Homily offered by Maggie Cunningham at All Saints, Pasadena at our 12:10 p.m. Ash Wednesday service.
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Many years ago, during the required Ministry Study Year, my mentoring rector instructed me that my “affect should always be congruent with the liturgical season.” I was surprised and puzzled by this directive, and the more I tried to imagine what that would look like (and I really did try), the more bewildered I became. Was I to walk around open-mouthed in wonder during all of Eastertide or perpetually beam with joy throughout the Christmas season? And what, I wondered, would be the appropriate affect for Ordinary Time, that endless stretch of green vestments between Trinity Sunday and Advent One?
Lent would be the easy one, I thought—joyless, guilty, and hungry. But that, is actually not the look God is after. In the early days of the church, those who had scandalized the faithful were excommunicated on Ash Wednesday and returned to communion right before Easter, after forty days of penance. This was evidently a time for ferreting out the sinful (read generally non-conforming) resulting, I would imagine, in a rather smug affect on the part of those who had not been so identified.
It took a thousand years for the church to realize that everyone could do with some ashes and penance. The Ash Wednesday service of the early Prayer Books opened with a homily that was to include “the general sentences of God’s cursing against impenitent sinners followed by an exhortation to repentance.” The preacher, speaking for God, would adopt a wrathful affect, evoking terror in the congregation.
In modern times, the informal Lenten focus has become “giving something up.” What that something is, is left to the individual instead of the ecclesiastical authorities, and the responsibility for whether this practice is trivial, pro forma, or transformative lies with that person. Lent remains a penitential season, a serious, perhaps somber time, but that does not mean that we are to go about with long faces and refrain from smiling. Indeed, as today’s gospel makes abundantly clear, acts of penance are to be done in private, and our public affect should not suggest contrition.
The word Lent comes from the prehistoric West Germanic for “long days,” and refers to springtime, the time of year when the days grow longer. In springtime many experience an impulse to clean house. During Lent we engage in some spring-cleaning of the soul, as we recall Moses, Elijah, and Jesus praying and fasting in the desert for forty days. Their wilderness experiences were not exercises in self-deprivation for its own sake; they were distraction-free encounters with God. The point of Lent is not to punish ourselves, but to identify and remove the material, mental, and emotional obstacles to our awareness of God’s presence. The Litany of Penitence covers a good number of such obstacles; there are others more benign on the surface: habits and behaviors neutral in themselves but that for some are potential objects of distracting obsession.
A personal example: For the last two years plus, I have rushed to turn on the news as soon as I wake up, compulsively driven to learn of the latest atrocity perpetrated by the president. This is not a good way to start the day. Prayer is often known as a response to God. There used to be a popular children’s book called, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret! Prayer is more like, Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, God. When I am filled with anger and outage, I cannot hear God’s question, let alone respond. For Lent this year, I intend to return to my previous practice of quietly settling my soul before facing whatever new horror has developed overnight. This sounds easy enough, but I doubt that it will be.
When cleaning out any space, we are likely to come across things that are broken, useless, and perhaps even dangerous. We are also apt to discover among the cobwebs some long-forgotten treasure, the value of which we never understood. So it is with the spring cleaning of the soul. In the course of the prescribed self-examination, if we are honest and thorough enough, we will find past actions of which we are rightly ashamed, and we will recognize our capacity for evil. And, if we keep going, we may discover another unknown aspect of ourselves, a long-hidden, perhaps rejected trait or talent that we might well dust off and develop in service to the holy.
We all come into the world “trailing clouds of glory,” as Wordsworth put it.
There is a story about a young child asking her mother if she could spend a few minutes alone with her newborn sibling. The mother agreed and, curious, stood just outside the door to see what would happen. The child said to the baby, “Tell me about God. I think I am beginning to forget.” Life causes us to forget; Lent is about remembering.
Ultimately, Lent is about forgiveness. Given its association with excommunication, fire and brimstone preaching, and self-mortification, this may sound strange. And yet, these are all practices aimed at earning God’s forgiveness.
But, astonishingly, we already have it! Forgiveness is a funny thing: we can’t earn it; we just have to recognize that we need it. Notice how often, out of the blue, Jesus says things like, ”Your sins are forgiven. Get up and walk. Go and sin no more.” He doesn’t demand a show of remorse; the forgiveness comes first.
Why, then, does the church require and why do we pray for repentance? “Forgiveness,” Marion Hatchett explains, “is the free gift of God; true repentance and sincere faith, also gifts of God, enable us to receive the good news of forgiveness of our sins.”
I never did figure out how to match my affect with the church year, so I settled for wearing footwear in the appropriate liturgical color. Rejecting both wrath and wretchedness as Lenten affects, this afternoon I will take off my purple shoes, wash my face, and probably turn on the news.
