Lent 2, March 1, 2026 - Episcopal Church of Our Saviour

Opening Hymn

Opening Sentence & Prayer

We all go off track, sometimes far off track – as individuals and as a society. That’s why we bless God, who always wants to help us back on course.

God’s mercy endures through everything.

God of growth and transformation, you offer us abundant new life. Teach us to welcome the disorientation and challenge of growth as part of the meaning of picking up our cross to follow you. Help us to carry our share of the world’s burden so all may know your liberating love. Amen.

(Silent Reflection)

Kyrie

Confession of Sin

Let us confess our sin in the presence of God and one another, that we may turn towards God.

Holy God, have mercy on us and forgive us. We have set our own human habits above your divine law and have placed our faith in authorities other than you. We have insisted on our own comfort to the neglect and indifference of our neighbors. We have acted to preserve our own self-interest in the face of suffering. We have lacked creativity and compassion when envisioning solutions to the challenges many of your children face.

We are sorry. We want to change course. Grant us the gift of hearts that grieve injustice, hatred, and fear. Make us steadfast in faith and give us the courage to follow you. Amen.

Hear the promise of God, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that aren’t yet here: we are saved by faith and our sin is forgiven. Through God’s love and mercy, we have been set free. Now, with renewed hearts, let us serve others and honor the world God made, knowing the good news we have received is for all people. Amen.

Collect of the Day

Our God be with you.
And also with you.
Let us pray.

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Ministry of the Word

Genesis 12: 1-5

A reading from the book of Genesis

God told Abram: “Leave your country, your family, and your father’s home for a land that I will show you.

I’ll make you a great nation
    and bless you.
I’ll make you famous;
    you’ll be a blessing.
I’ll bless those who bless you;
    those who curse you I’ll curse.
All the families of the Earth
    will be blessed through you.”

So Abram left just as God said, and Lot left with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot with him, along with all the possessions and people they had gotten

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Psalm 121

I look up to the mountains;
does my strength come from mountains?

No, my strength comes from God,
who made heaven, and earth, and mountains.

He won’t let you stumble,
your Guardian God won’t fall asleep.

Not on your life! Israel’s
Guardian will never doze or sleep.

God’s your Guardian,
right at your side to protect you—

Shielding you from sunstroke,
sheltering you from moonstroke.

God guards you from every evil,
guards your very life.

God guards you when you leave and when you return,
guards you now, guards you always.

Romans 4

So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, “Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own.”

If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God’s decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God’s promise at that—you can’t break it.

This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift. That’s the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that’s reading the story backward. He is our faith father.

We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as father of many peoples”? Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!”

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

John 3: 1-17

There was a man of the Pharisee sect, Nicodemus, a prominent leader among the Jews. Late one night he visited Jesus and said, “Rabbi, we all know you’re a teacher straight from God. No one could do all the God-pointing, God-revealing acts you do if God weren’t in on it.”

Jesus said, “You’re absolutely right. Take it from me: Unless a person is born from out of this world, it’s not possible to see what I’m pointing to—to God’s realm.”

“How can anyone,” said Nicodemus, “be born who has already been born and grown up? You can’t re-enter your mother’s womb and be born again. What’s up with this ‘out of this world’ talk?”

Jesus said, “You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original, prima; creation— the invisible moving the visible, an awakening into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s realm. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.

“So don’t be so surprised when I tell you that you have to be born from out of this world, so to speak. You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.”

Nicodemus asked, “What do you mean by this? How does this happen?”

Jesus said, “You’re a respected teacher of Israel and you don’t know these basics? Listen carefully. I’m shooting straight with you. I speak only of what I know by experience, what I’ve seen with my own eyes. There is nothing secondhand here, no hearsay. Yet instead of facing the evidence and accepting it, you procrastinate with questions. If I tell you things that are plain as the hand before your face and you don’t believe me, what use is there in telling you of things you can’t see, the things of God?

“No one has ever gone up into the presence of God except the One who came down from that Presence, the Son of Man. In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up—and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life.

“This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.

The Gospel of Our Saviour. Praise to you, our Jesus Christ.

Sermon

The Prayers

A Contemporary Creed

We believe in one God, the Almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
Source of all life and all love.
We believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son,
Fully God, fully human,
Savior of the world,
The risen Ruler of all realms.
We believe in the Holy Spirit,
The breath and power of God,
Sustainer of our life in Christ.
We believe in the church, Christ’s body,
God’s family for the spiritually homeless,
Called to be Love and Light,
To pursue justice and show mercy,
To proclaim the Good News of Christ,
To work for the common good of humanity.
Amen.

Prayers of the People

At this time of great crisis for so many of your children and for our precious planet, we come to you God, imploring your help and inspiration.

In Lent, we remember how Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to pray. We pray that during this Lent we, too, take the time to look into our own values and our relationship with God.
We pray to you, God.