Jesus invites us to focus on "what can I do?" instead of "why did this happen?"

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 26, 2017 (Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): John 9:1-41

“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The question would have been a natural one in Jesus’ day; it was widely assumed that sin and physical illness were connected in a directly causal relationship: if you were sick or had a disability of any sort, it must have been because you had sinned. If you were born with an illness or disability, either you must have committed some sin while still in the womb, or your misfortune was due to the sins of your parents. So the disciples were trying to figure it out, to determine which category they should place this man in to explain his abnormality, to find someone to blame.

Despite the advances of modern science, we’re not so different in 21st century America from the disciples who sought to explain the condition of this blind man by blaming it on sin. We’re always looking for ways to blame someone for the uncomfortable abnormalities and disabilities we see in others – “That poor child is deformed because her mother used drugs during her pregnancy,” or “If only he’d stop smoking, he wouldn’t have gotten lung cancer,” or “She has AIDS; that must be a punishment for her lifestyle or drug use.” And if we can’t find a reasonable person on whom to pin the blame, we pin it on God. “Why, God? What have I – or my sister or my uncle or my friend – done to deserve this?” we ask, the assumption being that illness and suffering are only inflicted upon those who “deserve” it as punishment for something they have done wrong.

But the interesting thing is that Jesus rejects this assumption that physical illness is an indication of the presence of sin. “Neither this man or his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

But is this really any better? The man’s blindness – and by consequence, the miserable life he would have experienced as a blind person in first-century Palestine, with no real opportunities for making a living open to him besides begging by the side of the road – was created just so Jesus could come along and perform a miracle? Does that mean all our sufferings are created just so God can be glorified through them? Certainly God can be glorified through our sufferings, but does God create them on purpose – does God make us suffer – just to glorify himself? What kind of God would that be?

But several biblical scholars have suggested that that is not necessarily what Jesus meant to say in this passage. Some scholars propose an alternative translation of the Greek text from the one we heard this morning, a translation that goes like this: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” (9:3-4a). In this translation, Jesus does not give an explanation for the man’s blindness, but simply accepts it as a given. Rather than dwelling in the “why” questions, Jesus is concerned with the more practical “what” questions – what can I do for this man now, and how can God’s glory be revealed in his life, regardless of his condition or his past?

In a similar vein, the blind man is not interested in explaining or justifying Jesus’ behavior when he is interrogated by the Pharisees; he is only concerned with testifying to his personal experience of Jesus. “We know this man is a sinner,” the Pharisees say to him, trying to get him to speak ill of Jesus. “I do not know whether he is a sinner,” the formerly blind man replies. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” He offers no other explanations beyond this simple statement.

In the story as we have received it, both the blind man and Jesus are concerned with the here and now – with responding to the facts of the present situation without over-analyzing them. Jesus does not try to explain the reason why this man was born blind to his disciples, and the blind man does not try to justify Jesus’ actions to the Pharisees. Jesus sees a need and responds to it; the blind man receives a gift and testifies to it. The disciples are so caught up with trying to find a reason for the man’s blindness, to find someone to blame for this misfortune, that they miss seeing a real human being in need in front of them. The Pharisees are so caught up in arguments over what is and isn’t lawful according to religious tradition that they miss the miracle that has taken place in front of them.

The Pharisees tend to get a bad rep in the Gospels, since they’re always set as the “bad guys” in the story, in opposition to Jesus. But as this story shows, the disciples don’t always “get it” either. And aren’t we a little more like the disciples and the Pharisees in this story than we’d like to admit?

I sometimes wonder how Jesus would be received if he were to appear in an Episcopal church on any given Sunday morning. Might we not find ourselves to be modern-day Pharisees, more worried about whether Jesus was performing the liturgy correctly than about the miracle of his presence among us?

And don’t we often look around for people and institutions to blame when things go wrong in our lives, rather than accepting the circumstances for what they are and trying to think creatively about how we could contribute to making the works of God be revealed in that situation?

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.”

“I do not know whether he is a sinner,” says the formerly blind man. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

John’s Gospel this morning is inviting us to let go of the urge to explain, to analyze, to justify, and simply open our eyes to the world around us. Where is there a need that you can respond to, regardless of the reasons it exists? Where have you received a gift that you can testify to with gratefulness? Our personal stories about how we have experienced God working in our lives are the most powerful evangelism tools we have. What is the “one thing you do know” about God in your life? I invite you to share your answer to that question with someone in your life this week, and see what happens. Maybe you too have the power to open the eyes of the blind.

Meeting our spiritual needs is just as critical to our survival as meeting our physical needs

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 19, 2017 (Third Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:5-42

Water is essential for all known forms of life. It could even be said that water is the key to life, biologically speaking. So it no surprise that religious symbolism around water is extensive and widespread. We are dependent on water for our very survival, and we are dependent on God to provide us that water.

In our baptismal service, we give thanks to God for this physical, earthly element and recount the ways in which it is part of our religious history:

“We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise.
In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism.
In it we are buried with Christ in his death.
By it we share in his resurrection.
Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.
Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (BCP 306-07)

But this brief summary of significant events in the history of our faith that happened in water, with water, or through water doesn’t include the two we hear about in our readings today. The framers of our Prayer Book could have added a few more lines to that prayer:

“With it you nourished the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Through it your Son Jesus connected with a Samaritan woman, breaking down religious boundaries and bringing her to acknowledge him as the Messiah.”

God not only brought the children of Israel out of Egypt through water – by walking through the parted waters of the Red Sea – he sustained them during those forty years in the wilderness with water, providing them water from the rock in the desert. Despite the people’s quarreling and grumbling and complaining, questioning the purpose of that very liberation God had brought to them, God continues to be faithful and provides them with the basics for life – water from the rock, and food in the form of manna from heaven and quail.

And Jesus was not just baptized in water; he continued to use water as a powerful image in his teaching, including when he spoke to Nicodemus about being born “of water and the spirit” in the passage we heard last week, and when he told the Samaritan woman in our reading today that he had “living water” to give her, water that would never leave her thirsty again.

She doesn’t understand at first that he’s not talking about actual physical water, some kind of magic liquid that could slake her thirst forever, but about a spiritual sustenance that could feed her soul from within, an internal “well” of strength, of support, of love, of comfort, of protection, offered to her through a connection with this man standing before her, this man who “told me everything I have ever done.”

Jesus’s reference to this internal spiritual sustenance as “living water” draws on its vital importance to human existence: it is key to life; without it we die. The same is true of our relationship with God. We must continually seek it – like this woman coming day after day to draw water from the well – or else we perish.

In 21st century America, where clean water is readily available with little to no effort or money expended on our part, many of us have lost touch with just how important the search for and acquisition of water is when one does not have easy access to it. To us, an offer of “living water” that would never leave us thirsty might be a nice but unnecessary additional convenience. It wouldn’t really impact our lives that much, because for us, acquiring water is as simple as turning on a tap only a few steps from where we happen to be at any given moment. For this woman, though, to have access to water that would assuage her thirst forever would be life-changing. It would mean she would not have to keep coming back to this well to draw water and cart it back to her household. She would have time and energy to devote to things other than mere survival. And so we can almost hear the desperation in her voice when she responds, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

It is with that kind of intensity, that kind of passion, that we should seek God as well. Our physical needs are so primary, so essential, that we can get stuck in seeking to fulfill them alone, but fulfilling our spiritual needs is the only way we will find true sustenance, true life, life beyond the physical, biological meaning of the word. Psychologist Abraham Maslow observed that until our basic physiological needs are met, it is nearly impossible for human beings to focus on anything else. Only when we have enough to eat, shelter, and water, can we begin to explore higher level needs like spiritual awakening. But what we often don’t realize is that our hunger, our craving, for those “higher needs,” is just as essential to our survival as the physical needs. Too many of us stop when we have our basic physiological needs met, neglecting to continue up that hierarchy of needs to pursue the rest of the things we need in order to be truly alive, truly fulfilled.

Jesus is telling the woman by the well that she has a deeper need even than the physical thirst that brings her here day after day, and that only when she addresses that need will her real thirst be quenched.

When the disciples come back and meet up with Jesus and encourage him to “eat something,” his response is, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Just like the woman at the well, they don’t get it either, asking one another, “Did you give him some food? I didn’t give him any food. Did you give him some food?” - but again, he’s talking about a deeper hunger than the physiological. The “food” he has is of the same sort as the “living water” – an internal source, connected to a higher spiritual power, that has the ability to truly nourish in a way that literal, physical food cannot do.

Jesus reminds us that we will only assuage our true hunger and thirst when we seek God as desperately as we seek to fulfill our physical needs. “Give me this water,” we should cry out, like the woman at the well, give me the living water of God that will quench my soul.

But since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do that seeking after God if our basic needs for food and shelter are not met, those of us who do have our basic needs met are called to do all in our power to assist others in meeting those basic needs so that they, too, can seek the kind of spiritual sustenance that will truly nourish them, completely, wholly, at every level of their being.

Faith is a two-way relationship, and we can control only our side

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 12, 2017 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.

Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.

In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.

I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?

I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.

But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.

So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.

Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once told me that she had to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.

But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.

And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," between two extremes. Rather than asserting that faith is entirely our choice or entirely a gift, I’m proposing that it’s both. Somehow at the same time it’s both a choice we make and a gift from God.

The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.

We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot MAKE God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, and we cannot force ourselves to have faith.

So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). In our life of spiritual practice, we are building ourselves a wind turbine, so that when God’s Spirit does blow in our lives, we have the mechanism ready to capture its energy and allow it to fuel us.

This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.

Shame and fear: two things God never intended for humanity

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 5, 2017 (First Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19

Since the season of Lent invites us to reflect on sin and its consequences, it is appropriate that we begin with the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the first sin, the “original sin,” in the Garden of Eden.

According to the story, humanity’s first sin was disobedience. God said not to do something, Adam and Eve did it, and wham: God expels them from the Garden.

Setting aside any philosophical questions about whether God’s rules were just and worthy of obedience or not, this story attempts to make sense of one of humanity’s fundamental flaws: our inability to accept limits, to acknowledge that “God is God and we are not.” We never seem to be satisfied with what God gives us; we always want more. As a species, we have a tendency to go after precisely the things we know we cannot have. Many a parent will tell you that the quickest way to get a child to do something is to tell them not to do it.

So what are the consequences of this sin? Immediately after their disobedience, after refusing to accept the limits placed on them, Adam and Eve feel shame -- they become aware of their nakedness and cover themselves, something they had previously not felt it necessary to do -- and fear -- they hide when God comes looking for them in the garden. Their relationship with each other and with God is changed because of their disobedience; rather than relationships characterized by trust and comfort and safety, they have become relationships tainted by fear and shame.

If fear and shame only entered Adam and Eve’s consciousness after the Fall, then it’s safe to say that fear and shame were not part of God’s intentions for humanity. Fear and shame are a consequence of sin, and in fact are sinful themselves, in a way, having nothing to do with what our relationship with God is intended to be like. Yet unfortunately, many people associate fear and shame with God. They think of God as a judgmental figure to be feared, someone in front of whom they should feel shame. Perhaps this is because so many churches and other religious communities -- the organizations that represent God to so many people -- use and rely on fear and shame to motivate and control people. Instead of seeing this as a characteristic of humanity’s sinfulness, people come to see it as a representation of how God relates to us.

And so when we enter a season like Lent, a season about repentance, a season that encourages us to look closely at our sin, it can stir up fear and shame for many people. They may feel they are being judged and shamed for their shortcomings in all areas of their lives. But while Lent encourages us to look seriously at our actions and make amends for any harm we have caused to others, it doesn’t invite us to wallow in shame or cower in fear.

Psychologists have written about the distinction between guilt and shame -- guilt is a feeling of remorse over some action we have done that we regret, while shame is a general feeling of unworthiness, a painful feeling about how we appear to others, whether or not we have actually done anything wrong. Guilt is about specific actions, whereas shame is about our sense of identity, our understanding of self [1]. That’s why shame is so destructive and unhealthy. It’s appropriate to feel guilt over something we’ve done that upset or harmed someone, and the season of Lent encourages us to acknowledge the sins of which we are guilty. But it’s not appropriate to feel like we are a horrible, unworthy person because we’ve done something that upset or harmed someone else -- that’s shame, one of the consequences of the Fall, something that God never intended for humanity.

According to psychologists, people who are overrun with shame often have an inability to feel true guilt, because they are so consumed with feeling bad about themselves they don’t have the ability to notice when they have hurt others or to feel remorse about it [2]. Feeling guilt, however, is considered a sign of emotional health. Emotionally healthy people are able to recognize that their actions may have caused pain to someone else, empathize with that person, and feel remorse and make amends [3]. Guilt may be painful, but it is healthy. Shame, on the other hand, is both painful and unhealthy.

And what about fear? Aren’t we supposed to “fear God?” The Bible constantly tells us things like “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10, Psalm 111:10). Doesn’t fear motivate us to behave ethically, fear of punishment if we don’t?

Well, yes, that kind of fear can be a motivator, but the ancient wisdom of the elders in both Jewish and Christian traditions tell us that that kind of fear is an insufficient foundation for true faith, because it relies on an incomplete understanding of God [4]. Yes, God can punish us, God has the ability to punish us, but God is also merciful. The story of the Fall in the Qur’an says that while God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden for disobeying his law, he also provided them guidance for living in the world to which he banished them. In other words -- with the punishment also came mercy. That is a complete picture of God: as the psalmist says, “You were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds” (Psalm 99:8). With sin comes consequences, but we can also rest assured that God is merciful, that God is always working for our good, even when it may seem we are being slammed with a punishment. Because, as Paul points out in our reading from Romans today, God managed to turn even the Fall into a good thing. Yes, he punished Adam and Eve by expelling them from the Garden, but he righted their wrongs -- and all of our wrongs -- by sending Jesus to us as the “new Adam,” a new creation, a picture of humanity restored to God’s original intentions for us and a gateway to accessing that restored humanity ourselves.

When the Bible talks about “fearing God,” it is not talking primarily about being scared, dreading punishment, pleading with God, “please don’t hurt me.” The Hebrew word used in the phrase “the fear of the Lord” is yirat, a word that means awe, reverence, wonder, amazement [5]. If you’ve ever had a theophany, a moment where God’s presence was revealed to you, made known to you in a powerful way, then you will know that that kind of experience can be slightly “scary” in our normal sense of the meaning of that word, but the emotion generated is one that comes from feeling overwhelmed at being connected in a positive way to something larger than ourselves, not one that comes from worrying that that thing larger than us will squash us.

So this Lent, I invite you to focus more on guilt -- acknowledging and admitting when you hurt others -- than on shame -- thinking you are an unworthy person, and to focus more on awe -- marveling at the presence of God and your connection with God -- than fear -- worrying that God will punish you. Don’t allow Lent to be a season of shame and fear. In fact, maybe this year, you could try giving them up for Lent.


[1] Joseph Burgo, “The Difference Between Guilt and Shame,” Psychology Today Blog, 30 May 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shame/201305/the-difference-between-guilt-and-shame Accessed 4 March 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/Summaries/Eikev/Yirah/yirah.html
[5] Tara Sophia Mohr, “Is it Fear or Awe?” http://www.jonathanfields.com/is-it-fear-or-awe/ Accessed 4 March 2017.

An invitation to take stock of individual and corporate sins during Lent

Sermon delivered Wednesday, March 1, 2017 (Ash Wednesday) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:1-12, 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: all the right ritual actions are meaningless if not accompanied by the right intentions. 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.” 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.”

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 denying and emptying oneself in order to open oneself 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 one’s neighbor as oneself. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet of 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.”

The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own hearts 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. Cuthbert’s, as the Diocese of California, 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. In our current political climate, these communal sins of our culture are on display in a particularly vivid way. This year I am especially aware of “the evil done on our behalf” that our confession of sin refers to – sins we may have not have committed personally, but things our government has done “on our behalf,” in which we are implicated whether we like it or not.

On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our mortality and the fragility of human life. It is a time for examining our actions and behaviors and priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and taking stock of what is really important in the life of faith.

So as you begin Lent this year, take some time to consider: what is really important to you in your life of faith? What spiritual practices do you wish you were doing on a more regular basis? Could you commit to doing at least one of them during Lent? What relationship in your life do you most need to change in order for God’s love to be reflected in and through it? Could you take some steps toward changing that relationship during Lent?

Each of us may have a different Lenten discipline this year, but the underlying theme of our work 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.