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Lent religious vanity
SERMON - 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 11th March 2007
Revd. Matthew Vernon
Lk 13.1-9.
Lent, these 40 days before Easter, are often associated with the desert.
Partly because Lent is based on Jesus spending 40 days in the desert.
More deeply because the desert is a good analogy, a good image for the journey of Lent.
The desert is place free of:
• the lights that dazzle,
• the voices that distract,
• the images that make false promises.
The desert is a quiet place where we journey within – into our souls.
The desert is a dangerous place –
• the journey within is a risky journey,
• a journey we prefer to avoid.
In the early centuries of Christianity, some Christians went to live in the actual desert
• in places like Egypt.
Anthony the Great was one of the first.
It can seem like they were trying to escape from the world, and at one level they were.
But they weren't running away from reality.
They wanted to explore their relationship with God and what it means to be human.
And they knew this had to be done in a community, in relation to other people.
At the heart of their lives was a struggle.
An inner struggle in the desert of their hearts.
A struggle with themselves,
• with their vanity and self-centredness.
Sometimes we think that being spiritual means detaching ourselves from the messy business of human life.
Other people, after all, complicate things, don't they?
The desert monks say that a relationship with God doesn't happen unless we mend our relationships with Tom, Dick and Harriet.
Our relationship with God is put to the test through our relationships with other people.
As 1 John puts it "Those who say 'I love God' and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen."
Moses the Black is one of the vivid personalities from the early monastic world.
He had been an Ethiopian highwayman before converting to Christianity.
He was buried in the desert west of Cairo
• and people still visit the monastery there.
The story goes that a brother monk had done something wrong.
They called a meeting and invited Abba, or Father, Moses.
After first refusing to go he agreed to join the meeting.
But he took with him a leaky jug and filled it with water.
Some of the brothers at the meeting asked him to explain.
"My sins run out behind me and I cannot see them,
• "yet here I am coming to sit in judgement on the mistakes of somebody else.'
When they heard that, they canceled the meeting.
There's a similar story about Abba Bessarion.
A brother monk had sinned and was turned out of church by the priest.
Abba Bessarion got up and followed the brother out of the church.
He said, "I am a sinner too."
For the desert fathers, at the centre of the spiritual struggle is our tendency to judge other people:
• the way we tend to feel we're superior to others
We find it easy to notice the faults of the other people, don't we?
You know, the things they do that really press our buttons,
But we easily forget that we just might press their buttons.
And the desert fathers were acutely aware of how we love to think we know more about God than other people do.
Moses the Black taught:
• "If you are occupied with your own faults, you have no time to see those of your neighbour."
This is at the heart of what Jesus is talking about in this morning's gospel reading.
It's a gory one.
According to Luke, some Galileans met a sticky end and Pilate had mixed their blood with their temple sacrifices.
Nasty.
Some people ask Jesus about that.
Judging by the tone of Jesus' answer, they thought the Galileans were being punished by God.
Jesus says, 'Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No".
Jesus squashes the belief that God punishes people by making accidents happen to them.
Jesus gives another example:
• the people who were killed when a tower feel on them.
"Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No".
As he often does, Jesus cuts to the issue.
The people asking him about the gory sacrifice business are suggesting that the Galileans who were killed were great sinners.
They are implying that the Galileans were inferior to them.
Hence Jesus' strong response. "Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did."
Jesus is cracking down on religious superiority:
• the way we notice the speck of dust in a brother's eye,
• but fail to notice the great pile of muck in our own.
Self-righteousness is the way that leads to spiritual death.
Notice the word repent.
Repent doesn't mean what we often think it means:
• 'feeling guilty for things we think God disapproves of'.
The real meaning of repent is 'a change of heart and mind'.
Jesus is saying 'unless you change your hearts and minds, you will all perish'.
And notice that perish doesn't mean some kind of eternal punishment.
Jesus is saying 'unless you change your hearts and minds, your soul will shrivel and die'.
That's why Jesus is so hard on that attitude?
That's why the desert fathers were so focused on false superiority.
Because the price, the shriveling of the soul, the price is so high.
Spiritual superiority blocks the truth;
• it gives a false image of God.
It's so tempting to believe we have the solution to someone else's problem;
• to think "I know how to deal with this problem in your life – and never mind about mine."
We Christians so often fall into the trap of success and failure.
We behave as if faith is about winning, about being on the winning side.
When there's a controversy, we try to resolve it according to God's will so that we prevail in God's name.
More often than not it's about our will; about satisfying ourselves.
When we do that we give a false image of God.
And crucially we might prevent another person finding God more deeply because they come up against the brick wall of our self delusion.
Some old men went to see Abba Poemen and asked, "We see some of the brothers falling asleep during divine worship. Should we wake them up?"
Abba Poemen said, "As for me, when I see a brother who is falling asleep during worship, I lay his head on my knees and let him rest."
So don't worry if you're falling asleep now!
On another occasion, Abba Poemen was asked, "If see my brother sinning, should I hide the fact?"
Abba Poemen replied, "At the moment we hide a brother's fault, God hides our own.
• "At the moment we reveal a brother's fault, God reveals our own."
Where does this tendency to project onto others come from?
Where does this inclination to judge other people originate?
Perhaps it's some primeval response that helped us survive millennia ago.
It's about protecting ourselves from the desert in our heart.
The dangerous place deep within that we fear to enter.
The void where our failures, our wounds, our guilt lurk.
We resist the call into our own depths.
It is where we've hidden the things that have hurt us in the past.
We resist going there because we're afraid of being hurt again.
We suspect that our wounds go deeper than we think.
They do – connected all the way back to childhood.
But as the mystical text says, "there are palaces whose gates open only to tears."
Our desert is the place God longs to reach, to touch and heal.
Our sense of guilt is so powerful that we project that even on to God.
Combine that sense of guilt with the guilt other's feel and you get the great religious guilt systems that infect our faith.
The more I reflect on it, the more I feel religious guilt has nothing to do with God what's so ever.
It all comes from us.
Love keeps no record of wrong,
• and God is love.
You do not have to change for God to love.
We feel we need to make up for our failures and wounds.
We want to put ourselves right with God.
We try to do that with our good works and with our acts of faith.
We strive to be better Christians.
But there's nothing we can do to make God love us more
• and there's nothing we can do to make God love us less.
The only thing we can do is let God's grace into our desert places.
In the desert of the heart the healing fountain can flow.
The place we fear is where new life begins.
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