Slaves to deadly things

Bishop Scott Bullock
The First Sunday of Lent
March 9, 2025

When I was a young priest, an associate pastor in a parish in my former diocese, one late fall day a man appeared on the front steps of our church, pulled out his sleeping bag and took up residence. He would arrive late in the evening and would be gone before morning Mass would start. Our pastor, concerned naturally, about this man, asked me, together with members of our parish’s social concerns committee, to try to help the man get a warmer and safer place to sleep. However, each time we’d try to approach him, he’d quickly pick up his things and run away. One night, while he was setting up his residence again, he didn’t notice the stealthy associate pastor, who sneaked up behind him and began a conversation including offering him a warm cup of coffee on that cold night. An invitation which he, reluctantly, accepted. Once inside the room, which is now the pastor’s office at that church, he revealed that his name was Russ.

As he was having a warm drink, we began to ask him if we could try to arrange for some warm place for him to stay on that cold evening. Russ looked at the offer with some confusion, and said, I seem to recall, “No, I’ll just stay where I am now.” 

When we insisted that it was not a good place for him to be sleeping, he said something extraordinary. He said, “No, your pastor gave me permission to sleep there.” 

When we assured him that our pastor did not in fact want him to sleep in such a cold place, Russ repeated, “No, he gave me permission to sleep there.”  

Finally, I said, “No, our pastor really didn’t say that. He asked us to try to find a warm place for you.”

He then looked at us with confusion and then, with some anger, rose, put his coffee down, and said, “I don’t have to stay where I’m not welcome.” 

Pleading that we did indeed want to help him, but this went unanswered, as he dashed out of the office. He picked up his things and was never seen at the church again. I’ve often wondered where he ended up and if he survived in the risky life of homelessness. 

I have thought about Russ many times over the years. His surprising need to be free from our care, even to the point of fabricating a story that he had been somehow welcomed and then rejected, strikes me as a situation where he simply couldn’t understand our offer of care and hospitality. He’d probably been rejected many times, and so he just couldn’t accept or trust care when it came to him. After much mistreatment, a caring world really made no sense to him. 

I’ve wondered might I too, across my life, have gotten too used to some situation, though it keeps me from living fully, so I can’t imagine living in any other way like Russ did. Even while I’m not really living at all? So, have some things in our own lives — anger, fear, resentments — enslaved us, kept us from living fully so we can’t see how to live any other way? Maybe they’ve become so familiar that I’m not totally aware of how harmful they are for me.

We are given today, as the season of Lent begins, a reading from the ancient book of Deuteronomy. In today’s passage, the people of Israel are remembering their days as slaves — enslavement in Egypt — from which they dare discovered a God who was a deliverer. So, why did Israel need to remember that God was a deliverer? Because once they were delivered from slavery, in the desert on their way to the promised land, the people had forgotten that they had a deliverer and longed for the slavery they had become accustomed to. 

We hear that, on the verge of their entrance into freedom and the promised land, “the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.” The Israelites said, “If only we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our kettles of meat and ate our fill of bread! But you have led us into this wilderness to make this whole assembly die of famine!”  

So, with freedom in sight, their former slavery somehow seemed a more comfortable place to go. They needed to remember that the Lord wanted them to be free.

Like Russ, the man I mentioned on the front steps of our church so many years ago, have we gotten, we should ask, so used to habits of thinking that we can’t live fully, even when the love of Christ is still presented to us to deliver us from those old ways. These old, deadly, familiar ways can look good, or at least familiar, but they’re shackles. In God’s grace, we believe things can be different, for we too have a deliverer! We can be freed if we but trust the abundant love and mercy of God, our most merciful master, who is ready to bestow his gifts, once again, in his very life given to us in this Eucharistic we’re celebrating now. 

So, we need never be slaves to these deadly things, not one moment more. Here we never need to be anything else but beloved daughters and sons, sons of a most lavishly loving God. From the beginning then, God has been a deliverer. Deliver, we pray, Lord, then us from our slavery of old ways, even if they are familiar and have not given us life. We pray that you will renew your salvation in us, and, Lord, restore us once again in the freedom of the children of God. So, may this season of Lent, which we now begin, become a time of recognition of how sometimes we’ve lived like slaves, and also a time of recognition that we do have a deliverer who awaits our hearts desire for freedom.