Third Sunday in Lent: On Repentance (Rebecca Gordon)

Here we are in the third Sunday in Lent, and we haven’t really talked much about sin or repentance. Traditionally, Lent is a time to reflect on our failings of thought, word, and deed, on the things done and left undone. Lent is a time to think again, as the Latin roots of the word “re-pent” tell us, about our connections with the world, with each other, and with God. It’s a time to experience both regret and hope. Regret for sin and hope for redemption.

Sin and repentance are subjects that liberal Christians are often uncomfortable with, and there are good reasons for that. Some of us are uncomfortable because in our early religious lives we were introduced to a vicious demon of a God, a God who is just waiting for us to fail so that he – and this God is very much a “he” – can cast us into the eternal fires of damnation. I kind of think there’s a little bit of this God in the one Paul says destroyed 23,000 people at once in the desert, just so they might be a good example for the Christian church at Corinth a millennium later.

This is the God who hates so many of us, maybe because we are as Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church would say, fags, or because, as I used to believe, we are women, or poor, or weak, or because we have failed to find the right amount of unswerving belief in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. A God who hates creation – imperfect as it may be – is a hard God for me to love. A hard God to cry out to, as we did in today’s psalm:

“O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”

Why would I eagerly seek Someone who is only waiting to throw me into the pit? What a blessed relief it is to be able to come to a place like St. John’s, to worship a God who, far from hating me, loves me like a daughter. And yet, and yet…

I think another reason that the idea of sin and repentance is hard for many Episcopalians is that we don’t really believe that as individuals most of us are really all that bad, are truly deserving of eternal damnation. Oh sure, we all do unskillful things, as Buddhists say. We tell the occasional lie, maybe to prevent a friend or partner from being hurt or, more likely, from getting mad at us. We snap at people we love. We put off things that would be better done today. Often we wish we were braver, or kinder, or had more self-discipline. But we’re not evil. Are we?

All this talk of sin and repentance makes us nervous and maybe even a little embarrassed. My partner Jan grew up in the pre-1979 Episcopal church, with the old prayer book that was published in 1928. Most Sundays her congregation at Trinity Church in Buffalo, New York said Morning Prayer, which always began with Confession. Here is part of what they used to say:

“ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.”

We are “miserable offenders… and there is no health in us.” Not the best message for church growth, is it? Not quite the right note to appeal to the spiritual but not religious moving in all around St. John’s, is it? Who wants to come to church to be told they’re bad? And yet, and yet… there are times when I know that I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart, and they have not led me where I truly want to go. And I need somewhere to turn, someone to help me turn my heart where it truly wishes to rest – in God. I need a church that loves me in all my fallible humanity, that does not ignore my failings, but helps recognize and redeem them. I need a place where I can lay the burden of those failings down, place them in stronger hands than my own.

One of the joys of preaching in the Episcopal church is that the preacher doesn’t get to – or have to – decide what texts to talk about. Today the lectionary has served up a slightly odd bunch of readings. We’ve got: the well-known story of Moses and the burning bush; one of the lovely hunger-and-thirst-for-God psalms; Paul’s meditations on why bad things happen to bad people; and an oddly unfinished story about a fig tree.

Oh, and a collect. The collects are another gift of the Episcopal church. They’re a set of prayers for all kinds of occasions, many dating back to the 16^th century. You can find them in that little red book under the chair in front of you – the Book of Common Prayer. (Don’t look now.) Here’s the collect that opened today’s service:

“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

I think we can find a key to today’s readings in this collect. It is, after all, Lent, and we are being invited to repent. “Almighty God, you know we have no power to help ourselves.”

We have no power to defend our bodies and souls from the assaults of the world. Oh we may think we do. We might pride ourselves on eating right, exercising faithfully, giving up a car to ride a bike to work, as I’ve done. And then, boom! You thing you're doing everything right and you still end up with a herniated disc. (You’ll be glad to know that mine keeps me from being able to stand up all that long, so there’s a natural limit to the length of this sermon!) “We have no power to help ourselves.”

And just as we have no power to protect ourselves from our own ultimate mortality, alone we have no power to protect ourselves “from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”
Sometimes we find ourselves helpless before the devices and desires of our own hearts. Sometimes there is no health in us.

That's pretty harsh. Most of the time most of us have a fair amount of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. We’re not perfect, but we’re not all that bad. I think we can find an example of what the words of the confession mean, if we are willing to repent – to rethink – today’s reading from the Book of Exodus. In this much-loved passage, God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and commands him to free his people from slavery in Egypt.

In a few weeks I’ll be sitting down with other Jews to celebrate the Passover. We’ll remember and retell the story of how we were slaves in Egypt, and how God, through Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, brought us out of slavery into freedom, out of living death into life. We’ll remind ourselves that none of us are free until all of us are free. We’ll repeat what are probably the oldest words in the Hebrew scriptures, a celebration of death and destruction, the poem known as the song of Miriam: “Sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted! The horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea.”

This story of the freeing of the Israelites is one foundation of a way of thinking about our faith called liberation theology. It’s a way of understanding God as the One who stands with the oppressed, who in the person of Jesus knows what it is to be tortured and murdered by the world’s powers, who works in history for justice. The book of Exodus is a central text for liberation theology. This understanding goes back to slavery times in this country. It’s no accident that Harriet Tubman, who led African slaves to freedom, was known by the code name “Moses.” Similarly, people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have taken this story of liberation as their own, as a sign and promise of God’s liberating action.

But there’s another way to read this story, a way to re-think it. Let’s listen again. Here is what God says to Moses: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”

Wonderful news, if you’re an Israelite. Not so great if you’re a Canaanite, a Hittite, or an Amorite. The American Indian theologian Robert Allan Warrior wrote about this side of the story some years ago, in an essay called “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians.”

Speaking about a people who have been freed from horrible oppression, Warrior said, “Once the victims have been delivered, they seek a new dream, a new goal, usually a place of safety away from the oppressors, a place that can be defended against future subjugation. Israel's new dream became the land of Canaan. And Yahweh was still with them: Yahweh promised to go before the people and give them Canaan, with its flowing milk and honey.” Thus, says Warrior, “Yahweh the deliverer became Yahweh the conqueror.”

“The obvious characters in the story for Native Americans to identify with,” he continues, “are the Canaanites, the people who already lived in the promised land.” Warrior invites us to re-pent, to think again about the story of the Exodus. And when we see the great saga of liberation from another viewpoint, it becomes a story of cruelty and extermination. We remember God’s orders to eliminate completely the peoples they meet in the conquest of Canaan. Here, from the Book of Joshua for example, is the story of what happened to a city called Ai:

“Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai.… So Joshua burned Ai[b] and made it a permanent heap of ruins, a desolate place to this day. He impaled the body of the king of Ai on a pole and left it there until evening.”

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us that the sins of the Israelites included grumbling about their leaders, sexual immorality, and idolatry. I think it’s the last one that’s the real sin. It is idolatry when we turn the God of liberation into an idol who cares only for people like us, a God who will fulfill the devices and desires of our hearts, even at the expense of the hearts of those who are different from us, who promises us milk and honey in return for slaughter.

Indeed, I sometimes think all histories of human liberation contain their own crushings and cruelties, their unbearable pain as well as unbearable joy: think of collaborators tortured and murdered; of the collateral damage of armed struggle against dictators; of the women raped and murdered, crops destroyed, fields sown with salt. This month we will observe the tenth anniversary of the U.S war in Iraq. Whatever the intentions of the architects of that war, many young soldiers went there believing in a mission of liberation. And indeed, a vicious dictator was deposed – at the cost of more than a hundred thousand lives, of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and the “ethnic cleansing” of entire cities.

I don’t think these evils are accidental byproducts of otherwise glorious events. I think they are built into human reality. I think that is what we mean when we say, “There is no health in us.” It’s a recognition of the collective evil that we, as a species, as peoples, are capable of. It’s a recognition of our ability to turn the God of liberation into an idol that treats one nation, one people as if they were divine. I think this is what we see if we are willing to rethink the Exodus from the point of view of the Canaanites.

We see this ill health today in the ravages of an economic system that makes a few people very rich by impoverishing the majority. Most of us are helplessly complicit in this system. We don’t want other people to suffer; we’re just trying to live our lives. The workers at CitiBank didn’t set out to make Gloria suffer when they tried to foreclose on her house. They were just living their lives, doing their jobs, trying be responsible for themselves and their own families. We are implicated, tied up, intimately involved in the reality that life feeds on life, that even without being all that bad, we can cause a great deal of harm.

Which brings us to the unfinished parable of the fig tree. Jesus tells us about a man whose unproductive fig tree is taking up space in his garden. Three years, and it’s borne no fruit. There is no health in it. Maybe he should dig it up. Or maybe it’s worth spreading a little manure around it, and giving it another chance. Did the tree bear figs the next year? We’re left wondering. We never find out the end of the story.

I think that's because the story isn’t over. We are all imperfect fig trees invited to flourish and bear fruit. But we can’t do it alone. We need the nourishment of connection with God and with the body of Christ, which we recognize in each other. With our companions, the ones with whom we share bread. That’s why, week after week, I return to this table for solace and strength. I lay all my imperfections down before God and my neighbors. I repent, re-think, and am reconfirmed through the sharing of bread and wine, as part of the body of Christ in the world, as God’s beloved daughter. We are all invited to do the same! Amen.