Tests

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable to you O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer. Amen.

Well, the start of spring is only ten days away, and just as we have begun to contemplate an end to the doldrums of winter, midterm exam week has come along yet again to rear its ugly head and force us back to the bowels of Firestone. It's a time when the stress and anxiety we so often feel is compounded by the prospect of sitting in a packed lecture hall with an empty response book before us and being forced to account for exactly what it is we've been doing over the past six weeks. No wonder so many of you wanted to get in a few words with the big guy tonight.

But I don't think that midterm exam week is just about the tests we take in class, and I don't think its lessons are limited to hastily memorized lecture notes. Especially for us Christians, especially in this Lenten season with its focus on human imperfection and sin, midterm exam week is a reminder of the less apparent tests we face in our daily lives. Caring for a sick relative with compassion, living a public life with integrity, celebrating others' accomplishments without becoming envious yourself – these are tests that can't be completed with a #2 pencil, tests that aren't scheduled in advance, and tests that are all too often too much for us to bear alone. And it's these kinds of tests that are the subject of our slate of readings tonight.

Tonight's epistle comes to us from the apostle Paul, who wrote his two letters to the Corinthians, in his words, "out of much affliction and pressure of heart... and with streaming eyes." Paul was writing under great distress, at a time when the Christian Church at Corinth - a church he himself had founded – was riven with spiritual divisions. He faced the daunting challenge of uniting the Corinthians so that, Paul writes, all might "speak the same thing and that there [might] be no divisions among" them – a challenge reflected in the challenges Presiding Bishop Schori currently faces leading our own Episcopal Church within the Anglican Communion. So I think it's safe to say that Paul knew a thing or two about tests. And so do we, for we, too, face tests that sometimes stretch us beyond our capacity - but we are not alone.

Because the Bible also tells us that God cares deeply not only about these big tests, but about how we respond to the less obvious tests that pervade our daily lives. In Psalm 139, the psalmist writes, "O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD." And today's epistle, in stern language, reminds us of the challenge we face in responding to these smaller tests too: for example, using another person for our own sexual pleasure, a sin as a punishment for which, Paul writes, "twenty-three thousand fell in a single day." Or our impatience in putting Christ to the test, complaining, demanding an answer from Jesus (TODAY!), to the pressing issues before us, as if prayer were designed to give us an immediate response.

Jesus, being both fully God and fully human, knows of these challenges, and in today's Gospel, he has harsh words for those who would claim that they are above testing, beyond pain. While preaching to a crowd on the way to Jerusalem, he references an incident in which a tower in the nearby city of Siloam fell, killing eighteen Galileans. The Gospel implies that some in the crowd thought that God brought this disaster upon the Galileans as punishment for their iniquity - because they, the crowd, were somehow "better" than the Galileans. But Jesus, as always, knows better. He asks the crowd, "Do you think that they [those who were killed] were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." What Jesus is telling us is that bad things don't just happen to bad people – they can happen to you and me. And his lesson is that our focus should not be on those bad things that happen to us; but rather on our response to them; not the challenges we face, but the attitude we take. Events, Jesus teaches us, are not some punishment for failing a test – they are the test itself.

It is the particular role of the Lenten season to remind us of our responsibility to reflect on how we respond to tests like these. What do we do when we see that a friend or family member has started engaging in self-destructive behavior, or when our relationship with God through prayer has deteriorated? Do we shrug off these challenges as if they have nothing to teach us, or worse yet, pretend that they simply don't exist? I know that all too often, in moments of anxiety, I've flung up a poorly thought-out prayer to heaven in the hopes that something might "stick," – a practice that the Cambridge theologian Jim Cotter evocatively calls "breaking the speed limit of prayer." This Lent, I have challenged myself to put on the brakes, slow down, and devote some time each day to meaningful, discerning prayer. In that same spirit, I hope that each of you have given thought to the similar challenges each of you have taken on this Lent, and the other, less apparent tests in your lives that God may be calling you to address. And we need not feel afraid to take on these challenges; Isaiah reminds us that "the grass withers, the flower fades... Surely the people are grass... but the word of our God" – the great I AM – "stands forever," especially in the times when we feel tested beyond our capacities.

In closing, I want to share a story with you about one of those times when I felt tested beyond my capacity. My dad always likes to say, "God works in mysterious ways," and this case was no different. Last spring, I was swamped with papers over Reading Period, doubting as so many Princetonians do that I would ever be able to complete them all before Dean's Date. Nevertheless, I came to Church that Sunday, hoping that God would grant me some kind of sign to show me that everything was going to be alright. Now, when I come to church, I usually walk briskly down that [point] long aisle and take my seat here in the chancel, rarely stopping to glance at anything on my way here. But on that Sunday, for whatever reason, I was moved to take a look at that large stained-glass window on the left, and my eyes wandered to the inscription below it. And in a moment that I will never forget, I discovered to my amazement that the inscription read, "And he that shall endure until the end, the same shall be saved." God works in mysterious ways.

This week, we will all face tests of our own. But as Paul was keen to note, "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it." So in the coming days, when you're taking your midterms, I encourage you to reflect on the real and unanticipated tests that you face in your everyday lives – and to remember that God will always be there to help you endure them.

Amen.