Monthly Archives: March 2022

Will Willomon: Don’t Think for Yourself

Posted on by

I ran across this piece from Professor Willimon from 30 years ago. It still reads pretty well and he certainly is prophetic in places. Check it out.

Don’t Think for Yourself

Undoubtedly you have seen the movie The Dead Poet’s Society. In the movie an energetic teacher at an exclusive prep school is depicted as opening up the minds of his hung-up, privileged, young students by urging them to think for themselves. “Don’t trust what your parents have told you. Don’t trust what you have heard. The important thing is to think for yourselves,” he says. In one scene he rips up a textbook telling them, “Don’t listen to the experts; think for yourselves.”

A friend of mine noted that despite the movie’s claim that this teacher was somehow liberating his students from social convention, it would be hard to think of a more conformist and socially conventional message in today’s context than to give young people the advice to think for themselves. If there ever were a day when such advice was deemed radical, that day has passed.

Here’s how the president of Yale University welcomed the freshman to Yale last year. He told them, “The faculty can guide you. We can take you to the frontiers of knowledge, but we cannot supply you with a philosophy of life. This must come from your own active learning, from your own choices, from your own decisions. Yale expects you to take yourself seriously. Think for yourself.”

In other words, the university has absolutely no clue what you’re supposed to be doing here. Oh, we’ve got this smorgasbord of courses and professors. We’ve got this  graduate, well that’s really up to you. The important thing is that you think for yourself.

And it appears we are thinking for ourselves. A few weeks ago I received a shakily written letter from a woman in her late seventies. In her letter she enclosed a clipping from the Raleigh newspaper. (I think the Durham newspaper protected the citizens of Durham from this particular story.) The article described how during the gulf war American troops had buried alive 700 to 800 Iraqi soldiers in their trenches. One of the Gls said, “By the time we got there, there was nothing but hands and arms sticking up out of the sand.”

In her letter, she said, “Why did we not hear about this? Have you mentioned this in one of your sermons? Have you mentioned this in one of your prayers? Where is the moral voice of the church?”

One possible reply is, “Look lady, it’s called war. The old rules just don’t apply. it’s always a nasty business. Besides, when it comes to burying people alive, you’ve got your opinions, I’ve got mine. The important thing is that each of us thinks for ourselves, right?” Ironically, when I got her letter, I had been reading this new book, The Day America Told the Truth. That book says that 91 percent of us admit we lie routinely. Thirty-one percent of us who are married admit to having an extramarital affair lasting over a year. Eighty-six percent of youth lie regularly to their parents, and 75 percent lie regularly to their best friends. One in five loses his or her virginity before the age of 13. 2,245 New Yorkers were murdered by their fellow citizens last year, an increase of 18 percent. Two-thirds of those asked about religion said it plays no role in shaping their opinions about sex. It’s a lie here, an extramarital affair there, and before long it’s hands and arms sticking up out of the sand. We are thinking for ourselves.

Now an alternative epistemology is asserted in today’s text from Jesus and from Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 6:6-8: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you’re at home and when you are away….Fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (NRSV).

These words in Deuteronomy refer to the words of the law of Israel; Torah. A better translation of torah than “law,” I suppose, is “teaching” — the teaching of Israel. Or more literally, the finger pointing in the direction: Torah is not so much the law that we’re not to break as it is the divine finger pointing us in the direction we ought to walk. Torah.

Interestingly enough in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus is asked about life’s big questions, he simply refers them to Deuteronomy, to Torah. Good Jew that he was, Jesus simply said, “Look, you know the answer. We’re to love God with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.” This is Torah, truth.

You may not know a lot about Jesus. You may not be clear on everything he said and did. But today’s text says if you know this about Jesus, it’s about all you need to know for now: love God with everything you’ve got to the very depths of your soul and your neighbor as yourself. Class dismissed.

People who follow Jesus, just like those in Israel before us, are people who do not bow down to other gods, be they called by the name Eros, January, Mars, IBM, Amway, or USA. We’re just real funny about who we’ll worship. We do not use labels like faggot, kink, nigger, or broad, preferring instead to refer to people as sister or brother. We have a very odd notion of who our next-door neighbors are.

Love God with everything you’ve got and then your neighbor as yourself. Take these words, advises Deuteronomy, and teach them to your kids. Paint them over the door to your dormitory room. Brand these on your forehead. Tattoo them on your biceps. Take these words and just drill them into yourself so that you won’t forget.

Here we come into a collision with an alternative way of knowing, a culturally disruptive epistemology. Alas, you have been the willing victims of a mode of education that has taught you always to locate the normative answer exclusively within your own experience, as though your experience, particularly your racial, gender, cultural experience could yield insight on the spot. Think for yourself.

And that’s why most of my sermons begin with your experience, because I have a hunch that’s the only thing you really trust. So I begin my sermons always groping around for some point of contact with what you already know.

But Torah always begins with what you could not know unless somebody had told it to you: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.” Don’t think for yourself.

Thinking in Israel and with Jesus begins as an auditory act. Notice these verbs: hear, listen, speak, tell. Unlike Yale or many of my sermons, Israel did not expect her young to devise insight via personal conjuring. You don’t have to be the author of your own faith, for here is a massive faith that lies way outside the limited confines of your individual psyche.

Israel’s sons and daughters don’t have to invent the secrets to life. Their parents loved them enough to tell them the secrets. And it is no coincidence that in today’s text, wisdom is depicted as an exchange between an elder and someone of the younger generation as the giving of an intergenerational gift. Being 21 years old is just way too tough without having to make up the world as you go.

Think of the stance you’re going to assume here at the Lord’s table, with hands outstretched, open, empty, eager, ready to receive the gift of bread and wine. That is the primary biblical posture for how you get wise, for Torah-like wisdom.

Parenting and education in our day have become little more than the management of conflicting truth claims — a process of cool consideration of diverse alternatives, some of which may be true. But not here. Not in the middle of Deuteronomy. Not at the feet of Torah.

Joshua told Israel, “In the future, when your daughter asks you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ you are not to reply, ‘Well, they may mean that the Lord might have brought us out of slavery and chose us to be obedient to his way. And then they might not.’” No, in this Torah curriculum there is only the nervy, pushy, passionate assertion of truth that is reliable and coherent and confident in the face of chaos, narcissistic subjectivity, hands and feet sticking up out of the sand.

I agree with that great theologian Oscar Wilde who said, “About the worst advice you could give anybody is ‘be yourself.’” Don’t think for yourself.

As Walter Bruggemann says, “Torah is not just for children.” (Enemy is not just a danger for the young.) It may surface in what is now conventionally called the crisis of midlife (listen up alumni) or anywhere else. All persons of whatever age face the threat of darkness. Bruggemann says everybody needs some time of homecoming, when you can return to those sureties that do not need to be defended nor doubted. That’s what Torah is; it’s homecoming.

A Torah-less world in which there are many gods and no neighbors is a world just full of idols and enemies. Maybe that’s why we’re so fatigued as we rush breathlessly from one worship service to another. Before long, after you’ve bowed down at enough altars, the only posture you know is that of bowing. So accustomed have we become to submitting to so many different gods – the nation, the corporation, my own ego — all the while rattling our chains and pitifully asserting how free we are.

Since we’ve learned to bend ourselves before so many altars, there is almost nothing to which we will not stoop. It’s a lie here, a deceit there, until we are quite able to walk past the hands and arms sticking up out of the sand without even a twitch of conscience.

The Durham city council has become us all over. With no Torah-induced neighbors, the world is driven only by competing, savage self-interest. Even the people under our own roofs become our enemies. The office becomes a battleground for the war between the sexes. Cultural chaos leads to ethical immobility. We don’t make many big moves — having nowhere to stand, we can’t make big moves. A recent Duke graduate asked his old man late one night when he went back home, “Look, I’m getting ready to go out into life. Tell me what you know. Go ahead, tell me if you know something.”

For this touchingly child-like request, he received an hour of ramblings, a confession about how his old man had an affair with his secretary and how he hated his job, and he’d love to chuck it all and move out into a cabin in the woods, and he really despised his marriage, and he couldn’t trust any of his friends.

“Man, you are messed up,” said the son. “I’m supposed to be asking you for advice?” Now he’s reduced to thinking for himself.

Torah asserts a countercultural way of wisdom that is intergenerational, public, counter-cultural, historical. The beautiful thing is you don’t bear the burden of having to think for yourself. Every time you walk in this building, the chapel, and especially today on All Saints, a host of predecessors leans down out of the windows and tries to speak to us, if we’ll dare to listen. They stare down at us from the windows begging to show us the way — saints.

Saints are people who manage to love God more than life itself. They manage to love neighbor more than self and thereby find true life. Saints are people who just push their way into our modest present and make the God-question and the neighbor-question the only interesting intellectual questions. Christians are those who’ve learned to think with the saints, and thereby we think much more creatively than we could if we’d been left to our own devices.

St. Francis, Martin Luther King, Teresa of Calcutta, Gideon, Mary — they help us to think beyond ourselves. They help us to think despite ourselves and thereby in this act of holy remembering and saintly thinking, new options are envisioned. We are encouraged; a new world not of our own devising is offered to us. We get some big ideas. Torah and the saintly lives thereby produced is a kind of intelligence by proxy.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “I stand in awe of two things: the starry heavens above and the individual law of morality within.”

I’m still awed by the starry heavens.

©1992 William Willimon

Source unknown

Chaplain Tucker Messamore: Invitation to a Lenten Feast

Posted on by

Sermon delivered on Lent 3C, Sunday, March 20, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon click here.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 55.1-9; Psalm 63.1-8; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; St. Luke 13.1-9.

As you can see on the screen, the title for my sermon today is “Invitation to a Lenten Feast.” I realize that this probably looks like a typo, like an “e” got accidently inserted into the last word. that it should say “fast” instead of “feast.” But you should know by now that we’re real professionals here at St. Augustine’s, that everything always goes according to plan, and that we would never allow for a silly error like that. I assure you; the title is correct as it appears: Invitation to a Lenten Feast.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Tucker, we know you’re relatively new to Anglicanism and liturgical Christianity, you’re wearing an alb for the first time in your life… maybe you don’t really understand how to observe Lent.” After all, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines Lent as a “period of fasting in preparation for Easter,” a time “of penance by abstaining from festivities, by almsgiving, and by devoting more than the usual time to religious exercises.”

Of course, all this is true. But as we take a closer look at today’s Old Testament reading, I hope we’ll see that Lent is not a season for fasting or penitence or self-denial as ends in themselves. Rather, Lent is about fasting so that we can feast, being emptied so that we can be filled, repenting of sin so that we can experience true joy.

Our passage from Isaiah begins with an invitation to a feast: “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price… eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (vv. 1-2). Here the prophet sounds like a food vendor calling out to those who pass by on the street to announce a special offer: an abundant supply of choice food and drink, available to all who hunger and thirst at zero cost.

This is an offer Isaiah’s original audience would have been eager to accept. Judah had been oppressed for years by foreign powers who attacked and besieged their cities and took waves of captives into exile. The book of Lamentations vividly describes the horrible circumstances God’s people faced when Jerusalem was under siege: “The tongue of the infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst; the children beg for food, but no one gives them anything… Happier were those pierced by the sword than those pierced by hunger, whose life drains away, deprived of the produce of the field” (Lamentations 4:4, 9). Sadly, these conditions are not difficult to imagine as we see footage and hear horrifying stories from those in besieged cities in Ukraine.

But the offer the prophet announces is not for physical food, but for something more vital: that which nourishes the soul. Spiritual sustenance was also something God’s people lacked. At the beginning of v. 2, the prophet asks, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” The reason God’s people faced famines, plagues, attacks from their enemies, and exile from their land is because they had turned away from the God who had called them to be His people, brought them out slavery, and led them to the fruitful and abundant land they could call their home. Instead of worshipping God alone and following His commands, God’s people worshipped false gods, practiced sexual immorality, and oppressed the poor and helpless, taking advantage of the most vulnerable people in society to benefit themselves. They turned to sin and selfish ambition thinking they would bring happiness and contentment, but they would ultimately fail to deliver. We could say that God’s people had exchanged the lavish banquet God offered for a plate of gruel. Elsewhere, God puts it this way: “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13).

At this point, we should acknowledge that as God’s people today, we too often make this shocking exchange. Our sin nature inclines us to seek fulfillment in the things of this world, what St. John calls “the [lusts] of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, [and] pride in riches” (1 John 2:16)—money, power, sex, possessions, food and drink, the praise of others, on and on we could go. I don’t feel the need to provide an exhaustive list because if we’re honest with ourselves, we can all envision the things we turn to in search of happiness or to medicate ourselves.

Whatever these things may be, while they may give us a temporary thrill or numb us for a moment, they cannot satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts, for we were made to find true joy in God alone. As our own St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.” C.S. Lewis famously said, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 26).

But we don’t have to live this way! The prophet exhorts us, stop “spend[ing] your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy”! “Come to the waters! . . . Come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!” This is not just an offer for the people of Israel; Isaiah envisions a day when people from all nations would come to this banquet (vv. 3-5). Indeed, Jesus extends this same invitation to all who trust in Him: In John 6:35, He proclaims, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” 

Our question then is how? What does it look like for us to “come to the waters” and to “eat what is good”? How do we take advantage of this offer?

Although Isaiah doesn’t use the specific word, he is describing repentance. The prophet highlights two necessary movements, two important steps that repentance entails. First, we must turn away from sin. In v.7a, Isaiah exhorts us, “Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts.” This involves admitting that we are not okay, that, as Father Kevin reminded us in his Ash Wednesday sermon, that there is something deeply wrong with us. As Jesus warns in our gospel reading, “Unless you repent, you will all perish.” (Luke 13:3). We must acknowledge that we have a sin nature within us that inclines us toward evil and sin, that predisposes us to choose lesser things over the God who alone can satisfy the deepest longings of our souls.

This means that in order to turn away from sin, we must also turn toward God. It is only though the saving work of Christ that we can receive “abundant pardon” for our sin (v. 7) and be released from its bondage. It is only by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit that we can have the power to say no to sin. Together, these two actions that the prophet describes—turning away from sin and turning toward God—constitute repentance.

But we should understand that repentance is not a one-time event in the Christian life that takes place when one comes to faith in Christ. It is an ongoing practice through which God transforms us and sanctifies us. Isaiah urges us to “Seek the Lord” (v. 6). Speaking through the prophet, God tells us, “Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good… incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live” (vv. 2b-3a). We listen to God and draw near to Him through prayer, through Scripture, through the liturgy, through the sacraments. As we mediate on who God is and what He has done, as we are reminded of His ways, we begin to see sin for what it is—a poor substitute for the abundant life we are promised in Christ. This is how we come to the feast that God has set before us: by practicing repentance, by turning away from sin and turning to God.

This Lenten season, we can avail ourselves of disciplines that will help us to continually practice repentance.

On Fridays during Lent, we observe the Stations of the Cross, a practice that helps us reflect on Christ’s journey to Calvary. Mediating on Jesus’ crucifixion reminds us that He has paid the penalty for our sin and has set us free from our bondage to it. In the cross, we see both the seriousness of our sin and the love of our God. Jesus’ passion shows that God is not a petty tyrant who gets angry at us because we don’t do things His way; He is a God who loves us and wants what is best for us—so much so that he was willing to take on human flesh and suffer and die to set us free from sins power and its eternal consequences.

During Lent, our priests are also setting aside Tuesday evenings to offer the sacrament of confession. While we do confess our sins corporately as a part of the liturgy, there is something truly powerful about confessing your specific sins aloud to another person and hearing them speak God’s pardon over you.

Lent is also a season to practice the discipline of fasting, which can help us “find victory over temptation.” As Fr. Kevin shared in a Lenten post, St. Augustine taught that when we deny ourselves a harmless pleasure like coffee or chocolate, we are training ourselves to say no sinful desires of the flesh (McKnight, Fasting: The Ancient Practices, xv).

Finally, in the Anglican tradition, we have the gift of the Daily Office, a way to orient our lives around the gospel and to establish daily rhythms of worship, Scripture reading, and prayer. If this is not a discipline you currently practice, Lent is a great time to begin. These are just a few disciplines that can aid us in the practice of repentance this Lenten season and beyond.

As we close, I want to share a story that Bishop N.T. Wright recounts in his Lent for Everyone devotional on the gospel of Matthew. Once, when he was young man, he ran out of gas while out for a drive in the English countryside. Observing his plight, a nearby farmer offered to fill his tank, but he didn’t realize until later that he had received a special blend of fuel intended for use in a lawnmower, not an automobile. Thankfully, he was able to make it back home, but when he got there, his engine was sputtering and coughing “like a sick animal.” Wright describes the sense of relief that he—and his car—felt when a mechanic was able to remove the thick sludge built up in his carburetor.

This, Wright says, is an illustration of the opportunity we have before us: “Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault-finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store” (N.T. Wright, Lent for Everyone: Matthew, Year A: A Daily Devotional, 13). This Lenten season, may we heed the call of the prophet. May we turn away from that which will only leave us feeling empty and turn to the God who alone can satisfy us. As we come to the table this morning, may we feast on Christ, our bread that came down from heaven (John 6:41) and our living water (John 7:37-38), that we may never hunger or thirst again (John 6:35).

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lent: A Time To Become Unafraid

Posted on by

Sermon delivered on Lent 2C, Sunday, March 13, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3.17-4.1; St. Luke 13.31-35.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

In today’s lessons we are reminded in various ways that there are lots of things in life that make us afraid. In fact, the most repeated command in all Scripture is to not be afraid. So how can the season of Lent help us in our fight not to be afraid? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

We all can relate to Abraham in our OT lesson this morning. He had just finished risking a dangerous fight with the local kings in his region to rescue his nephew Lot, powerful kings who had a reputation for wreaking vengeance on their enemies, and Abraham had become one by defeating and humiliating them. Then he had done the most inexplicable thing. He refused to take any spoils of war, choosing instead to give a tenth of the spoils to the local priest, Melchizedek, and to restore Lot and his family. You can read about that in Gen 14. This is hardly the way of the world and surely Abraham had to wonder how that would all turn out. And now here is God, coming to Abraham, apparently in a very powerful night vision, making him even more afraid. 

And like Abraham, there are lots of things in our world that continue to make us afraid. There are wars in Africa that are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, wars that rarely get reported in our country. There is war in Europe that does get a lot of press, not all of it accurate, a war that has the potential to explode into another world war, only this time the belligerents have the capacity to annihilate each other with nuclear weapons. There is the very real threat of a cyberattack on our country’s most critical infrastructures, attacks that could cripple our nation if successful. We are enduring rampant inflation driven by exploding fuel costs. Then of course there are the usual tiresome voices denouncing all for which America stands and striving to fundamentally change our values. As we become an increasingly godless nation these voices become more strident and the rancor and strife they create becomes more intense. Abraham would surely have understood.

Then of course there are the personal fears and demons we all carry around. We worry about our health, about our kids or parents, about our bank accounts and career choices. We worry about finding a mate if we are single or about our marriages if we are married. Many of us worry (needlessly) about our standing before God. And of course in the back of our minds we worry about and fear death. Oh, most of us do a fine job repressing and deflecting and denying this reality. We delude ourselves by thinking that we’re not bad people so that God really isn’t all that concerned about our sins and foolishness and folly. That’s reserved for the really bad folks. You know, anyone but us. They are the ones who need to be concerned. But death is universal. It comes to every one of us, even the best of us, because all have sinned and death is its chief wage. Here too, Abraham would surely have understood. There is a lot in our world and lives that make us afraid.

Yet here is God, telling Abraham not to be afraid because God is his shield. Trust me, God tells Abraham and us, nothing will happen to you because I am your shield. I’ll prove it by giving you the offspring and land I promised. Notice what is happening here. First, God promised to give Abraham offspring before Abraham believed God. God’s promise wasn’t contingent on Abraham’s faith. God promised this to his fearful servant out of sheer grace and love for Abraham. Only after the promise was made did Abraham believe God, making Abraham right with God and showing us how to do likewise. And this is critically important because it is in our alienation from God that all our sicknesses and fears are rooted. Think about it. Before our first ancestors sinned against God in paradise, they enjoyed perfect communion with God. God walked with his beloved image-bearers daily in the garden and as a result, Adam and Eve enjoyed perfect health and happiness. Who among us would not enjoy perfect health and happiness living in the direct presence of our Creator and God? Only after human rebellion and sin ruptured our relationship with God and caused us to be alienated from God—Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden, God didn’t hide from them—did we become anxious and afraid and lonely and isolated. Our rebellion has cost us dearly. 

But God did not give up on us. He did not destroy humans and his good creation. No, God called Abraham to be God’s vehicle to restore his good creation and creatures gone bad to their right minds and right order. And it wasn’t until God became human as Abraham’s descendant, Jesus, that God’s plan was fully realized. So here in our OT lesson, we see the power of God at work to rescue humanity and creation from Sin’s ruin. All Abraham had to do was to trust God’s promise. That was what that strange ceremony was all about. Abraham had nothing to fear because God’s word is true and God’s power is completely efficacious—it always produces the desired results. 

Sounds good, right? Trust God. Have faith in God’s promises. But here’s the problem. That is easier said than done! Abraham needed continual reassurance and so do we, precisely because we live in a sin-sick and God-cursed world, and we lack the power and perspective of God! So how do we learn to strengthen our trust in God? The short answer is that we learn to see the power of God at work in our lives and his world so that we have a basis for trust. Nowhere does Scripture ask us to have a blind faith. Faith by definition cannot be proved. But faith needs a basis for the related trust that is part and parcel of it. So how do we learn to see the power of God at work in our lives?

First, we have to know what that power looks like and what it promises. In other words, we have to keep our eyes on the prize. God reminded Abraham that his promise to be Abraham’s shield was trustworthy. Otherwise, how could Abraham eventually have countless descendants? Abraham of course was skeptical because he laughed at the promise when God approached him about it the second time later in this story (Gen 17). But God is God, the God who spoke this vast cosmos into existence and who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Nothing is too hard for God. Nothing. Giving Abraham offspring when his loins and Sarah’s were as good as dead was one way for God to show this to his trusting but skeptical servant. 

For us, the prize is new creation, God’s new heavens and earth, where we will get to live forever in God’s direct presence with all of the benefits Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden and more. Death will be abolished as will evil and suffering and sorrow and all the things that make us afraid and anxious. Sheer beauty. Sheer life. We will be restored to the fully human beings God created us to be and given the sacred and holy privilege of running God’s world to the glory of God the Father. This prize is worth more than all our lesser prizes and idols combined. It is worthy of our supreme loyalty and striving, or to use St. Paul’s language, it is worthy of our citizenship in heaven whose values we are called to model here on earth, and it is made possible only by the saving Death of Jesus Christ. Forget this prize and we lose our way. That’s why Scripture repeatedly urges us to remember the power of God. For ancient Israel, that meant remembering the Exodus. For us, it means remembering Christ’s Death and Resurrection and the new creation to which the Resurrection points. When we remember the power of God at work in Scripture, it makes it easier for us to recognize the power of God at work in our daily lives, even if that work is nowhere near as spectacular. If we believe God really did speak this universe into existence and raise Christ from the dead, why would it be hard for God to be intimately and actively involved in our lives? Christ died to reconcile us to God and break Sin’s power over us so that we could be citizens of God’s new world as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. Why then would God abandon us to schlep around in our daily lives without his help? God knows we need him. If he became human to die for us while we were still his enemies, why would he abandon us now that we are reconciled to him?

To be sure, this act of faith is not always straightforward. We believe that Christ died to break Sin’s power over us yet we continue to sin. Why is that? We all know people who have loved the Lord but who died untimely or awful deaths. How was God a shield to them? We see wars and injustice swirl around us. If God is in control, why does God allow this? It appears that increasingly the patients are running the asylum in this county, i.e., more and more people try to convince us that wrong is right and right is wrong, and it makes us afraid. But that does not negate the promise, no matter how dark things look! We are called to live with the apparent disconnect, unanswered questions, and ambiguities. If we could have told Christ’s disciples that first Good Friday that things were gonna turn out all right, they would have looked at us in disbelief. They knew better. Dead people didn’t rise up from the grave. That’s why we must also persevere as we remember. The outworking of God’s redemptive plan requires a marathoner’s thinking and perspective, not a sprinter’s.

That is why it is critical for our faith to remember God’s power when things look bad, and we are called to remember together. As the psalmist reminds us, we need to keep coming into God’s presence as his people and worship him, especially in the midst of our fears, so that God can heal our fears, and where we can find people who know how to live out their faith well and who are willing to mentor us as St. Paul reminds us. God knows we need the human touch and worshiping together and enjoying fellowship together in the Risen Lord’s Presence are critical ways God uses to support and strengthen and inspire us when we are afraid. Let us therefore resolve to use these gifts, these means of grace, to strengthen our faith in trust. After all, as Christ reminds us in our gospel lesson, we worship a God who loves us and wants to mother us in the best possible sense. This reality is also an integral part of the prize on which we must keep our eyes. Great mothers protect, defend, instruct, and love their children, giving them freedom to grow and learn despite their foibles and rebellion. How much more does God our Father love and support and protect us? For you see, whatever happens to us in this world, for good or for ill, is only temporary, only partial. That is why we must keep focused on the truly good and eternal things, the things of God.

And this is where our Lenten disciplines come into play because they are designed to help us do just that. Lent is a season that helps us recall what life is really all about. It helps us focus on God’s beauty and love and power and forgiveness, reminding us the true joy involved in being reconciled to God so that we can truly be God’s image-bearing creatures. It points us to our deepest longings and desires as humans and God’s image-bearers, to be loved and to love, to pursue mercy and goodness and beauty and truth. Lent exposes the shallowness and falsehood of our disordered longings and desires to be selfish and ruthless and cruel, with all the accompanying fear and anxiety. It reminds us our lust for power, sex, money, security, status, and hedonistic pleasure is all a sham and will eventually lead to our eternal destruction as St. Paul warns us in our epistle lesson. None of these things can give life or provide real security because Death is universal and makes these disordered desires a sham and delusion. Lent reminds us what is real and what has real worth. It gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves in the light of God’s judgment and mercy and to develop the holy habits that will help us to remember the power and love of God through prayer, repentance, self-reflection, worship, Bible reading and study, and regular participation in the Holy Eucharist where we feed on the Bread of Life, the very bread that gives us life forever, Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead.

There is indeed much to make us afraid in this world, but we have the power to overcome our fears, a power that is not our own, the power of God who loves us more than we dare love ourselves. Let us therefore not throw these pearls to the swine, my beloved. During this season of Lent, let us renew our commitment to Christ who has the power to take away our fears now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lent 2022: Abbess Egeria Describes How Catechumens were Instructed in 4th Century Jerusalem

Posted on by

Fascinating. It was no easy or light thing to become a Christian in those days.

I must also describe how those who are baptized at Easter are instructed. Those who give their names do so the day before Lent, and the priest notes down all their names; and this is before those eight weeks during which, as I have said, Lent is observed here. When the priest has noted down everyone’s name, then on the following day, the first day of Lent, on which the eight weeks begin, a throne is set up for the bishop in the center of the major church [behind the site of the cross], the Martyrium. The priests sit on stools on both sides, and all the clergy stand around. One by one the candidates are led forward, in such a way that the men come with their godfathers and the women with their godmothers.

Then the bishop questions individually the neighbors of the one who has come up, inquiring: “Does this person lead a good life? Obey parents? Is this person a drunkard or a liar?” And the bishop seeks out in the candidate other vices which are more serious. If the person proves to be guiltless in all these matters concerning which the bishop has questioned the witnesses who are present, the bishop notes down the candidate’s name. If, however, the candidate is accused of anything, the bishop orders the person to go out and says: “Let such a one amend their life, and when this is done, then approach the baptismal font.” He makes the same inquiry of both men and women. If, however, some are strangers, such people cannot easily receive baptism, unless they have witnesses who know them.

Ladies, my sisters, I must describe this, lest you think that it is done without explanation. It is the custom here, throughout the forty days on which there is fasting, for those who are preparing for baptism to be exorcised by the clergy early in the morning, as soon as the dismissal from the morning service has been given at the Anastasis [site of the empty tomb]. Immediately a throne is placed for the bishop in the major church, the Martyrium. All those who are to be baptized, both men and women, sit closely around the bishop, while the godmothers and godfathers stand there; and indeed all of the people who wish to listen may enter and sit down, provided they are of the faithful. A catechumen, however, may not enter at the time when the bishop is teaching them the law. The bishop does so in this way: beginning with Genesis and going through the whole of Scripture during these forty days, expounding first its literal meaning and then explaining the spiritual meaning. In the course of these days everything is taught not only about the Resurrection but concerning the body of faith. This is called catechetics.

When five weeks of instruction have been completed, they then receive the Creed. The bishop explains the meaning of each of the phrases of the Creed in the same way as Holy Scripture was explained, expounding first the literal and then the spiritual sense. In this fashion the Creed is taught.

And thus it is that in these places all the faithful are able to follow the Scriptures when they are read in the churches, because all are taught through those forty days, that is, from the first to the third hours [6am-9am], for during the three hours instruction is given. God knows, ladies, my sisters, that the voices of the faithful who have come to catechetics to hear instruction on those things being said or explained by the bishop are louder than when the bishop sits down in church to preach about each of those matters which are explained in this fashion. The dismissal from catechetics is given at the third hour [9:00am], and immediately, singing hymns, they lead the bishop to the Anastasis, and the office of the third hour takes place. And thus they are taught for three hours a day for seven weeks. During the eighth week, the one which is called the Great Week [Holy Week], there remains no more time for them to be taught, because what has been mentioned above must be carried out.

Now when seven weeks have gone by and there remains only Holy Week, which is here called the Great Week, then the bishop comes in the morning to the major church, the Martyrium. To the rear, at the apse behind the altar, a throne is placed for the bishop, and one by one they come forth, the men with their godfathers, the women with their godmothers. And each one recites the Creed back to the bishop. After the Creed has been recited back to the bishop, the bishop delivers a homily to them all, and says: “During these seven weeks you have been instructed in the whole law of the Scriptures, and you have heard about the faith. You have also heard of the resurrection of the flesh. But as for the whole explanation of the Creed, you have heard only that which you are able to know while you are still catechumens. Because you are still catechumens, you are not able to know those things which belong to a still higher mystery, that of baptism. But that you may not think that anything would be done without explanation, once you have been baptized in the name of God, you will hear of them during the eight days of Easter [Easter Sunday through the following Sunday] in the Anastasis following the dismissal from church. Because you are still catechumens, the most secret of the divine mysteries cannot be told to you.”

—Pilgrimage, 45-46

Lent 2022: Abbess Egeria Describes Fasting in 4th-Century AD Jerusalem During Lent

Posted on by

When the season of Lent is at hand, it is observed in the following manner. Now whereas with us the forty days preceding Easter are observed, here they observe the eight weeks before Easter. This is the reason why they observe eight weeks: On Sundays and Saturdays they do not fast, except on the one Saturday which is the vigil of Easter, when it is necessary to fast. Except on that day, there is absolutely no fasting here on Saturdays at any time during the year. And so, when eight Sundays and seven Saturdays have been deducted from the eight weeks—for it is necessary, as I have just said, to fast on one Saturday—there remain forty-one days which are spent in fasting, which are called
here “eortae,” that is to say, Lent.

This is a summary of the fasting practices here during Lent. There are some who, having eaten on Sunday after the dismissal, that is, at the fifth or the sixth hour [11:00am or noon], do not eat again for the whole week until Saturday, following the dismissal from the Anastasis [site of the cross]. These are the ones who observe the full week’s fast. Having eaten once in the morning on Saturday, they do not eat again in the evening, but only on the following day, on Sunday, that is, do they eat after the dismissal from the church at the fifth hour [11:00am] or later. Afterwards, they do not eat again until the following Saturday, as I have already said. Such is their fate during the Lenten season that they take no leavened bread (for this cannot be eaten at all), no olive oil, nothing which comes from trees, but only water and a little flour soup. And this is what is done throughout Lent.

—Pilgrimage, 27-28

March 10, 2022: This Day in Maney Family History

Posted on by

John F. Maney under a tree at Ufculme, EnglandOn this day in 1943 my dad, John F. Maney, was inducted into the army at the age of 20 (the tree in this picture under which dad sat is outside a house in Uffculme England that was used as battalion HQ. I have a picture of that tree 40 years later when dad and I visited in June 1984). A week later he left on a train from Van Wert, OH for Camp Perry on Lake Erie. What a way to start the decade of your 20s.

Mercatornet: Groupthink today: an endless circle of scapegoating

Posted on by

George Orwell invented the term “groupthink” for his dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949. A few years later, the term was already in clinical use to describe a common psychological phenomenon.

The idea is that people have a tendency to conform their own thoughts to those of the people around them, while believing themselves to be independent thinkers. Peer pressure is at least an important element in groupthink. With successful propaganda, bad actors can take advantage of groupthink, as a technique with which to control a society. This is what happens in Orwell’s novel.

A theory of mob violence by the French philosopher René Girard sets the phenomenon of groupthink in a wider anthropological context. Girard argued that human desire itself is mimetic. In other words, human beings don’t just conform their thinking to others, but also copy their desire from others. Like groupthink, human beings are unaware of the origin of their desire, believing it to be something that originates in themselves. When multiple people desire the same things, rivalry results, leading to jealousy, snobbery, hatred and violence.

This chaotic situation doesn’t remain a matter between individuals. Gradually, society bifurcates into antagonistic groups, each united by a common hatred of the other. As one group gets larger than the other its hatred of it grows, rather than reduces, in proportion to its increasing superiority. When the larger group includes almost all of society, it becomes a mob, and seeks the annihilation of the smaller group, or in some cases, the individual—the scapegoat, onto whom it has channeled all its hostility.

For the mob, the scapegoat is the source of all problems, and must be eliminated for the greater good. Nearly everyone in the mob believes this, and anyone who challenges it is denounced and banished. Few dare question the mob, and instead succumb to groupthink. It’s much easier.

Mahon is very much on to something, especially his conclusion. Read it all and see what you think.

Lent 2022: Fasting as a Lenten Discipline

Posted on by

The season of Lent with its emphasis on self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter is quickly approaching. One of the Lenten disciplines I commend to you this year is fasting. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about fasting and so I offer you some great insights from Dr. Scot McKnight’s excellent book, Fasting: The Ancient Practices. Hear him now:

Fasting is a person’s whole-body, natural response to life’s sacred moments (p. xii).

St. Athanasius, one of the architects of Christian orthodoxy, knew the formative powers of the sacred rhythms of the church calendar. That calendar weaved in and out of mourning over sin (fasting) and celebrating the good grace of God (feasting). “Sometimes,” he says of the church calendar, “the call is made to fasting, and sometimes to a feast [like every Sunday when we celebrate our Lord’s resurrection].”

…St. Augustine took fasting into a another area of formation. One way for Christians to find victory over temptation, St. Augustine reminded his readers, was to fast. Why? Because it is sometimes necessary to check the delight of the flesh in respect to licit [not forbidden or lawful] pleasures in order to keep it from yielding to illicit pleasures.

These two themes—fasting as a sacred rhythm in the church calendar and fasting as a discipline against sinful desires—are perhaps the most important themes of fasting in the history of Christian thinking (p. xv).

Dr. McKnight offers his own excellent definition of fasting:

Fasting is the natural, inevitable response of a person to a grievous sacred moment in life (e.g., death, sin, fear, threats, needs, sickness). Does it bring results? Yes, but that’s not the point of fasting. Those who fasted in response to grievous sacred moments frequently—but not always!—received results, like answered prayer. But focusing on the results causes us to misunderstand fasting entirely.

Which leads us now to see fasting in an A —> B —> C framework. If one wants to see the full Christian understanding of fasting, one must begin with A, the grievous sacred moment (e.g., death, sin, fear, threats, needs, sickness). That sacred moment generates a response (B), in this case fasting. Only then, only when the sacred moment is given its full power, does the response of fasting generate the results (C)—and then not always, if truth be told. [So, e.g., in response to sin we fast and can receive forgiveness.]

What we are getting at here is very important: fasting isn’t a manipulative tool that guarantees results. The focus in our deepest Christian tradition is not moving from column B to column C but the A —> B movement. Fasting is a response to a sacred moment, not an instrument designed to get desired results. The focus in the Christian tradition is not “if you fast you will get,” but “when this happens, God’s people fast [emphasis added]” (pp. xviii-xix).

Dr. McKnight develops these ideas in the subsequent chapters of his book and I wholeheartedly commend it to you for your edification. As always, it is critically important for us as Christians to know why we do what we do. This pertains to worship and the various spiritual disciplines, fasting included. Therefore, this Lent I encourage you to fast regularly as a means to help you become a more Christ-oriented person and to live a cruciform (cross-shaped) life.

To purchase Dr. McKnight’s book on fasting, click this link.

Father Jonathon Wylie: The Temptation of Jesus

Posted on by

Sermon delivered on Lent 1C, Sunday, March 6, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Father Wylie gets all whiny when we ask for a written manuscript. Nobody’s got time for a whiny priest, especially during Lent, so click here to listen to the audio podcast of his sermon.

Lectionary texts: Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 91.1-2, 9-16; Romans 10.8b-13; St. Luke 4.1-13.

Lent: Time to Focus on the Power and Love of God

Posted on by

Sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of tonight’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51; 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10; John 8.1-11.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the 40 day season we call Lent. It is a time for self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter. Our Commination Service earlier today reminded us that something is terribly amiss in God’s world and our lives, that without the love, mercy, goodness, justice, and power of God, we remain hopelessly alienated from God and each other because we are all slaves to the power of Sin, that alien and malevolent force that is too strong for any of us to resist on our own power. And if we are not reconciled to God, we are undone forever in ways too terrible for us to imagine. Lent therefore is a time for us to focus not so much on ourselves but on the power of God manifested most clearly in the cross of our Lord Jesus. So tonight I want us to look at the dynamic of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation that God the Father makes available to all through the work of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, i.e., the surprising power of God at work. Until we understand this dynamic and what we are up against, we can never hope to observe a holy Lent (and beyond).

If we ever hope to be reconciled to God our Father so that we can live with him forever in the new creation, we must first acknowledge our utter helplessness to fix ourselves so that we are no longer alienated from God. This means that we must first have the wisdom and humility (gifts of God’s grace) to acknowledge the fact that we are all slaves to the power of Sin. Too often we speak of our sins and think of them as misdeeds or acts of wrongdoing, the root cause of our alienation to God. This diminishes the problem of Sin to an absurdly reductionist level. This thinking implies that we can get right with God by simply adjusting our behavior or changing our thinking on certain things or making better choices—the current darling of excuses for our feel-good culture. This is a fatal mistake on our part, however, because it implies that we can fix ourselves and our problems, that if we repent of our bad choices or thinking or behavior, our sin problem with God goes away. But the whole of Scripture makes very clear that there is something vastly more sinister going on. There is something desperately wrong in the world and our lives—the problem of Sin— and we know it in our bones, despite our best efforts to deny it. But left to our own devices, we don’t have the ability to defeat the power of Sin in our lives and we delude ourselves if we think otherwise. Don’t believe me? How about those sins you confess? I bet you never do them again after you confess them, do you? Or how about your resolution to do better in some areas of your life? How is that working out for you? If we are honest with ourselves, try as we may, we must acknowledge that our efforts matter very little when it comes to turning away from our sins. Why? Because we are up against a power that is far greater than us, a power that seeks our destruction and undoing as God’s image-bearers, a power that will ultimately lead to our permanent death. The sins that we focus on are not the root cause of our alienation from God. Rather, just as a fever is a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem itself, our sins reflect our slavery to the power of Sin, again defined as an outside and malevolent force that has enslaved us. We acknowledged this very starkly in our Commination Service this noon when we acknowledged that without the cross of Jesus Christ and his presence in our lives, we are condemned to utter and complete destruction forever. This should both humble us and scare the hell out of us—literally. Until we get our thinking straight on this, we will surely have and live out a half-hearted faith (at best) because we live under the delusion that we can fix ourselves so that we are pleasing to God and set ourselves up for a self-righteousness complex. When we think like this, we inevitably dismiss the cross of Jesus Christ and the life-saving gift God the Father offers us all in and through his Son. But when we understand that Sin is a power we cannot overcome on our own and there is nothing we can do or say that will change our status before God, we are ready to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ, crucified and raised from the dead.

This calls for us to be sober in our thinking about the power of Sin and see it as God sees it—a force that corrupts and destroys God’s precious image-bearers and good creation. This is why God hates Sin and why we can expect to receive God’s wrath on our sins. God is first and foremost a God of love and if that is true, God must also be a God of justice. God cannot and will not ultimately allow anything or anyone in his creation to continue corrupting it and us. God loves us too much to allow us to be permanent victims of injustice and all the evil that flows from Sin’s power. Since we are powerless to break Sin’s grip on us, and since God is the only person who can free us from our slavery to it, God must intervene to destroy Sin and set things right, the very essence of justice. Otherwise, we would be doomed to be forever in Sin’s grip, catastrophically and permanently separated from God’s eternal love for us and excluded from God’s great heavenly banquet he has prepared for us so that we can enjoy him forever. It means that we would forever be trapped in our worst selves and that violence, greed, selfishness, cruelty, rapacity, suffering, hurt, brokenness, and alienation would continue to rule unchecked in our lives and God’s world. If God really is love, God cannot let this state of affairs go on forever. To be sure, punishment is involved in this making-right process, but the overall thrust of God’s justice is restorative and healing because the heart of God is merciful, kind, generous, and loving. God does not create us to destroy us. What parent looks at his/her newborn baby for the first time with the intent of destroying it? The notion is absurd. If we fallen humans don’t think like this, why would God? Makes no sense!! God created us so that we can enjoy him and rule his world faithfully and wisely on his behalf. 

This knowledge will also help us think clearly about the dynamic of grace, repentance, and forgiveness. As we have seen, because we are helpless to free ourselves from our slavery to the power of Sin, our repentance is not enough to reconcile us to God because we will continue to sin even with repentance. Repent or not, unless our slavery to Sin is broken, we are doomed to continue living in its power. We see this clearly in our OT and gospel lessons tonight. The prophet calls God’s people together to collectively repent of their sin of idolatry, the worship of false gods that inevitably leads to all kinds of sins that will provoke God’s anger and wrath (idolatry is a primary sin because sooner or later we become what we worship). If God’s people turned away from (or repented of) worshiping false gods and turned to the one true God, then there was hope that God might not execute his wrath on his sinful people. Here we are reminded that we dare not presume God’s mercy on us, that God is free to show us wrath or mercy quite independently of what we resolve to do (or not do). In other words, God’s mercy is not contingent on repentance. The prophet believes God will be merciful because God had revealed his character to his people: God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If God relents on punishing his people for their idolatry, it will be because of who God is, not because God’s people have repented. 

Likewise in our gospel lesson. Notice that our Lord forgave the adulterous woman before calling her to repentance (go and sin no more). In this case God the Son showed mercy before the woman changed her behavior, reflecting the heart and character of his Father. This is God’s grace at work to achieve forgiveness and reconciliation between God and humans. Grace—God’s undeserved blessing, goodness, bounty, mercy, and forgiveness on us—precedes our awareness of sin, not vice-versa. This is because God’s character is eternal, preceding our slavery to Sin. In fact, without God tugging at our heart and mind, we would be unaware that we are alienated from God and stand under God’s just condemnation of our sin. Why? Because as we saw in our preaching series on Christ’s Death and Resurrection, sin is a theological concept. People whose lives are devoid of God have no awareness that their behavior is offensive to God and that they are slaves to Sin’s power. We see it all the time from the Twitter mob and in the extreme rhetoric of self-righteousness that accompanies the sense of warped justice that invariably accompanies human thinking and behavior without the intervention of God. Simply put, if the Holy Spirit is at work in us he will make us aware of our awful unmediated state before God and our own sinfulness, our awareness of his Presence notwithstanding. But here’s the thing. The moment we become aware of our sin captivity, we are already standing in God’s grace, ready to receive God’s healing love, mercy, and forgiveness because of God’s eternal nature! We see this dynamic expressed beautifully in the old favorite hymn, Amazing Grace. John Newton, who wrote the hymn, was a slave trader whose eyes were opened to the wickedness of his sin by God’s grace. He was a wretch who was saved, a man lost but now found, by the grace of God that preceded his evil deeds, a grace that called him to repentance. God’s grace always precedes our repentance because God and God’s character always precede us. God makes us aware of our slavery to Sin and the chasm it creates so that we will turn to him and let him heal and rescue us from our slavery.

And how did/does God do this? In and through the cross of Jesus Christ as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. As we saw three weeks ago, here is the essence of the Good News of Jesus Christ. God became human to bear his own just punishment on our sin and wickedness so as to spare us from bearing his wrath and eternal condemnation that would lead to our destruction. In the process the power of Sin is broken in us, only partially in this life but fully in the next. How all this works with all of its mysteries, enigmas, ambiguities and the continuing messiness of the human condition, we aren’t told, only that it does. Our knowledge of the power of Sin and our slavery to it makes us realize that we don’t deserve this kindness and mercy. None of us do. But it is ours for the taking if we have the gifts of humility and wisdom to accept God’s invitation to believe it to be true, despite the fact that we cannot fully explain how God accomplished this all in the cross of Christ. But because we believe that Scripture is the word of God, we believe the promise to be true. God’s undeserved mercy, grace, love, and forgiveness lead us to a sense of profound and deep relief and gratitude because we realize we are no longer under God’s just condemnation and there is not a thing we did to deserve it.In other words, deep and sincere repentance, the kind that really matters in helping us learn and prepare to live as truly human beings in God’s promised new world—a world we can only hope to inhabit because of the cross of Jesus Christ—comes in response to our knowledge of God’s grace, not before. This is power of God at work, reconciling us to himself in Christ. Nobody likes to be confronted with their sin and their abject standing before God without God’s intervention in and through Christ. But we cannot hope to be reconciled to God without it.

We see this whole process vividly illustrated in our gospel lesson and we should take our cue from it. Imagine you are the woman who was dragged before Christ. You know your sin because you know God’s law; God has made himself known to you through it. And so you expect the worst, a death sentence for your sin of adultery. You are braced to feel the stones strike your body, slowly and painfully killing you (not unlike our sin does to us over the course of time). And then comes a remarkable surprise. Jesus pronounces you not guilty, despite that fact the he and you both know you are guilty of an awful sin. You have experienced God’s mercy and forgiveness, not because of who you are, but because of who God is. How would you feel? Stunned? Relieved? Profoundly grateful? All of the above and more, no doubt! He tells you to go and sin no more (he calls you to repent of your adultery), but his forgiveness is not contingent on that. Certainly the vast majority of us would be grateful for this reprieve and our gratitude would likely serve as ongoing motivation for leaving the adulterous life. She, like us, would certainly have to recall her sin and the great gift of forgiveness because life, well, gets in our way and distracts us so that we forget. That’s why we recall our sins and God’s mercy shown to us in Christ, not to make us feel bad (although that is really unavoidable on occasion), but to make us remember the love, mercy, grace, and faithfulness of God applied to our wickedness. When the woman remembered Christ’s intervention on her behalf, was she grateful? Did her gratitude help motivate her to repentance? We aren’t told, but our own experience suggests that it can and does, and this is what God desires from us. One more thing before we close. In this story, Christ does not tell us to suspend moral judgment when he challenged those who brought the woman to him. Instead, he was exposing their hypocrisy and evil intent to trap him. In doing so, he was able to show mercy to the woman caught in adultery, calling her to repentance and giving her the motivation we all need to live our lives in imitation of our Lord and Savior, the essence of repentance and faithful living. 

This is what it means to observe a holy Lent and beyond, my beloved. We are called to reflect on the fruit of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness in our lives—the power of God at work in us. We are called to understand that to be reconciled to God means trusting in the power, mercy, love, and character of God revealed supremely in Jesus Christ and not our own perceived (and often delusional) abilities to make ourselves right with God. It means we see clearly the truth about the human condition and our standing before God without the intervention of Christ. We needn’t fear the truth because the truth always sets us free to love and serve the Lord, thanking him for his love and kindness and justice, and asking his mercy and forgiveness when we miss the mark as we attempt to imitate him in the power of the Spirit as we live out our lives together. May we all observe a holy Lent and sing God’s praises with grateful hearts forever and ever. 

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A Prayer for Ash Wednesday 2022

Posted on by

Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent:
Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,
that we, worthily lamenting our sins
and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and ever. Amen.