Sermon for the First Day of Lent, February 17, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Joel 2:1-2,12-17, Psalm 103:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Maxwell Johnson is a professor of liturgy at Notre Dame. He’s a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the author of one of the most important book out there right now on Baptism. That book is, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation[1]. Johnson is part of a generation of liturgical scholars who are trying, to the extent they are able, to let historical documents, evidence, speak for themselves, as it were, before deciding on what the document means. That’s not easy to do. But in many ways not only is it possible, but really important to try to do.

The single most influential book in the area of worship in the last century – at least for the English-speaking world, Protestant and Roman Catholic, – was Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy.[2] Unfortunately, his approach methodologically was just the opposite from Johnson and his contemporaries. Apart from Dix’s unquestionably beautiful devotional writing The Shape of the Liturgy,[3] he got some really important things wrong. He read ancient texts from the perspective of his theological positions, his understandings, his own experience of worship. He did not let the texts speak for themselves. In fact, he got so much wrong that a great deal scholarship over the last fifty years has been spent just cleaning up the mess.[4]

Stay with me. One of the most important things Johnson and many others are uncovering about the first centuries of the Christian era, is a much greater diversity of belief and practice than most of us were taught had been there. Just because Ignatius of Antioch mentions bishops, presbyters and deacons that doesn’t mean every else Christian community was organized that way.

Most scholars would argue today that the Christians of the first centuries were far less focused on the way one became a Christian – through Baptism – and remained a Christian – through Eucharist – than they were on faith, on conversion of life, on their new relationship with God and with each other in Christ.

Along these lines, for the purposes of this first day of Lent, I have found myself thinking about spiritual, emotional methodology.  I’m trying to think through how methodology carries over to confession, to reconciliation, to forgiveness.

I have known Jesus’ words about forgiveness, and how many times we are to forgive, basically all my life.[5] But at some level they always seem hollow to me, beautiful words, not a reality I have often known.

Strong memories from the past, especially painful, humiliating memories, are shaped, reshaped and renewed every time they come to mind. I think some of the intensity of many hard memories I experience comes as much from this burden of repetition as it does from the memory of the experience itself.

My siblings and I are negotiating a date for one final weekend to finish cleaning out my mother’s house and getting it up for sale. The last time I was there I found my mother’s collection of my report cards from elementary school. The report cards came out quarterly in those days and the teacher themselves entered all the grades by hand along with their comments. I was pretty surprised when I read through them. I thought I clearly remembered many things different teachers had written about me, when in fact I had not. Isolated phrases and sentences took on a much larger life – and, again, the repetition of memories can reshape memories in a way that is less than truthful. Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”[6]

In today’s gospel lesson Jesus speaks in the most direct way about not trying to show off in our praying and giving. He urges us to a live our lives with a certain integrity, a certain confidence, that God knows who we are and what we are up to. . The real zinger is the last sentence of the passage, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”[7]

Back to methodology. “The wounds of the Spirit” – to use John Henry Newman’s phrase[8] – are real things. Maybe there’s not an easy way around them, but until you and I try genuinely to get around whatever burdens of memory we carry with us, we cannot begin to be in a new place. I realize I can’t go back in time as an observer. But perhaps just the realization that I don’t know everything about every intense memory I have may itself be enough truth to reset the system, enough truth to set me free and move me to a new place.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.