Loving God, when we make much of that which matters little to You, just forgive us. Amen.
Ahhh Lent: Some of us grew up with a sense of what this season is supposed to be about; many of us did not. Even those who have observed Lent for years may still find themselves wondering: What exactly is this time for? What are we meant to do now that we don’t do the rest of the year?
Those are good questions—and important ones that guide us throughout the next few weeks.
A few days ago, on Ash Wednesday, my colleague Joseph preached a sermon that has stayed with me. He described Lent as a time for telling the truth: about ourselves and about the world. That phrase caught hold of me, and I want to pull on that thread today, believing that where this string leads is to that amazing and transformative place where the honest truth meets – and interacts – with God’s love… and THAT is precisely what Lent is all about.
The Courage to Name What Is Broken
The Church has long had a word for the brokenness of the world: SIN. It is not a word I use often, but Lent gives us permission to dust it off and look at it honestly. From the beginning, sin has been the Church’s attempt to name that which is fractured—within us and around us.
One of the earliest ways we as humans have tried to make sense of that brokenness is through our story-telling. The portion of the creation story we read from today (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7) is one such story, and it tells us of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, reaching for knowledge they were warned against, becoming aware of good and evil—and of themselves. And because of their brokenness – and their awareness of it – God sent them out of paradise, not because God stopped loving them, but because their work was no longer in the Garden, but making their way in the imperfect and broken world into which they had now entered.
There is no moment in that story where God withdraws love. What changes is the setting. Humanity is sent into an imperfect world, armed—some might say cursed—with the ability to see things as they really are.
The Fear of Seeing Clearly
Seeing the truth of things can be hard, both hard to do and hard to stomach when we do it. As a result, all of us adopt various techniques for avoiding difficult truths: denial, justification, anger, ‘what about you’ rationalizations, ‘it’s just business’, etc. The truth about ourselves, about our institutions, about our communities and our country are often uncomfortable. Things are messy. Broken. Imperfect.
Many of us are familiar with the old adage that “love is blind”. Its original intent, of course, is to suggest that love has a way of overlooking imperfections and seeing only the good and beautiful in someone or something. But that is not the way the human psyche works. Much more often we harbor the belief – the fear, even – that only that which is perfect can be loved. Meaning that we ourselves … and our country, our history, our ancestry, our world …can only be loved if they are perfect. And thus desperately wanting that love, we blind ourselves to the truth and pretend that we – and they – areperfect.
A recent example of such blindness to truth is the current the idea in our religious and political discourse that empathy is at the root of our problems. This argument stipulates that empathy – the ability to see the world through somebody else’s eyes, to feel what they feel, and to understand their perspective, is bad because it prevents us from making hard and uncomfortable decisions. One should not empathize with immigrants, for example, because the needs of the country demand their deportation. If we were to start seeing things from their point of view, we might sympathize with their situation and not have the stomach to do what we need to do. Ergo, empathy hurts us because it allows us to see too much.
Some of the textbook controversies going on in parts of the country right now are another example of such willful blindness. State legislatures toil away to scrub from our history books references to slavery, or the fact that we had concentration camps for the Japanese during World War II, or that we’ve got concentration camps for immigrants now. All if this willful blindness is based on the presumption that we are incapable of healthy patriotism and true love of country if we know the full truth of it. But that is exactly what true love – God’s love – is capable of.
God Does Not Love Perfection
Scripture tells a different story.
Adam and Eve were not perfect. God loved them anyway. God did not love their perfection; God loved them. And that is true of us as well: God meets our brokenness and imperfection with total love and acceptance – as we are. But that is not the end of the interaction, but only the beginning. Because it is only when we are fully honest, truthful, and vulnerable about our brokenness and realize that God loves us anyway, then we are able to experience the transformative and life giving power of that Love.
As Bishop Matthew Cowden is fond of saying: God loves us as we are, but is not content to leave us where we are. That kind of love is deeply familiar in the best of human relationships. The people who love us most usually know our imperfections most clearly. They love us with eyes wide open—and, in doing so, call us into something better.
If Lent is a season of truth-telling, then empathy is not the problem but rather the process through which we see the truth more clearly. We cannot see our own brokenness – or that of our church or state – clearly on our own. We need one another’s perspectives to see more of the truth. True love, true patriotism, true religion sees all those inherent faults and loves anyway, knowing that transformation is the result of the encounter between love and truth
This year, I offer a simple invitation: see more deeply. See yourself more honestly. See your church, your community, your country more clearly. You will need eyes and ears other than your own to do that. Seek out and empathize with others that their sight and their truth may mingle with yours to give a clearer picture of Truth. And trust that God’s love does not require perfection, but interacts with honesty and vulnerability.
Lent reminds us that we can do hard things. We can tell the truth. We can risk vulnerability. And we can trust that love—real love—will meet us there and transform us more closely into the Divine beings we already are.
Amen.
— Zach Drennen
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