Third Sunday of Lent: The Narrow Door

Third Sunday of Lent

A number of years ago
I was sitting around a campfire with a friend of mine named Jim.
He has three boys.
At the time they were five, four and three years of age.

All three of them are what people commonly refer to as “all boy.”
Rowdy, rambunctious, and ornery all get out.
All three of them were like this.

And as far as I could tell,
they were like this all of the time.

It was a nice evening.
And we had a nice fire going.
And Jim, being the family man he is,
was not troubled by the boys pestering him
to assist them with their fishing lines
or get a jar to for fire flies they caught
or finish the half-eaten hot dogs they left lying on the ground.

As night drew on, however, the boys got tired
and they crowded close to the fire.

And where one boy was the other two boys fought to be.
Especially when it came to piling into their dad’s lap.

Unfortunately, the ring that enclosed the fire
was nothing but a circle of rocks.

When three-year-old Jared attempted to climb in his dad’s lap
and was rebuffed by his brothers for the fifth time
he stumbled back, slipped on the stones, his arms started flaying
and if it hadn’t been for the quick reach of his father,
he’d have fallen into the flames.

And that’s the way it is with fire.
I’m not telling you anything new.

We love a fire in hearth in the wintertime.
We enjoy campfires in the summertime.

Fire is beautiful and lovely and it draws us close.

Yet fire demands respect.
If mishandled fire brings agonizing pain and death.

God spoke to Moses from a bush aflame with fire but not destroyed.

Moses approached the Living God
the way a person is drawn to fire
with appreciation and awe, reverence and respect.

So, if God’s light fills the world
like sunlight fills the sky,
that must mean that a bit of God’s light
shines in the hearts of everyone.
And we’re all going to be saved.

But that’s not true.

We forget that the sun that melts wax
also hardens mud.

Unless our hearts are open to God.
Unless we assimilate
the purifying light of fire of God’s love
we will be left in darkness,
a deep and dreadful darkness.

We’ll be lost and Hell is a definite possibility.
The Scriptures are very clear on this.

Did you hear the urgency of Jesus’ words in today’s gospel.
“Reform your lives. You must reform your lives.”

“Repent and believe the good news.”

In other words, it’s not enough just to show up at church.
Nor is it not enough to say, “Oh I believe in God.
And accepts me just as I am.
So I don’t have participate in the life of my parish unless I feel.
I don’t need to change. I can stay just the way I am.”

Unfortunately, that’s a lie.
A terrible deception.
It’s what Deitrich Bonhoeffer,
a Lutheran minister who died at the hands of the Nazis called
“cheap grace.”

Grace without obligation.

In his view, one of the most destructive lies
taught by modern theology
is that people can be saved
without being changed.

But doesn’t God love us the way we are.
Yes.
But God loves us too much
to allow us to remain the way we are.

We either melt in the glow of God’s love
or we harden like mud.

We make a thousand decisions a day
and each one leads us closer to heaven
or close to Hell.

Wide is the road that to destruction, says Jesus.
And many choose to take it.
The road to heaven, on the other hand, is through a narrow door.

We’ve been told just how narrow it is.
We’ve been given the dimensions.

It’s the width of one man.
The width of one man carrying a cross.

Our only hope is to follow him.