson from Joshua is all about the Israelites’ transition from 40 years of wandering in the wilderness to finally inhabiting the Promised Land of Canaan. This passage is set within the broader context of the transition in leadership from Moses to Joshua. Needless to say, this was a disorienting and anxious time for Joshua and the Israelites.

One reason that the Israelites had to spend 40 years in the wilderness was that they weren’t ready for the freedom and prosperity that awaited them in the Promised Land. Though they were no longer bound by the chains of slavery to the Egyptians, they had not yet fully transitioned away from slavery.

Those of us who have been engaged in prison ministry know that freedom is never instantaneous…it is a social, emotional, and spiritual process that can take years to attain. That is why there is so much recidivism in the prison system – many prisoners simply do not know how to be free. And that is why it is so important for us to invest in transitional programs for folks who are released from prison, so that they can, after paying their debt to society, go on to live productive, healthy lives.

And such was the case with the Israelites. At one point, they even complained to Moses and expressed their desire to return to Egypt, where they at least knew where they were, what their routine would be, and when their meals would come. And even though they had experienced God’s mighty power through the remarkable Exodus from Egypt, making their way through the parted waters of the Red Sea, their impatience and anxiety got the best of them. So they made and worshipped a golden calf. At that point, God and Moses knew that a lot needed to happen before the Israelites were ready to live in true freedom.

While Moses’ tenure as the leader of the Israelites was spent re-orienting the Israelites from slavery to freedom (physically and spiritually), Joshua’s first task as their leader was to prepare them for the literal transition into the Promised Land. Before they entered Canaan, Joshua required all of the males to be circumcised, so that they would distinguish themselves from their captors in Egypt as well as the Canaanites who they would ultimately capture. While Moses had helped them shed their slave mentality, Joshua required that they undergo the physical mark of their ancestors in order to reclaim their ancestral identity. But this shedding of skin was every bit as symbolic as it was literal. It was a painful but necessary mark of transition for the Israelites.

Once the Israelites entered Canaan, Joshua ordered that the first meal they were to share was a Passover meal. Like circumcision, the Passover meal was a literal and spiritual remembering and reclaiming of their ancestral roots. Their ancestors in Egypt had shared the Passover meal, yet those who had been born in the desert had never experienced the ritual meal that would become – along with circumcision - one of the identifying marks of Judaism. Our text tells us that once they shared this meal together in the Promised Land, the manna that God sent from heaven every day in the wilderness no longer came. This transition from God providing their sustenance to them providing their own was a poignant transition for the Israelites. This transition didn’t mean that God no longer would provide for them. It just meant, like a nursing baby being weaned from his mother, that things would be different between God and God’s people. The love was still there, it would just be manifest in different ways. The Israelites were being challenged to grow up, and to name and claim their identity as God’s people who had been freed from captivity and called to live faithfully as God’s people in the land that God promised them. I think that through Joshua, God was telling the Israelites that with freedom comes accountability and responsibility. No matter who the person or community, this transition to full freedom, accountability, and responsibility is terribly challenging, but can also be extremely rewarding.

Our Gospel lesson is full of literal, emotional, and spiritual. The Younger Son of the Prodigal Family transitions to independent living in another country, cut-off from God, his family, and his very own self. The Older Son thus had to transition to becoming the only child on the family farm. And the Father had to wrestle with the emotional transition of losing a son whom he loved very deeply.

When the Younger Son came to himself, he made the difficult decision to return the family, home, and God who he had abandoned. The immediate effects of this transition back home included the humility and shame of the Younger Son, the anger and resentment of the Older Son, and the joy and elation of the Father. That is a lot of intense emotions in one family system. But what we don’t hear about is the long term effects of this transition. Did you Younger Son get over his shame? Did the Older Son get over his anger? What did life for the Prodigal Family look like after the party that the Father threw for his son? Was the family eventually able to embrace and live together as a new creation?

I think that these scripture lessons are given to us during the season of Lent because it is a time of intentional transition for us as Christian pilgrims as we journey towards Easter. Like the Israelites and the Prodigal Family, we are in a period of disorientation working towards reorientation, trying to reorient our lives so that we can responsibly experience and live in to the freedom that has been given to us in Jesus Christ. As we saw in our lessons today, with freedom comes responsibility, and from time to time we are prone to wander away from God and our spiritual families. We have a tendency to lose our identity as those who have been grafted into Christ’s Body through our baptisms. So the season of Lent invites us into the process of reorientation.

Like the ancient Israelites, part of our reorientation is to remember and to reclaim our identity as God’s people. And as Christians, this is reclaiming our baptismal identity and recommitting ourselves to our baptismal covenants. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, through our baptisms we are made a new creation in Christ Jesus. Baptism is our “identifying mark” just as circumcision was for the Israelites. And it is a mark that we are called to remember and reclaim over and over, lest we forget.

As I have mentioned before, the rituals, traditions, and disciplines that we are called to in Lent aren’t designed to make us feel guilty or ashamed. And they don’t exist just for themselves. Rather, they are the manna from heaven that sustains us during this season of penitence and fasting. But we will not eat manna forever. An Easter feast in this life and a heavenly banquet in the next await us, just as the Passover Feast awaited the Israelites in the Promised Land. So as we continue on our Lenten pilgrimage towards the Promised Land of Easter – the Promised Land of a new life in Christ - let us rejoice in the holy and life-giving transition that lies ahead!