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.