Fairness & the Prodigal Father

Let me describe a typical summer day from my childhood.  I wake up and head down the street to “the park” – a large, undeveloped property in the center of our neighborhood where kids gather all day to play games.  We choose up sides and somehow all the big kids are on one team and all us little kids are on the other.  And do you know what we say:  “These teams aren’t fair!”  Now it’s lunchtime.  My mother fixes sandwiches and chips.  I get more chips than my twin sister.  What does she say: “No fair!  Keith got more chips than me.”  Flash forward to dinner.  I ask if I can stay out later at night.  “OK”, my father says, “you can play until the street lights come on.”  “No fair,” my older sister says.  “I couldn’t stay out that late when I was his age.”

Fairness.  Do you know that capuchin monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers?  If you give a capuchin a cucumber it will eat it, but if given a choice it will choose the grape every time.  So a researcher set up a little experiment.  He put two capuchins in a cage and each had to perform a simple task to get a grape.  Both were successful, except one got a cucumber instead.  The monkey who got the grape devoured it instantly.  The other monkey was so annoyed it threw the cucumber out of the cage.  No one likes getting the short end of the stick.

Another experiment.  A five-year-old child is given a choice.  Either he and two other children can get two treats each or he can get four treats while the others get only one.  More often than not, the five-year-old will choose the first, fair option; bristling at possibility of getting the long end of the stick.

Here is the best description of fairness I came across this week:

Fairness means treating people equitably, without bias or partiality.  It means actively working to set aside self-interest or group loyalty when rendering a judgment.  In day-to-day life, fairness manifests itself in simple ways such as taking turns, listening intently, sharing, and not taking advantage of others based on their weaknesses.

Impartiality is a key part of fairness.  Being impartial doesn’t mean having no biases—rather it means knowing what those biases are, striving to set them aside, and requesting outside perspectives as needed.

While inspired by the ideal of justice, fairness is not sameness or always following the letter of the law.  Fairness makes room for us to generate solutions and compromises based on reason and circumstance.

In today’s gospel reading we hear Jesus tell a parable with three central characters: a father and two brothers.  While the lion’s share of the story revolves around the father and the younger brother, its main point hones in on the eldest.  He is the one who cannot welcome back his sibling and resents his father’s lavish celebration.  And to be honest, it is hard to blame him because it just does not seem fair.

Even in our culture, a sibling demanding his share of the inheritance is just wrong, but in the culture of Jesus’ day it was unthinkable.  No one, but no one, would ever have been so insulting to a parent.  One bible translation puts it this way: “The younger brother says, ‘Give me what I could have if you were dead!’”  No father would honor such a request and, if a father did, he certainly would never, ever, under any circumstances welcome back his son.  It just would not happen.

But in Jesus’ story it does.  The father not only receives the son, but he actually runs to meet and embrace him.  It is almost shameful behavior in the face of such an insult.  But parables as a genre have an over-the-top quality.  The exaggerations are there to drive home the point.  The only person in the story who behaves in a way we might expect is the older brother.  He stayed.  He worked.  He was faithful.  He was dutiful.  And then his wayward brother returns, is welcomed home unconditionally, and (to make matters worse) dad throws a party for him!  I know what I would say if I was the older son: “This is not fair!”

Not only is the older son unhappy about getting the short end of the stick, the younger son seems none too concerned about getting the long end.  The Christian writer Lewis Smedes observes, “our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do.”  The renowned theologian Paul Tillich wrote a comment in the margin of his bible next to this story: “When the prodigal came home, I hope he didn’t stay too long.” It is not easy to have sympathy for this young man.  What he receives is not at all appropriate to the circumstances.

I am not the first social observer to note there is a great deal of anger in our society right now, which we see being played out in the presidential primaries.  It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of the anger, but I wonder how much of revolves around fairness.  The wealthy don’t believe the entitlement system is fair, while the poor and middle class believe the same about growing income inequality between themselves and the rich.  Women want a fair opportunity to compete with men in the workplace.  Minorities sense they are being passed over based not on performance, but rather because of skin color.  Hourly workers want to be paid a fair wage for their labor.  The average person believes his or her voice is not being heard.  This perceived lack of fairness – running across the board – spawns anger, resentment, and frustration.  It is especially challenging because what might make one person or group feel the world is more fair will only make it seem less fair to someone else.  There is no clear path to making sure three children each get the same number of chips for lunch.

I learned something this week.  Before this week I never knew the definition of the word prodigal.  I always associated it either with leaving home or returning after leaving on bad terms, but I was wrong.  Here is what I learned:

Prodigal: spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant.  Synonyms include wasteful, extravagant, and imprudent.

So the younger son is called the prodigal not because he returned home, but to describe the lifestyle he chose when he took off with his share of the family’s wealth.

Now here is what is really interesting.  Prodigal can be used in a second and more positive way, although it is one not often used in today’s English:

Prodigal: having or giving something on a lavish scale.  Synonyms include generous, lavish, liberal, bounteous, and unsparing.  

Given this definition, it would be accurate and entirely appropriate to thank everyone who worked so hard putting together the prodigal reception after church last Sunday.

Who in today’s story is a prodigal in this positive sense?  The father.  We see it in the lavish party he throws for his son, but even more in the generous and unsparing way he welcomes him back.  He is a prodigal when it comes to forgiveness, reconciliation, and love.  The great contrast of the story is not the difference between the reckless ways of one son and the dutiful ways of the other.  The great contrast is between the father’s prodigal heart and the older son’s heart, which is cold and closed.

And let’s be clear about this.  The father is being fair.  He says to his grumpy first-born, “You are always with me and all that I have is yours.”  Everything he has he gives to the eldest.  How much more lavish can he be?  The only thing he cannot give him is something he has never needed: lavish forgiveness and restoration.  But know this: if and when the older son needs it, the prodigal father will lavish it on him too. 

If you wanted to choose one person in this story to emulate who would it be?  Would you choose the younger son?  Would you like to run off, live it up for a while, and then return home with your tail between your legs – humiliated and full of regret, yet still deeply loved?  Or would you choose to be like the older brother: dutiful, dependable, steady, and grounded in a sense of fairness, and resentful of others who do not abide by your ethic?  Or would you choose to be like the father: so deeply aware of how blessed you are in life that you can give lavishly of everything you have – your heart, your love, your forgiveness, your possessions, your entire being?  Who would you choose to be like?

The father in Jesus’ story is a God-figure.  His actions reveal the nature of the Holy One from whom all things flow.  We worship a Prodigal God who is generous, bountiful, and unsparing in dealing with us.  In one sense it is not fair because it is not what we deserve.  We have not merited God’s prodigal love.  But it is completely fair because it is how God loves each of us.  We are all children of God lavishly loved. 

And just as the father invited the older son to join the celebration and thus receive the greatest gift he could have as an inheritance, so too we are invited to move from fairness to a prodigal lifestyle.  And while no faith community can do this perfectly, I like where we are at St. Paul’s right now.  Last week I told the Bishop I was going to present a fascinatingly diverse group of people for confirmation.  Twenty-five folks are now a part of our 374-year long journey as a parish.  Our newest members come from all walks of life.  What they share is a desire to be a part of this community where everyone is welcome and beloved.  I like how we are living as God’s prodigal people.  May God’s bountiful love continue to reign in our midst.  May it continue to well up in each of our hearts and direct our ways in all we do.

Redeeming Suffering

It is difficult for most of us to know how the events of last Wednesday have affected the people of Waverly and one particular family who lives there.  By all accounts, Larry Turner was a good man and a stalwart member of the community.  He loved to cook, one neighbor said of him.  His congressman knew him well and described him as being an engaged and concerned citizen.  On that particular day his girlfriend’s son and daughter and the daughter’s two-year-old son were with Turner in his home – a trailer home – when a tornado ripped through the area.  Turner, the son, and the child were killed – their bodies recovered 300 yards away from their home.  The daughter was seriously injured and, the last I saw, continues to fight for her life.

It is a painful, yet all too familiar story.  We live in a world where various degrees of suffering, pain, and tragedy are all too common.   It is one of the most vexing problems of our existence and is constantly on the mind of most thinking people.  Harold Kushner, who wrote the best-selling book Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, observes, “Virtually every meaningful conversation I have ever had with people on the subject of God and religion has either started with this question or has gotten around to it before long.”

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is in conversation with a group of people gathered around him.  At one point a person questions our Lord about a specific instance of one person’s inhumanity against another.  Jesus is asked about a group of Galileans Pilate ordered slaughtered while they were worshipping in the Temple.  Jesus’ response bores to the heart of the prevailing thinking of the time: Did the Galileans suffer this fate because they were sinners?

He then brings up another sad situation – this one, like the tornado – a tragedy of no one’s making.  A tower in the town of Siloam fell and eighteen people were killed.  Were these people worse sinners than those who escaped injury?  To both questions, the answer Jesus gives is no. 

This sends shock waves through the theological world of Jesus’ day.  It was commonly believed the righteous are blessed and the wicked are punished.  When a righteous person suffers – like say, the family in Waverly – it must mean the person is harboring some kind of unconfessed sin.

As absurd as this may sound, my experience in pastoral ministry is that in times of tragedy people still think this way today.  I remember talking to a person in Iowa who believed the 1993 flood was God’s way of telling farmers to stop using fertilizers that polluted the waterways.  Then there was the young mother who believed she deserved the beatings her husband inflicted because she was not a good homemaker.  And what about the man who felt his business went bankrupt because he hadn’t followed biblical principles for investing?  Jesus says no, suffering is not a form of punishment for sin.  God is not vindictive.  There is no need for people to create guilt where no basis for it exists.  

But it is what Jesus does not say that leaves us wanting.  He offers no alternative explanation.  He provides no new theological rationale for pain.  When an airplane crashes we need to know why.  When a young person collapses and dies, we need to know the cause.  When a long-time relationship ends in pain, we need to know where the fault lies.  So the silence of our Lord, in the face of our need to understand, does not sit well.

But, more and more, I find our Lord’s silence consistent with what I am coming to believe.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  I don’t know.  I don’t think anyone knows.  Simply put, there is no answer to the problem of pain.

And any person who tries to explain it to you is categorically wrong in what he or she is saying.  Most often it is either an attempt to defend God or to quiet their own anxieties.  All the reasons they offer boil down either to ‘its not God’s fault’ or ‘this is why it happened to you and not to me’.  I am now at a place in life where I don’t feel the need to defend God and I am as accepting as I can be that someday I too will suffer again.  On that day the question will not be why is this happening to me  – an innocent  – but what can I do and where will I turn to find the strength and courage I need to get through this?

Jesus does not tell us why we suffer but he does do something even more important.  He shows us what to do with our suffering.  As we walk with our Lord through the forty days of Lent, we walk with him in the midst of his agony.  We are with him as he is misunderstood and rejected.  We are with him as he is denied and betrayed.  We are with him as he sets his face toward Jerusalem and his eventual death.

What we learn as we walk with him is not the reason for misfortune, but that suffering is redeemable.  We learn, as one saint put it, our Lord has ‘sanctified pain’ – that he has found a way to make suffering the doorway to holiness.  We learn from our Lord that the Good Fridays of our lives do not have to be the final word.  We learn there is the possibility of an Easter resurrection for every pain.  And although we would never wish disaster for our friends, nor ask for it for our own instruction, we find there are lessons to be learned in the darkest moments we cannot learn in the brightness of a sunny day.  We learn some heights are only scalable from great depths.

When I am in the deep valley, of course I question how I got there.  I wonder what choices and what circumstances and what mistakes led to my situation.  Then I wonder how I will get out.  Where will I find the courage to fight through the chains and the shackles?  Where will I find the strength to go on?  It is only when I remember my help comes in the Name of the Lord that I can begin to leave the valley and return to the light of day. 

But the deeper the valley the more true it seems to be you never really leave it as much as are transformed by it.  The celebrated poet Wendell Berry understands this truth and captures it in a poem titled The Sycamore: 

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it.  There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark.  It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over.  It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

“It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.”  The more I read Berry’s poem the more wisdom and comfort I find in it.  He points to the Christian hope that suffering is redeemable; to our belief that pain, misery, and even death itself never gets the last word.

I have found this to be true in my own life; that the pains I have suffered are redeemable; in fact I would not be the person I am today without the hurts I have known.  I did not get what I wanted from these experiences, but through the grace of God I have been given everything I need and more.  Although I would never voluntarily choose these pains, I am a better person for God’s having walked with me through them.

I hope and pray for Larry Turner’s family and friends, as well as for others who where lost, injured, or affected.  I pray someday they will know their suffering has been sanctified and redeemed.  I hope and trust and pray they will be able

The Life of "Thelo"

You will find this hard to believe, but after last week’s service, someone approached me in the Parish Hall and told me she appreciated my sermon because I made references to the original Greek language in the text.  Yes, she was a visitor, but that little bit of encouragement means I have more Greek for you this week.  Don’t worry, it won’t be too painful. 

In the five verses from Luke’s gospel we read this morning the Greek word thelo is used three times.  Thelo means ‘longing’ or ‘desire’.  Herod longs to kill Jesus, although the text translates it “wants to kill.”  Jesus longs to gather the people as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.  But Jesus says this is not Jerusalem’s thelo.  The text says they were “not willing”, but a more accurate translation would be they did not long for this.

We get why Herod longs to kill Jesus.  He is a brutish thug who will do whatever it takes to preserve his place and power.  Notice Jesus does not refer to Herod as a bear or a lion (both strong, ferocious, respectable animals), but as a fox – a weasely, little vermin that is more a nuisance than a threat.  Still, he understands just how dangerous Herod can be, after all, Herod had John the Baptist beheaded.  It is no coincidence Jesus refers to himself as a hen and the people as a brood, because these are the exact creatures foxes are most likely to target.

We get why Jesus longs to gather the people.  Deep in our hearts we trust God wants to hold us, care for us, protect us, nurture us, guard us, and guide us.  And, at some level, we get why the people did not long for Jesus because we too often turn away from God and follow the devices and desires of our own heart.

Here is what I wonder: if the people of Jerusalem did not want to be gathered up by Jesus, what exactly did they long for?  What did they desire more than being embraced by God’s own Son? 

We know what Simeon longed for.  When Mary and Joseph presented their newborn son in the Temple, the elderly Simeon took the infant Jesus in his arms and said,

Lord, you now have set your servant free,

for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior

whom you have prepared for all the world to see.

Over the course of his entire service in the Temple, Simeon longed to see Jesus, but others associated with the Temple – not so much.  They longed for liberation from Roman oppression via the restoration of the royal line of David’s kingship.  They romanticized a time some thousand years earlier when Israel was at its peak and they longed from those good old days.  They also longed for the rule of law – the Torah, to be specific.  They longed for a society regulated by the minutia of hundreds upon hundreds of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” 

They did not long for Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, which was born not out of the Torah, but out of the prophetic movement.  Jesus longed not for rules but rather for justice and healing.  He longed for forgiveness and compassion.  He longed to break down barriers in order to build up our common humanity.  He longed for every person to be a part of his family of faith – no matter how good or bad they may be, no matter how rich or poor, no matter if they were highly placed or humble fisher folk.  But Jesus knew his longing was not their longing.

What do you long for?  What is your deepest yearning, your most heart-felt desire?  Unlike last week’s question “Who are you”, I suspect most of us have an answer or two at the ready for this one.  We long for a restored relationship or a better job or a deeper faith.  We long for forgiveness or healing or deliverance.  What do you long for?

Let me make two observations about the thelo in our lives.  First, you can only long for something you do not have.  You may spend all winter longing for a warm vacation, but once you are sitting on a tropical beach your longing comes to an end.  That’s when you say “I have been waiting for this for a long time.”  A husband longs for his wife to be home from deployment only while she is away.  If you received what you long for, the spiritual challenge is to be grateful for it and to be a good and wise steward of it.

The second observation is the quality of our longings can vary greatly.  The priest and poet John O’Donohue wrote, “One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.”  By this I think he is saying we all long to matter to someone; we all long to lead a life that is meaningful, and we all long to be appreciated for what we do.  Taken in this way, being “seen” is deeply significant.  But in our society today, there is a different kind of longing to be “seen” best summed up by the phrase “going viral”.  People long for notoriety; a shallow and superficial experience.  Yes, they are being “seen”, but it is not significant and it doesn’t really matter.  The quality of what you long for can very greatly. 

What do you long for?  What is your thelo?

I have always liked CS Lewis’ book The Great Divorce because it is imaginative, evocative, and challenging.  In it, a group of people is taken by bus to heaven.  When they arrive, each person is given an escort to help them make sense of where they are and what they are to do.  One person’s escort murdered her husband years earlier and she refuses to go anywhere with him.  It was Lewis’ way of highlighting the importance of forgiveness and how truly difficult and demanding it can be.

A mother gets off the bus and is informed by her escort they are going to see God.  But the mother, who lost a child years earlier, insists on seeing her child first.  The mother’s deepest longing is to be reunited with her child.  It is an understandable desire.  But the escort persists the woman first must see God.  The two carry on quite a conversation about this.  The escort is not saying God demands we put God before everything else.  Rather, God is to be our deepest longing.  All else flows from this.  Lewis writes:

“No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves.  They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein.  They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.”

What do you long for?  Perhaps a more appropriate way to ask the question is “How are your deepest longings grounded in God?”  The problem for the people of Jerusalem was their longings – whatever they were – had been divorced from God.  They were grounded only in their own hopes and aspirations with no reference at all to the Holy One.  Lewis wrote this:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.  Those who seek find.  Those who knock it is opened.

When we want a biblical example of longing we need look no further than today’s reading about Abraham.  He is old and he is troubled.  He has no heir to follow him, to carry on his name, and more importantly to carry on his beliefs.  No person at the time was like Abraham.  Everyone else believed in the existence of multiple gods making manifold demands for blessings such as fertility and rain for the harvest.  Abraham was the first to hold a belief in one God; a God who directed him to do away with superstitious practices and inhumane ways.  But he and his elderly wife were childless.  They had no realistic hope of this changing.  Can you imagine the depth and varicosity of his longing?

God promises Abraham will have a son and Abraham believes.  It seems like a simple transaction, but what really is going on here?  God embraces Abraham’s longing and asks him to trust God to bring it about.  In this case, faith looks like resting in God.  It looks like letting go of anxiety and tension in order to embrace assurance and hope.  More than once Abraham will stray from this to take matters into his own hand, supposing God’s plan is to give him a son through his wife’s servant Hagar.  As you know, God comes through and Isaac is born.  But at some point, in an episode so difficult to understand it is never once commented on anywhere else in the bible, God requires Abraham to sacrifice his son to demonstrate his longing first and foremost for God.

At my worst, I think that I am supposed to have all the answers not only to your questions, but also to the questions raised by our biblical texts.  I long to have the answers.  I must confess I have never fully understood why God choose Abraham or how his acceptance of God’s promise – an acceptance which he wavered on from time to time – constitutes the ultimate example of faith found in the original covenant.  There is something there, but I think it is elusive.  We, like Abraham, have our own thelo and there is something in him for us to learn.  Perhaps it is as simple and straightforward as God’s love for us is steadfast and faithful even in the face of our doubts and missteps.  I long to know this love in my own life and I long to know what it is to live as one of a brood gathered under the wing of God’s never failing, never faltering love.

A Tempting Identity

“If you are the Son of God…”

“If you bow down and worship me…”

“If you are the Son of God…”

Three temptations.  At their core they challenge  identity – Jesus’ sense of self, his self-understanding, his acceptance of who God proclaimed him to be at his baptism.  And they challenge allegiance – who or what is most important to him.  Put succinctly, the temptations raise two basic questions: Who are you? and Whose are you? 

In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis reminds us the devil is, if nothing else, an opportunist, but it would be a mistake to think this wilderness event is a kind of drive-by temptation; a quick attack and retreat.  The text tells us the Spirit “led” Jesus into the wilderness, “where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”  The verb form used here for to tempt is a present, passive participle, which means the action is ongoing, continuous.  Jesus is being tempted in wilderness throughout the forty days.  At the same time he is being led by the Spirit; the form of to lead is passive, imperfect which also implies continual, ongoing action. 

So as Jesus is being tempted he is being led and as he is being led he is being tempted.  He experiences both simultaneously, as we do.  As we are living into who we are we are being tempted to be someone we are not.  And as we are staying true to whose we are, we are being tempted to belong to something or someone else.

The Presbyterian minister and popular writer Frederick Buechner makes this observation:

After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus.  During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

So who are you?  It seems like a simple, straightforward question, doesn’t it.  You can answer in any number of different ways.  You can tell me you name, where you are from, and what you do in life.  You can tell me about your parents, siblings, spouse, children, and extended family.  You can show me your driver’s license and give me your Social Security number.  All of these things tell me something about who you are, but they are not what I am asking for.  Who are you – the ‘you’ uniquely created by God to be.  Just as no two snowflakes are the same, neither are any two human beings.  There is only one you. 

Who are you?

  What energizes you?

  What drains you?

  When do you feel most alive?

  When do you feel most loved?

  What do you do that gives you deep satisfaction?

  If you could do anything – anything at all – with the rest of your day, what would you do?

  What was the greatest risk you took in life that led to the deepest payoff?

  When do you feel useful?

  What experiences cultivated in you a sense of self-worth?

  When and how do you experience authentic communion with God?

  How is your life oriented around the reality of God?

These, and questions like these, have answers, but typically not at the ready.  We have to sit with them over time – perhaps forty days – in order for an authentic response to emerge.  It is from what emerges you can begin to answer the question of identity – who am I?

I am looking forward to our Wednesday evenings in Lent as we use a resource called “Growing a Rule of Life”, which was created by the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic community in Boston.  Typically, most of us are not looking for any more rules to follow than we already have, but monastics use the word rule in a different way.  For them a rule of life is “a plan, discerned over time, to cultivate practices that lead to flourishing of body, mind, and soul.” 

I suspect every person here unknowingly follows some kind of a rule of life.  I suspect you have an established routine you follow over the course of the day.  You get up, make a cup of coffee, and check the internet while eating a piece of chocolate.  You clean up, dress up, and get off to work in much the same way Monday through Friday.  Work has its own established routines, even if there is little about the day you control.  You come home at night, settle down, and settle in in a way that has its own established patterns. 

These patterns (called practices in the monastic tradition) have a way of shaping who and whose we are.  They emerge over time and develop out of our specific context.  For most of us, our practices have come into being unintentionally, not as a result of thoughtful discernment to aid who we want to be.  As a result, the ongoing experience of being tempted looks like drifting along through life in the same old way, never knowing who we are and doing little to live into whose we are.

I have said before how much I appreciated the gift of the conference I attended in November where we were given the time, space, and guidance to discover ourselves again.  I identified many things I already knew about myself and landed on a couple of new insights. 

Here is something I already knew: I am not one for large, social gatherings.  Crowded parties with voices all around me, people standing shoulder to shoulder, moving from one conversation to another, is not my thing.  However, I really enjoy small, intimate gatherings with family and friends.  I recognized that, other than evening meetings at the church, I live largely alone so I set a goal to cultivate intimacy in my life.  Who am I?  I am a person who prefers intimacy to crowds.  I committed to four practices to live into this aspect of who I am:

  Once a week I make a lunch appointment with a clergy colleague, even if I have to drive several hours for it to happen.

  I invite 5-7 people to my house on Friday evenings from 5:00-7:00 PM.

  I set out but have yet to join or create a clergy group for mutual exploration and support.

  I adopted a dog.

These practices form a part of my new rule of life.  They support who I am.  I will want to revisit my rule from time to time to see how I am doing with it.  Have I drifted away from it and, in the process, lost something of who I am?  Are there new practices I can cultivate to lead to a greater flourishing of my body, mind, and soul? 

“Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus.  During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.”  Someone once said if you can’t answer the question “who are you?” the world will give you an answer.  The single most difficult, ongoing temptation we face is to define who we are in ways others or the world wants us to be, as opposed to being who God created us to be. 

I was given several tasks to complete prior to going to the conference I attended last fall.  One was to work through a booklet titled Becoming Ourselves Again.  Let me conclude this sermon with the first two sentences in it:

When we get in touch with what truly matters to us, we discover what makes us most alive.

When we find that which rests at our core and gives us life, we rediscover the value God intended in us and for us.

I invite you into the wilderness of Lent to search yourself as Jesus searched himself – to learn who you are and to learn whose you are.

Ashes as We Age

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

We gather tonight to do something with deep, historical roots in our Scriptures and tradition.  In the Book of Esther, when Mordecai learns of the king’s decree to kill all the Jewish people in the Persian Empire he dons a garment woven from a course fabric known as sackcloth and covers himself in ashes.  Both are visible signs of his deep mourning, awareness of mortality, and heartfelt repentance.  After Jonah proclaims God is going to destroy the city of Nineveh, its king and citizens repent with sackcloth and ashes and are spared. 

Jesus, aware of this tradition, told skeptics that if the gentile towns of Tyre and Sidon (located in modern day Lebanon) had witnessed his miracles and heard his message, they would have put on sackcloth and ashes and reformed their ways.  Tertullian, a second century leader in the early church, directed penitents to “live without joy in the roughness of sackcloth and the squalor of ashes.”

By the eighth century, a dying person was placed on a piece of ground covered with sackcloth and then sprinkled with ashes.  As the priest blessed the dying person he said, “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.” The priest then asked, “Art thou content with sackcloth and ashes in testimony of thy penance before the Lord on the day of judgments?”  The dying person answered, “I am content.”  

We have a copy of a sermon by the Anglo-Saxon priest Aelfric dating to around the year 1,000.  In it he connects this ancient tradition with tonight’s liturgical moment, saying, “Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we skew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.”  And as a warning to those who snubbed his counsel, Aelfric goes on to tell the story of a man who refused to attend Ash Wednesday services and therefore did not receive ashes, who then was killed by a wild boar a few days later.

All of this talk of dust has its beginning in the beginning.  After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and God finds them hiding, God punishes first the serpent, then the woman, and finally the man.  God’s last words to Adam are these:

“By the sweat of your face

you shall eat bread

until you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken;

you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.”

As we gather tonight we are doing something profoundly counter-cultural.  We enact a ritual born of their wisdom of hundreds of generations before us.  We come together to acknowledge our brokenness, our regret, and our mortality.  And we believe by doing so two things happen.  First, we believe it helps us to amend our lives so that we can be rightly aligned with the realities of our mortal nature.  And second, we believe our actions are pleasing to God.

A boy attends an Ash Wednesday service with his family.  That night, as his mother is putting him to bed, he asks her, “Is it true we are made of dust?” “Yes, darling,” she answers.  “And do we really turn back to dust again when we die?” he inquires.  “That’s right, dear.”  “Well, earlier today I was playing in my room and don’t look now,” he whispers, “cuz I’m not sure if he is coming or going, but someone is under my bed.”  Tonight I am aware of how differently I receive the Ash Wednesday proclamation as I live closer to my dusty ending than my dusty beginning.

In the 1990’s, economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald set out to determine the relationship between work and happiness.  Their international study turned up something quite unexpected: a recurring pattern in every society.  They learned that people in their twenties reported the highest levels of happiness, but satisfaction with life begins a steady decline in the 30s, through the 40s, and into the early 50s.  The lowest levels of happiness bottom out at this point and then steadily increase (on average) as a person moves through the mid and late 50s and into the 60’s.  It may surprise you to learn that people in their 70s report levels of happiness and satisfaction comparable to or better than that experienced by people in their 20s.  These findings, reinforced by subsequent studies, are now described as the U-Shaped Curve of Happiness. 

Think about why this is.  Our whole life lies ahead of us when we are in our 20s.  The world is full of possibilities.  We are young and strong and optimistic and free.  Setbacks are little more than an opportunity to start over, to begin a new and more promising adventure.  We take on responsibilities such as marriage and parenting in our 30’s, which come with both blessings and challenges.  People in their 30s work harder for less pay than at any other time in life.  In our 40s we must manage teenagers, stale marriages, aging parents, declining personal energy, and a sense of being stymied at work.  It is at this point we begin to ask of life “is this all there is?”  It is the age of the classic mid-life crisis.  And it is no coincidence, I think, that George Orwell was 40 when he wrote: “Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”  He died six years later.

Somewhere in our mid-50’s, with our children either grown or off to college, our marriages either over or re-invigorated, and with an emerging awareness that all our years of work have paved the way for a good life, we look around and realize where we are, what we have, what we do, and who we are with is not so bad after all.  We come to feel everything has worked out OK and we will be fine.

One person, reflecting on this phase, writes:

What really changes as we hit 50?  Perhaps most importantly, our time horizon changes.  I’m not sure when my career will end, but I know I can see it from here.  This means my goals change.  I want to do something significant, but I’m realistic, circumspect, about what that might be.  I cannot pretend the possibilities are infinite; the constraints are obvious, with ‘time’ at the top of the list.

To me, this person sounds like he or she is coming to grips with the realities of brokenness and mortality and is better for it.

From this point forward, well into our 70s and beyond, we become wiser, which is defined as growing in “compassion and empathy, social reasoning and decision making, equanimity, tolerance of divergent values, and comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity.”  All in all, we become more satisfied with life, calmer, and more grateful.  We experience every new day as a blessing.

Reflecting on where he is and who he is in this phase of life, the religion writer Arthur Farnsley II writes:

My definition of “significance” has changed...  I have a clearer sense of what matters to me, of whose opinions matter to me.

Finite time constraints and a clearer sense of values combine to offer the greatest gift of all: an improved ability to live in the present.  At a certain age, you realize that clinging to past mistakes is futile.  Even better, you stop yearning for some ideal future because experience teaches us the ideal is probably not forthcoming.

All of this is to say our experience of the ashes changes as we age.  In our youth it is something most of us most likely received with a healthy dose of denial; believing we can do anything and will live forever.  As we head to the bottom of the U-Curve it is something we experienced with a deep sense of dread because it reinforces the feeling nothing works out as it should.  But moving forward from there, we receive the ashes as a message of life.  Once we stop denying we are broken and mortal, and once we stop fighting it, and once we give up being depressed about it, only when we learn to embrace it do we find we are liberated by it.

As I worked on this sermon yesterday, the women of the Suffolk Garden Club held a lunch in our Parish Hall followed by a 75-slide PowerPoint presentation on succulents (of all things!).  A person in her teens or 20s would have felt she was being held hostage at such an event, texting friends constantly about how she was losing her mind.  A person in her 30s or 40s would try to have a nice time and pay attention, but in this brief, rare, quiet moment, all she really could do is think about the overwhelming demands on her time once she leaves.  But, from the sound of it, those ladies, all 55 and older, were having a grand time doing something that adds only joy and goodness to their day… and they were satisfied. 

Where are you in life and what do the ashes say to you this night?  I hope they speak to you of the limited nature of time.  I hope they motivate you to determine what matters most to you and help you to focus your energies on those things.  I hope the ashes empower you to let go of those things you no longer need to carry on your journey.  I hope they invite you to come before God with your sorrows and regrets; that they witness to God’s deep, unfathomable, unshakeable love for you, and remind you God bids you to let go of the burdens you bring in order to be new and whole again.  And finally, I hope the ashes give you hope that the best is yet to come, not only in this life, but also in the life to come.