Lent I: "One More Time" - sermon preview

This week, we begin our journey through Lent toward the Passion Week and Easter.  As such, our focus will be on the Lenten texts rather than our Through the Bible in a Year readings during worship, though we will have opportunities to weave these together.  Below is what the Leader Magazine (from which our worship service is drawing from) has given me for the sermon seeds related to the Lenten theme...

"Sermon seeds

Primary text: Genesis 9:8-17

Secondary text: 1 Peter 3:18-22

"The problem: This passage picks up at the tail end of a catastrophic event: the almost total destruction of life. This tragic occasion represents a return to chaos after God brought order in the creation of the world.

"While the events that precipitate the flood are an early example of people turning their backs on God, this kind of behavior is hardly an isolated incident. Many of the most memorable events of human history are occasions when people bring forth, and embrace, chaos among themselves as well as with the rest of creation. The lure of disorder seems perpetual; even as mature Christians, we find ourselves outside the peace of Christ.

"The grace: The focus of the Genesis passage is not on the destruction of evil and corruption, but on the redeeming nature of God. This is where the story of redemption and grace begins, and God is the agent of and sole actor in the covenant that gets established here. There is no call for Noah and his descendants to take on, or even to remember, the covenant. God takes care of it all.

When we humans fail, God never again wipes us out, but instead walks alongside us. God gives a second chance. And a third. And a fourth. . . .

"What God started in the beginning (the “genesis”) continues even now. While the Genesis story is the first promise of redemption and grace, 1 Peter points out the ongoing pattern: God’s unceasing work to bring us back when we fall away. We worship a patient God, a God who will not break a promise but continues to find new ways to keep welcoming us home no matter what we do or don’t do."

- Leader: equipping the missional congregation Winter 2014/15pgs. 29-30

Along with this, it occurs to me that as we are reading through the book of Leviticus for our Bible reading that the covenant there is very different from the covenant made after the flood.  While the covenant after the flood is very one sided, the covenant made in Leviticus has things that the people were required to do and punishments for not completing those things...