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February 10, 2008  Lent One, All Souls' Episcopal Church 

Remember that dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return.

       In the Book of Genesis we are told that the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground; out of the soil. The word for soil is humus - h-u-m-u-s - from which we derive the word human. “Remember that dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.” These are the words we heard on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, as ashes of penitence were placed on our foreheads. On that day and in that liturgical act, we were reminded of our human nature. Just as the word human derives from humus, so does the word humility. A proper sense of humility informs us that we are dust; that we are fragile and fallen; that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; and that we are at all times and in all places dependent upon the enabling power and saving grace of God, our creator and our redeemer.

      The Book of Genesis also tells us we became living beings when God breathed his Spirit into us. We are quite literally an inspired creation. This fact reminds us that our destiny, our true calling and fulfillment, and our real greatness is to be found only in union with the God who created us in his own image and likeness. For us to know and fully realize the joyful destiny for which we were created, we must have fellowship with the God who created us to known him and love him. If we struggle on the other hand to exert our own will against the will of God, attempting to supplant God in a self-seeking, self-aggrandizing way, worshipping ourselves, the creature, over the creator, we shall find ourselves castaway, and alienated not only from God, but from our very nature, and from nature itself, a blissful paradise becoming a wilderness of struggle.

      This leads us to the first Sunday in Lent, and to our Lord Jesus in the wilderness. Our Lord began his public ministry by being associated with John the Baptist and his message of metanoia – of repentance – in which, with minds and hearts turned around towards God, a people were being called to prepare for the Day of the Lord. As Jesus emerged from the waters on that day, Heaven and Earth seemed to be united in a salutary moment as the Spirit of God descended upon him while his Father’s voice proclaimed, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus then departed for the wilderness where he fasted and prayed forty days and forty nights. He went forty days without food. He was in the wilderness where there was little or no shelter against the searing heat of the day and cold night winds; where there was no one around from whom he might have sought solace or received comfort; where wild beasts roamed, prowling to and fro looking for prey, and where nature has a way of showing us what’s what.

      In that wilderness, our Lord Jesus endured his temptations. Each of the three temptations really amounted to the same thing. In each case, he was tempted to seek his own will against the will of God; to supplant God in a self-seeking, self-aggrandizing way, and worship the creature over the creator. In the face of each temptation, our Lord Jesus is faithful and true to his Heavenly Father. In each of the temptations, he responds as the beloved son in whom his Father is well pleased. In each temptation in that harsh and forbidding wilderness our Lord responds as he would later respond in a garden overlooking Jerusalem where his mind and where his heart remained in steadfast union with his Father as he prayed, “Thy will be done.”

      The Season of Lent is our opportunity to say to our Heavenly Father, “Thy will be done.” The Season of Lent calls us to a serious moral inventory; to take stock of who we are and what we believe; to prepare to recall the road of suffering and way of self-offering our Lord walked in Holy Week, for it is a road we need to walk, and a way we need to journey by faith in him and with him.

      Years ago, a full head of hair and many pounds ago to be precise, I was in my mid-twenties working in my very first parish. I made a pastoral call to a parishioner who was on our church rolls but who never, ever, attended services. He was a man in his early sixties who looked at me as if I was young and wet behind the ears, probably because I was young and wet behind the ears. He said to me, “You’re going to tell me I need to go to church.” I said, “I’ve actually stopped by to get to know you, but I also want to make sure you know that we’d like you to come to church.” He then told me that he didn’t need to attend church because he was just as good a man, and maybe better, than those who attended every Sunday. I knew that those were two different issues, but I wasn’t going to argue with him about it. He then went on to tell me that he lived his life according to a very simple code. I knew he wanted to tell me what that code was, and so I waited. He said, “My code is this: after me, you come first.” He smiled, paused, and then repeated the code just so I could be properly awestruck by the wisdom of it all. “After me, you come first.” He sat back in his chair, smiled again, and asked, “What do you think about that?” I told him what I thought about that. I said, “To me, that sounds like a recipe for sadness.”

      “What do you mean?” he asked. I explained that if you’re always putting yourself first, I don’t really understand how you can love anybody. Certainly, no one would ever join the Armed Forces with that point of view. No one would ever enter a life of service with that point of view. I can’t imagine a mother or a father saying to their children, “After me, you come first.” I don’t believe anyone would ever manage to get married if their proposal consisted of, “Darling, I promise you that, after me, you’ll come first.”

      I can report that my parishioner was not altogether pleased with my response. I can also report that after that conversation, he did not attend church, at least while I was there. He lived by his code. I hope he didn’t die by it.

      Always putting yourself first before God, before others who depend on you, before someone in need, is indeed a recipe for sadness. Always needing to be the one in charge; the director of your own play; the end of your own desires; is a selfish, self-seeking, ego-centric, narcissistic, recipe for sadness. “Thy will be done,” said Jesus in the garden where he prayed. Hours earlier, he had shocked his disciples as their master by kneeling before them as their servant and washing their feet. “Thy will be done,” prayed Jesus on the night he would allow himself to be arrested on false charges, interrogated illegally and brutally, mocked and humiliated, tortured over many hours, and publicly executed. “Thy will be done,” said the Son of God because He loves the Father who loves us, and he loves us, and reconciled us with His Father, uniting us with God in love forever.

      As we seek by faith and works of charity; by prayer, and fasting; by abstinence and self-denial; to observe over these forty days a time of self-examination in which we conduct a serious moral inventory which leads to a faithful and rational penitence, let us prepare to follow our Lord to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane and to Calvary, and let us learn to pray as he prayed, “Thy will be done.”

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