Sermon 3/2/2022 “Reborn to new life”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection, Alexandria, Virginia
Text: Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Day: Ash Wednesday
Eighteen years ago, when I was <mumble> years old—less than 40—I got off an elevator and a young mother said to her child, “You must let old people get out before you go in.” I looked around to be sure, and—sure enough—I was the only person on the elevator.
I hadn’t realized I was already an “old person.” I told this story to a friend, a woman some 18 years older than me (in other words, she was then the age I am now) and she told me a story of her own like mine. She said a girl of 8 or so reached out and gently pinched the loose skin on her forearm and asked, “Does it hurt?” And when my friend asked the girl, “Does WHAT hurt?” the girl said, “Being old.”
By the way, I asked my friend if she answered the girl and she said, “Oh, yes. I lied to her. I told her that being old doesn’t hurt at all.”
For those of you who have not been gifted with eye-opening, soul-jolting encounters such as these, we have Lent, which begins today on Ash Wednesday. The purpose of Ash Wednesday is to waken us to the reality of our mortality, with the certainty that we will die someday soon.
Having reminded us on Ash Wednesday of what we have managed to forget since Ash Wednesday last year, that we will die soon, we are supposed to spend Lent in the holy trinity of piety: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, with the goal of discerning and putting right everything spiritual we have let slide in the past year.
Most years, this is a good plan for Lent. However, I suspect a slightly different plan is needed THIS LENT, the third Lent in our present pandemic. So, here are three ways Lent should be different this year:
In the first place, in this of all years, we do NOT NEED Ash Wednesday to remind us of our mortality. Death is all around us:
- Waiting for us to draw a wrong breath; and if we survive simply breathing, then
- Hiding in any number of weather-related unnatural disasters; and if we survive the floods and earthquakes and tsunamis and tornadoes,
- Death awaits us as we accidentally cross the path of someone else’s rage,
- Not to mention the systems failures of an old body, whether or not a child points these out to us.
Not only is death near at hand, but we count death every day per 100,000 people on a seven-day rolling average. What we might need THIS year, more than being reminded of our impending death, is to be reminded that we need to be reborn into a more expansive way of living.
The second way Lent should be different this year is that we don’t need to give up ANYTHING for Lent. Haven’t we given up all but gingerly breathing for the last two years? For most of us, our lives are far emptier than they used to be. As we narrowed our lives to stay safe, we stopped DOING many things and doubled down on judging. Have you noticed? The antidote to a closed-down life is hope and love: hope for us and love for others.
The third way this Lent needs to be different this year is the way we practice our piety. In a typical Lent, we let our prayer book exhort us to a holy Lent by the traditional means of prayer, fasting, and self-denial; we priests emphasize almsgiving. Here at Church of the Resurrection, we’ve been praying throughout COVID and we’ve been giving money to help others; after all, we have money to spare, most of us, because we haven’t been DOING anything. What practically no one is doing during the pandemic, anywhere, is fasting, unless the elevated price of groceries has forced them into lowered caloric intake.
I’m not saying we SHOULD NOT PRAY or fast or give money to help those in need. What I’m suggesting is that we should spend this Lent deciding on how we will be reborn, post-COVID:
- Reborn to our trust in God and hope for the future
- Reborn to a life more in balance than either our pre-pandemic life or our pandemic-restricted living
- Reborn to a healthier life, physically and spiritually.
Our psalm today, when stripped to its verbs, tells us what we should pray for, what we should ask God to do for us this Lent: Blot. Wash. Cleanse. Teach. Purge. Create. Restore. Sustain. Deliver.
- Blot out the ways we’ve gotten life wrong.
- Cleanse us of guilt.
- Teach us a new way of living.
- Purge the instinct that has us following the crowd toward death rather than living our lives expansively.
- Create a desire for a healthier life.
- Restore us with meaning, purpose, faith, awe, beauty, and right-relationship.
- Sustain us in this new life.
- And deliver us safely to our holy death, whenever that will be.
To help us discover how to be reborn to life this Lent, I have purchased for our use a tool called, “A Reflective Assessment Tool for Expansive Living by the Rev. Sarah A. Speed. With the help of the ushers, I included a copy in your bulletin. This is for your personal use this Lent to help you reflect on the emotional, spiritual, social, financial, physical, mental, environmental, and occupational aspects of your life. This assessment tool also could help you to identify three things you decide to do, small steps toward the new life that Lent invites you to envision and make real.
The use of this assessment tool is like the criteria for confession: All may, not must, some should!
I invite you to invest in a Holy Lent; a new, more expansive life awaits you.
