A message for Lent

The Ashes

Last Wednesday (Ash Wednesday) a few of us received the dusting of ashes - with the words "Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return." This is not meant to be a stern reminder of our mortality, although that may not be such a bad thing. Rather, the ashing takes us back to the beginnings of the faith story - God's creation of humanity out of the dust of the earth. We begin the journey to the font by being touched again by the loving hand of the creator, who looked at what he had made and "saw that it was good." Created in the image of God, we share God's creative energy. Yet there is a dark side to our humanity which uses that energy for destruction and evil. Fire and ashes provide a good symbol of this human ambivalence. We are nurturing, protective and creative, yet capable of terrible violence and destruction. Ash Wednesday invites us to choose life or death, to be recreated in God's true image or to heap fuel on the fire of human degradation. Ash Wednesday calls us genuinely to take stock. Where do I fit in the human story? What does it mean for me to be remade in God's true image? If you want to make your confession this Lent, I am available. Reconciliation with God and with one another is at the heart of renewal. 

The place of new beginnings is the desert

The faith of the Hebrew people was formed in the desert. Even when they had settled into cities, the Hebrews remembered that they were a desert people, and they were renewed by that memory. Representing all God's people, we are told that Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. The Easter mystery was born in the desert and we go there with our Lord every year when we too begin our fresh journey into Easter. Our desert journey will strip us of the unnecessary ‘baggage' in our lives and it will make painful demands on our cluttered, pampered, self-absorbed personalities. We mustn't be misled, though, into thinking that the desert is just a place of deprivation. The ancient Hebrews didn't go into the desert out of Egypt to be oppressed but to be free. Jesus didn't go there to end something, but to make a beginning. In the story of the people of God, the desert means these three things: 

freedom            remembering            encounter freedom

The Hebrews escaped out of slavery to Pharaoh but it took them a long time to learn that true freedom is found in obedience to God. The ways of Satan and the world-that-hates-God are the ways of Pharaoh, who hoarded up grain and ran a system of violent oppression. The ways of God are freedom and dependence on the heavenly Manna (Exodus 16) If you don't clearly know this part of our story (the Exodus) you should read the second book of the Bible. The first book (Genesis) tells us that we are created in God's image (Genesis 1:27) and about how the original goodness came unstuck (Genesis 3). The second book (Exodus) tells us that God has rescued us for freedom into the Divine love. The temptations of Christ were an enticement to settle for the slavery system of Egypt instead of the glorious freedom of the rescued people of God. Together and one by one we have to confront the same tension between the superficial attractiveness of Egypt and the genuine beauty of the God-led desert journey. There is no freedom in Egypt.

By reflecting on the shape of the journey of God's people from Abraham until now we are able to situate ourselves also in the story of what God is doing. It is only by remembering that we know who we are. The Lenten desert is a place for remembering the whole of our journey and at the Easter Vigil we will exultantly recite its highlights.  In the great Easter Vigil readings we announce that we have been back to the desert and we remember who we are. In the Eucharist of the Vigil we recite also the story of the new Exodus - in which Christ leads us through death and resurrection into a new promised land.

The knowledge of God is not information about God but an encounter with God. That deep encounter is what Christian faith is all about. The desert takes us back to the place where we (God's people) first encountered God. The encounter doesn't happen in isolation from a fresh encounter with self, others and the natural world. The desert is therefore a place of surprises.

Our Lent 

The way we do Lent is critically important to the shape of our whole faith journey. We all need to determine ways of ‘doing the desert' that are right for us. However, the Church insists that Lent includes fasting, additional gifts to the poor and tons of prayer. This is the Lenten discipline required  of us by our membership of God's people, and it has helped to form the saints. We owe God, the Church, the world and ourselves a holy Lent. We need to be intentional in our approach to the season. 

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The good news is of an accepting God

 

 

A prominent American tele-evangelist recently asserted that the reason Haiti has suffered the terrible misery that has befallen it during and in the aftermath of its earthquake is that, back in history, it made a pact with the Devil so that he might help it drive out the French.  The earthquake is God's punishment.

The very idea that the Haiti earthquake is divine punishment is outrageous, and the perpetrator of this has been rightly condemned as heartless and cruel.  The trouble is that this image of God is by no means a dead letter. Scratch any one of us and you may well find that primitive ideas about who God is and how God acts in the world are often alive and well.  Deep down, many of us still think of God as a terrifyingly fickle potentate to be appeased, capable of horrible cruelty on a grand scale, stalking the universe seeking victims, administering arbitrary justice, punishing the wicked, seeking revenge for old insults, visiting calamity on innocent children for their father's sins - even to the third and fourth generation.  And if you hear more than a few echoes of biblical language in this, you will not be surprised.  Because a lot of these distorted ideas about God have become written into the text of scripture itself.

But the Bible is not one voice; the Bible is many voices, and not all these voices carry equal weight.  For Christians, of course, the voice above and beyond all other voices is the voice of Jesus, who in his own person is God's speech, God revealed to us, God addressing us - the Word made flesh, the Word embodied, full of grace and truth.

Last Sunday, the mainstream churches would have heard, as the Gospel reading for the day, Luke's account of Jesus preaching in the synagogue of his home town (Luke 4: 14-21) in which Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and significantly omits the prophet's strictures about the vengeance of God. It is a significant and deliberate omission. Unlike Isaiah, Jesus comes to proclaim good news to the poor, as healer and liberator and eye-opener, but not as an instrument of divine vengeance. Jesus himself disagrees even with the great prophet Isaiah  - there is no day of vengeance. We may routinely create God in our own image - a God who returns evil for evil, even inscribing our gun barrels with biblical texts! But the God of Jesus is first and last accepting. God creates space for us whoever we are, wherever we have been, whatever we have done or left undone, the divine welcome awaits us, an arena in which we can begin afresh, a place of liberation where we can find our true selves, where we can come to ourselves and start over.  Recognition of this is the beginning of repentance, of conversion. This is the Good News, the Gospel of God.

But, in Haiti, even as aid flows in to its desperate communities, money is flowing out to pay off the country's crushing debt -- over $1 billion in unfair debt racked up years ago by unscrupulous lenders and governments.

The call for full cancellation of Haiti's debt is building steam across the world, and has won over some leaders -- but other rich lender countries are rumoured to be resisting. As the G7 finance ministers prepare to meet next week at their summit in Canada, the good news to the poor which Jesus proclaims surely compels us all to join the call to cancel Haiti's debt fully and without conditions, and ensure that earthquake aid is made with grants, not loans. A victory now will change lives in Haiti even after the world's attention has moved on. That would be nothing less than the work of God!

 

Archdeacon Tony White