Sermon delivered Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21).
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.
If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.
Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.
And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
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