Lent: A Beginning, Not a Destination by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Ash Wednesday, 2014
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
My divinity school friend Maryetta Anschutz tells the story of touring the cathedrals of England with her parents as a young child. She was fascinated with the tin alms boxes that were on the walls, and she delighted in dropping a coin in them. When she did so, she loved the clanging noise that it made, and loved watching other people in the cathedral turn their heads to see what the noise was all about – and to discover that it was about her.
Then one day she noticed a lady approach one of the boxes, apparently on her daily visit to the cathedral. She dropped in a paper bill, and alas, made no sound. No one else turned around to notice that an offering had been deposited into the box. The bill, she realized, had far greater value than her small coin, and yet fell silently, like a feather from the sky. No one recognized the gift – only God, she supposed.
For the past several weeks our Sunday Gospel has led us through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as related by Matthew. On this Ash Wednesday, the passage has Jesus turning to the subject of personal piety. That is fitting, because in this season we are asked to focus particularly on how we maintain our relationship with God through prayer. He starts with a general principle: Good works are done privately for the love and honor of God, not publicly to attract the attention and admiration of other people. And he uses three specific examples of good deeds or acts of devotion that would have been familiar to his Jewish audience: the giving of alms, prayer and fasting.
Jesus assumes his audience already does these things; his purpose in reviewing them is to draw their attention to their own motives in practicing them. As was the case in his earlier discussion of the summary of the Law, Jesus is more concerned with the inner, spiritual dimension of these acts than the outward evidence.
Somewhat ironically, our lectionary, in its attempt to make this point, skips over 10 verses of this chapter, and they happen to be Jesus lesson on how to pray – the prayer that we know as the Lord’s prayer. And in skipping over this prayer, we may easily miss a central point that Jesus is making.
In that prayer, we ask God to provide us with our daily needs. “Give us this day our daily bread.” The season of Lent can provide us with a special time to reflect on how generous our God is, and to contrast that with the frequency, and the generosity with which we give back to God. And in the very next phrase, we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In seeking God’s forgiveness, we can reflect on how many times we have asked and received God’s forgiveness, and compare that to the number of times and ways that we have failed to be reconciled with our brother or our sister, or with the good creation that God has given us.
This entire section of the Gospel of Matthew, then, gives us an opportunity to reflect on our relationships with God, and our relationships with one another. During this season of Lent, our Outreach Committee has provided us with a template for addressing both. We invite you to join us in a season of prayer as we ourselves renew our relationship with our Creator. And we invite you to join us in building up our relationships with one another and to all those with whom we come into contact in acts of service and human kindness. On the information tables you will find a purple sheet which contains a calendar and some initial suggestions for acts of human kindness. We invite you to journal your seasonal acts of kindness on your calendar – they may serve as a useful reference as we pass from Lent to Eastertide. Along with whatever other prayer or devotions you may find useful during Lent, consider your acts of kindness as yet another dimension of your prayer life.
Our Lenten journey is a beginning, not an end in itself. I invite you to a Holy Lent, not because it is what we think we are supposed to do at this time of year, but so that we can more fully know that to grow in relationship with our God who sees and knows in secret is what leads us into life. AMEN.