What do you really desire? I confess that I often don’t know. And even when I think I do know what I want, it turns out to be something quite unholy like a pint of Salt & Straw ice cream. So I find myself saying, like the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.”
Lent can, if we choose let it, bring us into intimate relationship with the sin that dwells within us. Last Sunday Nathan told us that he’s giving up Lent for Lent, for just this sort of reason. And I think that’s fair. If traditional Lenten disciplines like prayer, fasting and almsgiving become an organized exercise in personal failure, then I am not sure they help us to become disciples of Jesus, who longs to free us from shame.
If you are Paul, the answer to your Lenten failings might be to forego shame, and instead to project it. That is, to blame it on the sin that dwells within, as if it were some alien being. Or to blame the sin on those who live as enemies of the cross of Christ, as this morning’s lesson described them. All of which are convenient ways to deflect attention from a very good and holy desire—the desire to be more like God—and thereby avoid taking responsibility for whatever gets in the way of it.
Which is exactly why I like the historic spiritual practices of Lent. They force me to reckon with myself and what I really want. Not so that I can feel bad, or so that I can blame the sin within me or the enemies without me, but so that I can come to terms with my deepest desires. Which usually means that I have to face down all my lesser desires. All the many ways in which I want what I do not want.
Jesus, what did you want? In today’s gospel, we heard him say: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Which is a maternal image that I deeply love, but our first lesson expresses a similar desire within a more masculine sensibility. Count the stars, if you are able to count them” the Lord said to Abram. “So shall your descendants be.” What God wants is to create a family; to gather and to guide a faithful people.
That’s not what Jerusalem wanted, though. It had no desire to be the place of God’s gathering, Jesus alleged. And worse, it was the city that kills prophets. That discourse was not just an indictment of the known sins of the city, but it also foreshadowing of Jesus’ own death: he is the prophet who is casting out demons and performing cures. On the third day, his work would be finished. By the fox Herod, whose desire was death.
In a city almost seventy five hundred miles from here, some terrorists motivated by racism desired death. I spent a bittersweet Thursday evening on the phone with Chris Lynch, our beloved former organ scholar. He and Trinity choir member Kymm Walker were locked down in the Anglican cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, as armed assailants were shooting mosque-goers during Friday prayers. I raged and grieved with Chris and Kymm. I assured them that we at Trinity loved him and were praying for him and for the people of their host city.
The thing is, Christchurch is really not known as a city that kills prophets. Or anyone else. The police don’t even carry guns. In international context, ours are the cities known for killing. For killing people of color, for killing people of faith, for killing schoolchildren, for killing people over political ideology and personal slight. Chris told me that New Zealanders were shocked by the tragedy itself, but equally so by the realization that such a hateful thing could even happen in their country.
In that sense, we north Americans—who saw 340 mass shooting incidents in 2018 alone—are perhaps a bit closer to the truth that Lent would expose. We know all too well that sin dwells in our midst. Not as an alien-like object of our personal shame, but as that banal evil that humankind is capable of when our worst fears and most selfish desires are given free reign. And the corruption of our desire begins at home. We, like the residents of Jerusalem, are perfectly capable of resisting God’s call to gather in community. I’ve certainly walked out of plenty of assemblies when I didn’t think I agreed with them. We have been known to prefer the shallow comfort of contempt over the costly grace of the common good.
I confess that I’ve not always been a big fan of the American Enterprise Institute, but this week Arthur Brooks caught me up short in his New York Times op-ed entitled “Our Culture of Contempt.” Our nation is more polarized than it has been at any time since the Civil War, he observed. And this is not just a problem of incivility or intolerance, he argued: it is the fruit of the far more dangerous practice of contempt. And not just contempt for other people’s ideas, but also for other people themselves. In the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.”
What a short trip it is from contempt for another to desiring the destruction of another. Herod knew contempt and its unholy desire for death. And it would seem entirely reasonable that Jesus—knowing that the fox Herod would indeed kill him—would express contempt for Jerusalem in return. Would condemn its errant ways and corrupt leaders and get away from the city. But Jesus didn’t—or perhaps couldn’t bring himself to—do that.
I’d like to believe that Jesus didn’t abandon Jerusalem because he knew his truest desire. He wanted Jerusalem to live into its vocation as the gathering place of God’s people. He wanted that even more than he wanted to preserve his own life. Even with the shadow of the cross looming over him, he still evoked that tender image of the mothering hen. He still longed to gather the people of Jerusalem. He longs to gather the people of Christchurch, Anglican and Muslim and atheist and terrorist alike. He longs to gather us, even now.
Here’s the Good News that looms just over the horizon during Lent. Violence did not have the final say over the ministry of Jesus Christ. It does not and will not have the last word for the city of Christchurch or Aleppo or Portland. But neither will violence redeem anyone. The contempt that fosters violence will not save anyone either. It is the teaching and witness of Jesus that will.
His way is no easy discipline for Lent—or any other time—but he stands in our text and in our midst, inviting us to let go of our lesser desires. In Jesus’ name, we can exchange the desire to be right for the desire to be loving. We can exchange the comfort of contempt for the costly grace of connection. We can desire the wellbeing of another over the familiarity of the status quo. We can approach and remain in the risky place when it seems more comfortable to go, we can insist that we all belong under the wings of the same loving mother. We can try to be that community gathered in God’s love until we fail, we can try until our hearts break, and then we can try again. And that, my friends, may well redeem us all.
preaching from same text tomorrow. Resonated with your entire message.