God’s love for us is so persistent! Thanks be to God!
The psalmist says that the Lord is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. God cares for us as a parent cares for a beloved child. God knows that we are as fragile as pieces of pottery, easily broken. “For he himself knows whereof we are made,” the psalmist says. “He remembers that we are but dust.”
The season of Lent opens with these reminders of God’s persevering love for us and for all creation, year in and year out, both in this life and the life to come.
The season of Lent is our opportunity to respond to God’s persevering love for us by returning to God with all our hearts.
Our love for God is fragile, and that love is often in pieces, rather than solid and whole and true. And we shut and lock the doors of our hearts against God, sometimes intentionally and sometimes without even knowing what we are doing.
The prophet Isaiah knew that our motives for what we do to be with God are often mixed motives, limiting our relationship with God rather than strengthening it. Worship can become something comfortable, a self-satisfied check mark at the beginning of the week of our love for God—after all, didn’t we just give you an hour of our precious time, dear Lord?
When we fast and participate in other acts of penitence, we can just imagine feeling a divine pat on the head for our efforts, magnified by the admiring and even jealous approval of our less disciplined friends, who just couldn’t quite manage, even on God’s behalf, to lose those extra pounds packed on during the pandemic.
Or what about those who for forty whole days turn to the Daily Office and pray not only Morning Prayer and Noonday Prayer, but Evening Prayer and Compline every day of Lent! What a sacrifice, Lord, of my time, and wouldn’t my bishop approve, and can I hear an admiring amen from everyone who knows that I’ve managed such a feat!
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called out this sort of this showy religious self-righteousness. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
Jesus doesn’t say not to practice piety, but to remember that the reason for doing anything in this lifetime, pious or otherwise, is to deepen our relationships with God—because our love for God can be easily damaged by our topsy turvy lives, and also by the selfish, willful, self centered love we tend to have for ourselves, above all other loves, the sort of misguided love that ends up shutting out God rather than letting God in.
So we must give attention to why we are doing whatever it is we are doing—are we doing what we’re doing for God, or for ourselves?
The early church recognized that our love for God tends to be fragile and often broken.
One of the shocking customs of the early church, as described in the Roman Pontifical, was to expel public penitents from the church on Ash Wednesday.
After the bishop places ashes on the heads of the penitents and clothes them in penitential garments and prays for them, he takes one of them by the hand, leads them all outside, and says to them with tears, “Behold you are expelled today from the doors of holy mother church because of your sins.” And then he admonishes them not to give up on the mercy of the Lord, but to be busy with fasting, prayer, pilgrimage, and other good works. They can come back on Maundy Thursday.
And then comes this harsh line in the Pontifical. “The whole assembly then goes back into the church to celebrate the Mass, closing the doors on the penitents.”
Closing the doors—what could be more discouraging than closed doors?
This past year has been like no other in our lives. Literally, on the second Sunday in Lent, we too were expelled from our churches, not by God, but by a tiny virus that has upended the lives of people around the world. Our church doors suddenly closed.
I’ll be the first to admit that I have struggled with discouragement this year—as I realized how much comfort and closeness to God and to you all I found in Sunday worship, the Eucharist, our rituals, our seasons and the things and times we shared together. Suddenly, all of that comfort disappeared, replaced by what we’ve crafted to stay connected in this pandemic wilderness.
For the first several months of being isolated from people, I felt isolated from God as well, and this year has seemed to me as it must have seemed to those penitents so long ago, one long Lenten season with the doors of the church shut against me.
But! God never shut me, or you, or those early penitents out! God keeps right on loving us, no matter how tightly our doors are shut against God.
The early penitents didn’t even have to wait until Easter, but they were directed to return to church on Maundy Thursday. On Maundy Thursday, church recalls Jesus putting on an apron, washing the disciple’s feet and serving them, a reminder of how deeply and tenderly God loves and cares for us.
As we hear in one of our Eucharistic prayers, “Those who wish to serve him must first be served by him, those who want to follow him must first be fed by him, those who would wash his feet must first let him make them clean.”
As our invitation to a holy Lent reminds, us, self-examination and repentance, and self-denial will help us renew our faith, to re-open our hearts to God.
What could be a greater self denial for those of us who insist on being self-reliant than to admit that instead of fending for ourselves, we open our hearts to God’s loving care?
For those of us who insist on doing, doing, doing for others an act of self-denial would be to agree to just take a break and let the Lord wash our feet—to submit to the grace of bathing in God’s love and care for us.
And for those of us who are just lazy and drift through the days, wishing and waiting for a return to normalcy, our challenge is to find in this season the desire and the discipline to do the work we need to do to draw closer to God. The realization dawns all over again that God never leaves us—but that we drift away from God, like empty boats out on the water, just carried by whatever winds and tides are prevailing at the moment.
The season of Lent is a time to stop moaning about the drifting, and to take up the oars that were in the bottom of the boat the whole time and start rowing back toward God. Lent is a time to exercise those spiritual muscles that have grown weak from lack of use.
Jesus pulls no punches in the Sermon on the Mount when he says to the disciples at the end of his directions about praying and fasting,
You all, remember why you are doing this, not to store up treasures that will simply pass away, but to store up treasures in heaven—that is, to do what is needed to work on the most important relationship you could ever have, your relationship with God.
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
This season of Lent reminds us to recall that our greatest treasure is God’s love for us.
Our discipline in this season of Lent is to stop waiting around aimlessly, but to work on returning to God with all our hearts, to offer up our broken love for God and for one another and to let God help us put that love back together. The season of Lent is time to enter the immensity of God’s cleansing love for us, choosing and then using the disciplines that will help each one of us return to God with all our hearts.
Our church doors are still shut. But those doors will open once more, and we will return.
Meanwhile, as we wait for our church doors to open once more, may we use our Lenten disciplines to love God with the same persistence with which God loves each one of us.
This is the season to unlock the doors of our hearts—for God has been waiting patiently and persistently and with great kindness for all this time to come back in.