Lenten light
Readings:
Joel 2:1-2,12-17
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Delivered on Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at the Church of the Advent, Louisville, KY.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer.
“What are you going to give up for Lent?” That was the question my mother would ask us a week or so before Lent began, when I was growing up. We went to St. Francis in the Fields then, and the younger children’s participation in Lent was centered around United Thank Offering mite boxes. We would drop pennies or extra change into the box and then on Easter morning, stack them in a large white wooden outline of a cross in the sanctuary. There was an unspoken, definitely un-Easter comparison of how heavy your box was to someone else’s, and a vague feeling that you fell short if your box was too light. As we grew older, we were introduced to the idea of giving up something more than loose change, and then even later in high school introduced to the experience of fasting and penance for having fallen short. This experience of those more somber Lents is illustrated in the reading from Joel:
Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people. Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, "Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations.
The whole idea of giving something up and expressing contriteness and performing penance was still fuzzy to me at the end of high school, when in college I heard something remarkable in a sermon from the Rector of the parish I went to: that rather than give up something for Lent as an act of contrition and penance, think about taking on something extra, something new and different. That idea sat with me much more comfortably than “fasting” by denying myself something between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. But, it didn’t clarify what was supposed to happen to me during Lent. What was this whole Lent thing supposed to be about? It didn’t seem to be about repetitive practices of mite boxes, or giving up something, or true fasting, or penance and contriteness. Over the years, I’ve searched for ways of observing Lent that were meaningful in ways that my past observances weren’t.
Brokenness and sin have been associated with Lent for some time, because during Lent, we were supposed to look inward at our individual sins and collective sins as a community. In this service, for instance, we have already been invited to an observance of a Holy Lent through self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial. It’s a heavy 6 weeks of dealing with the darkness of our brokenness and the dysfunction of the world, as well as the negative effect we can have on others. Lent has had a theme of developing a discipline of avoiding sin through fasting and self-denial, and this leads me to wonder about what fasting and self denial could look like beyond exploring and getting caught up in our darkness. What would it be like to fast by refusing to politicize non-political issues and problems we face? Our justice system does not belong to the Republicans or the Democrats; it belongs to all of us regardless of political values. To politicize it is to define justice by who is in power, rather than protect the powerless as Jesus taught. The effort to limit the spread of the new coronavirus is not a liberal or conservative agenda, it is instead a human health issue. To politicize it is to decide who is worthy of receiving care and protection, and who is not. And that is not for us to decide. What would fasting be like to counter darkness in social media with words that echo God’s love for all? What would it be like to deny ourselves destructive assumptions based on what someone looks like, or where they live, or what they believe? What would it be like to resist the temptation of ignoring the needs of the world?
The passage in Joel that we heard is a parallel of the first seven verses of the book of Joel, where a locust invasion is described. In vivid poetic imagery, the destruction of crops and food is recounted, and for the people in that time, it was a horror. That imagery and experience is presented again in our reading of the second chapter, but this time the context of destruction is from any cause: armies, leaders, communities, ourselves. The prayer of confession we recite every week is an admission that we have that power to bring darkness, destruction, and desolation to our own lives and to the lives of others, and that we have done so. Acknowledging this power and our exercise of it is a necessary part of Lent, but in admitting that we have that power is also the question of how do we respond to it, and how do we respond to our misuse of it.
Curiously, the reading from Joel doesn’t mention sin anywhere. It doesn’t talk about sin; instead it recounts a community’s reaction to doom. For some, this reaction to doom is enough to connect sin to punishment, where the doom is that awful anxiety that comes when you realize what you’ve done, and you are about to be confronted with your actions and are expected to own up to them. God is watching, waiting for you to come clean, and you are watching, waiting for punishment. This has been the experience of many Christians during Lent, and what can make Lenten observance counter-productive. The passage in Joel is not about the doom of judgement though, but instead about confronting the darkness of the world. And by confronting the darkness of the world, we have the opportunity to confront the darkness in ourselves living in that world, where we politicize non-political issues and problems, we perpetuate the anger and hate found in social media, we assume things about people that aren’t true, and we ignore the needs of the world as someone else’s problem.
We are now entering a part of a greater story arc that starts at Christmas and finishes on Pentecost. All through Christmas and Epiphany we see and hear about the light of the world revealed, the light that causes the darkness to recede. We are invited to find and live in the light of God’s love for us and salvation through Christ. In Lent, though, we do the opposite where we acknowledge the darkness of the brokenness in our lives; we name it, and we take responsibility for the power we have to bring darkness to others. We still hear the call to repent for the sinfulness and brokenness in us and others, but maybe that is not the sole focus of Lent. We repent every Sunday when we recite together the prayer of confession, and receive absolution of our sins. Our Lenten response to our misuse of power by focusing even more intensely or obsessing over our sins doesn’t move us any closer to changing our ways. It doesn't right the wrongs, or lead us to be ever more pious. Even nails are deformed if they are hit too hard, or too often by a hammer.
Instead, our response to our darkness during Lent could be a time to take our confession and absolution to their logical conclusion: that is, to turn back to the light and let the darkness of the world and of our lives recede. We have the power to turn against the darkness in our hearts and in the world through God’s love for us. We don’t have to participate in the hurtful attitudes or actions that we encounter. We don’t have to endure the self-loathing that comes from acknowledging our sins and faults. God’s grace through Christ provides that starting motion, and we continue that turning as a response to that grace. As we turn, our inner darkness recedes, and the world’s darkness falls behind us because during Lent we have turned toward God’s love for us and toward the hope of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter.
If Lent is to be a time of confession and reminders of our brokenness, then it doesn’t have to be a time of continuing to live with shame and guilt. We can have a different experience of the season by confessing and exposing our darkness while surrounded by the light of divine love and the hope of the Resurrection that we have turned toward. The shame and guilt that comes from admitting to the worst parts of ourselves does not have to be done in expectation of punishment or resigned disappointment from God. It can be a true, sobering experience knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God, as Paul writes to the Romans. The destruction of our lives and of the world does not have to be permanent, and the doom we feel is not something to resign ourselves to, because Joel tells us that there is hope:
Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
For Joel, the fasting and mourning are part of returning to God who never stops loving us, rather than as punishment. Fasting then becomes a discipline, or a practiced, intentional way of finding our way to the light of God by denying ourselves our worst thoughts and actions. Mourning becomes a letting go of the familiar ways of darkness that we have lived in and the destructive power we have used. In the reading from Paul, he at first lists his hardships at the hands of others by enduring beatings and imprisonment, yet then describes turning to the light through knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, and truthful speech. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus had been a pivotal moment in his life, where he turned away from his dark life of persecution and complicity in murdering Christians and turned toward the light of Christ as his means of salvation. His reaction to his troubles is to not accept God’s grace in vain, and to seek righteousness under God, and that was his reconciliation of his life in Christ as a sinner. And Jesus, in the Gospel reading says to pray, pray intimately to God, and receive, intimately God’s love and salvation. So, to turn to the light is to turn away from the worst part of ourselves and experience God’s love beginning to surround us despite our broken state. It is to acknowledge and accept that God’s love is freely given to us, despite our imperfections.
Jesus goes on to call us to store up treasures in heaven, which seems a bit out of place when we are supposed to be focused on self-examination and repentance. That storehouse of our treasures, though, can be the result of these different labors of Lent where we clear away habits, thoughts, and actions that prevent us from returning to God’s love. For everything we do, think, or say, we can ask ourselves several questions: does it bring us into fellowship with others, or does it separate them from us? Is it part of resisting evil, or is it succumbing to evil? Does it proclaim the Good News of God in Christ? Does it show that you love your neighbor as yourself, or are you taking out your anger and frustration on them? Does it lead to justice and peace for everyone, or just for you?
If these questions seem familiar, you're not imagining it. These are our baptismal vows, drawn from Jesus' teachings in scripture. These vows, followed everyday, will store up treasures in heaven, because they are about relationships, not things. They come from us being Christ in the world for others, and making every conversation a prayer to God for someone else. These are treasures of loving and being loved, stored in heaven by focusing on what God is doing through us, rather than by what we have done for God during Lent. We don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to live up to expectations, and we don’t have to have a clean slate in order to be acceptable to God and to do God’s work.
What these kinds of Lenten activities do is to create something radical in our lives: the experience of Lent year-round. This is not to say that we should continue living in or with the darkness, or accept that darkness will never go away. It is not to say that we continue to live with the self-denial or condemnation that has traditionally come with Lent. We don't need to prove our righteousness over and over again. That could lead to apathy, self-pity or self indulgence, or worse, grind our relationship with God into the ground. Rather, we can perform Lenten activities differently, to make Lenten practices the means to a different end, rather than the focus of confession and contriteness.
The result of these Lenten practices is what we will have accomplished during Lent: Turning toward the light by clearing away what prevents us from seeing it in God’s love, and then letting that love shine into us and then shine from us. Once we have a hold on that light in Lent, we are ready to be transformed by Easter, so that our Lenten experience is a response to Easter rather than something to be endured before Easter. We will understand the power we have to affect the lives of others, and we will understand the responsibility we have for that power by fearlessly owning up to when we have misused it. We will not succumb to the idolatry of seeing ourselves as hopeless sinners, believing that our lives will never merit salvation. Lent need not be a time of anxious trial and judgement, of crushing guilt and somber restitution. It can be a time of renewal and purposeful rededication, as we stand in a beam of light that is God's eternal, unconditional love for us.
Joel 2:1-2,12-17
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Delivered on Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at the Church of the Advent, Louisville, KY.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer.
“What are you going to give up for Lent?” That was the question my mother would ask us a week or so before Lent began, when I was growing up. We went to St. Francis in the Fields then, and the younger children’s participation in Lent was centered around United Thank Offering mite boxes. We would drop pennies or extra change into the box and then on Easter morning, stack them in a large white wooden outline of a cross in the sanctuary. There was an unspoken, definitely un-Easter comparison of how heavy your box was to someone else’s, and a vague feeling that you fell short if your box was too light. As we grew older, we were introduced to the idea of giving up something more than loose change, and then even later in high school introduced to the experience of fasting and penance for having fallen short. This experience of those more somber Lents is illustrated in the reading from Joel:
Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people. Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, "Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations.
The whole idea of giving something up and expressing contriteness and performing penance was still fuzzy to me at the end of high school, when in college I heard something remarkable in a sermon from the Rector of the parish I went to: that rather than give up something for Lent as an act of contrition and penance, think about taking on something extra, something new and different. That idea sat with me much more comfortably than “fasting” by denying myself something between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. But, it didn’t clarify what was supposed to happen to me during Lent. What was this whole Lent thing supposed to be about? It didn’t seem to be about repetitive practices of mite boxes, or giving up something, or true fasting, or penance and contriteness. Over the years, I’ve searched for ways of observing Lent that were meaningful in ways that my past observances weren’t.
Brokenness and sin have been associated with Lent for some time, because during Lent, we were supposed to look inward at our individual sins and collective sins as a community. In this service, for instance, we have already been invited to an observance of a Holy Lent through self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial. It’s a heavy 6 weeks of dealing with the darkness of our brokenness and the dysfunction of the world, as well as the negative effect we can have on others. Lent has had a theme of developing a discipline of avoiding sin through fasting and self-denial, and this leads me to wonder about what fasting and self denial could look like beyond exploring and getting caught up in our darkness. What would it be like to fast by refusing to politicize non-political issues and problems we face? Our justice system does not belong to the Republicans or the Democrats; it belongs to all of us regardless of political values. To politicize it is to define justice by who is in power, rather than protect the powerless as Jesus taught. The effort to limit the spread of the new coronavirus is not a liberal or conservative agenda, it is instead a human health issue. To politicize it is to decide who is worthy of receiving care and protection, and who is not. And that is not for us to decide. What would fasting be like to counter darkness in social media with words that echo God’s love for all? What would it be like to deny ourselves destructive assumptions based on what someone looks like, or where they live, or what they believe? What would it be like to resist the temptation of ignoring the needs of the world?
The passage in Joel that we heard is a parallel of the first seven verses of the book of Joel, where a locust invasion is described. In vivid poetic imagery, the destruction of crops and food is recounted, and for the people in that time, it was a horror. That imagery and experience is presented again in our reading of the second chapter, but this time the context of destruction is from any cause: armies, leaders, communities, ourselves. The prayer of confession we recite every week is an admission that we have that power to bring darkness, destruction, and desolation to our own lives and to the lives of others, and that we have done so. Acknowledging this power and our exercise of it is a necessary part of Lent, but in admitting that we have that power is also the question of how do we respond to it, and how do we respond to our misuse of it.
Curiously, the reading from Joel doesn’t mention sin anywhere. It doesn’t talk about sin; instead it recounts a community’s reaction to doom. For some, this reaction to doom is enough to connect sin to punishment, where the doom is that awful anxiety that comes when you realize what you’ve done, and you are about to be confronted with your actions and are expected to own up to them. God is watching, waiting for you to come clean, and you are watching, waiting for punishment. This has been the experience of many Christians during Lent, and what can make Lenten observance counter-productive. The passage in Joel is not about the doom of judgement though, but instead about confronting the darkness of the world. And by confronting the darkness of the world, we have the opportunity to confront the darkness in ourselves living in that world, where we politicize non-political issues and problems, we perpetuate the anger and hate found in social media, we assume things about people that aren’t true, and we ignore the needs of the world as someone else’s problem.
We are now entering a part of a greater story arc that starts at Christmas and finishes on Pentecost. All through Christmas and Epiphany we see and hear about the light of the world revealed, the light that causes the darkness to recede. We are invited to find and live in the light of God’s love for us and salvation through Christ. In Lent, though, we do the opposite where we acknowledge the darkness of the brokenness in our lives; we name it, and we take responsibility for the power we have to bring darkness to others. We still hear the call to repent for the sinfulness and brokenness in us and others, but maybe that is not the sole focus of Lent. We repent every Sunday when we recite together the prayer of confession, and receive absolution of our sins. Our Lenten response to our misuse of power by focusing even more intensely or obsessing over our sins doesn’t move us any closer to changing our ways. It doesn't right the wrongs, or lead us to be ever more pious. Even nails are deformed if they are hit too hard, or too often by a hammer.
Instead, our response to our darkness during Lent could be a time to take our confession and absolution to their logical conclusion: that is, to turn back to the light and let the darkness of the world and of our lives recede. We have the power to turn against the darkness in our hearts and in the world through God’s love for us. We don’t have to participate in the hurtful attitudes or actions that we encounter. We don’t have to endure the self-loathing that comes from acknowledging our sins and faults. God’s grace through Christ provides that starting motion, and we continue that turning as a response to that grace. As we turn, our inner darkness recedes, and the world’s darkness falls behind us because during Lent we have turned toward God’s love for us and toward the hope of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter.
If Lent is to be a time of confession and reminders of our brokenness, then it doesn’t have to be a time of continuing to live with shame and guilt. We can have a different experience of the season by confessing and exposing our darkness while surrounded by the light of divine love and the hope of the Resurrection that we have turned toward. The shame and guilt that comes from admitting to the worst parts of ourselves does not have to be done in expectation of punishment or resigned disappointment from God. It can be a true, sobering experience knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God, as Paul writes to the Romans. The destruction of our lives and of the world does not have to be permanent, and the doom we feel is not something to resign ourselves to, because Joel tells us that there is hope:
Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
For Joel, the fasting and mourning are part of returning to God who never stops loving us, rather than as punishment. Fasting then becomes a discipline, or a practiced, intentional way of finding our way to the light of God by denying ourselves our worst thoughts and actions. Mourning becomes a letting go of the familiar ways of darkness that we have lived in and the destructive power we have used. In the reading from Paul, he at first lists his hardships at the hands of others by enduring beatings and imprisonment, yet then describes turning to the light through knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, and truthful speech. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus had been a pivotal moment in his life, where he turned away from his dark life of persecution and complicity in murdering Christians and turned toward the light of Christ as his means of salvation. His reaction to his troubles is to not accept God’s grace in vain, and to seek righteousness under God, and that was his reconciliation of his life in Christ as a sinner. And Jesus, in the Gospel reading says to pray, pray intimately to God, and receive, intimately God’s love and salvation. So, to turn to the light is to turn away from the worst part of ourselves and experience God’s love beginning to surround us despite our broken state. It is to acknowledge and accept that God’s love is freely given to us, despite our imperfections.
Jesus goes on to call us to store up treasures in heaven, which seems a bit out of place when we are supposed to be focused on self-examination and repentance. That storehouse of our treasures, though, can be the result of these different labors of Lent where we clear away habits, thoughts, and actions that prevent us from returning to God’s love. For everything we do, think, or say, we can ask ourselves several questions: does it bring us into fellowship with others, or does it separate them from us? Is it part of resisting evil, or is it succumbing to evil? Does it proclaim the Good News of God in Christ? Does it show that you love your neighbor as yourself, or are you taking out your anger and frustration on them? Does it lead to justice and peace for everyone, or just for you?
If these questions seem familiar, you're not imagining it. These are our baptismal vows, drawn from Jesus' teachings in scripture. These vows, followed everyday, will store up treasures in heaven, because they are about relationships, not things. They come from us being Christ in the world for others, and making every conversation a prayer to God for someone else. These are treasures of loving and being loved, stored in heaven by focusing on what God is doing through us, rather than by what we have done for God during Lent. We don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to live up to expectations, and we don’t have to have a clean slate in order to be acceptable to God and to do God’s work.
What these kinds of Lenten activities do is to create something radical in our lives: the experience of Lent year-round. This is not to say that we should continue living in or with the darkness, or accept that darkness will never go away. It is not to say that we continue to live with the self-denial or condemnation that has traditionally come with Lent. We don't need to prove our righteousness over and over again. That could lead to apathy, self-pity or self indulgence, or worse, grind our relationship with God into the ground. Rather, we can perform Lenten activities differently, to make Lenten practices the means to a different end, rather than the focus of confession and contriteness.
The result of these Lenten practices is what we will have accomplished during Lent: Turning toward the light by clearing away what prevents us from seeing it in God’s love, and then letting that love shine into us and then shine from us. Once we have a hold on that light in Lent, we are ready to be transformed by Easter, so that our Lenten experience is a response to Easter rather than something to be endured before Easter. We will understand the power we have to affect the lives of others, and we will understand the responsibility we have for that power by fearlessly owning up to when we have misused it. We will not succumb to the idolatry of seeing ourselves as hopeless sinners, believing that our lives will never merit salvation. Lent need not be a time of anxious trial and judgement, of crushing guilt and somber restitution. It can be a time of renewal and purposeful rededication, as we stand in a beam of light that is God's eternal, unconditional love for us.
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