In the Interim- "Lord, who threw out these forty days?"

Dear Friends,

Some of my favorite sermons have been answers to musical questions. Years ago, a sermon preached at an ordination service for a bishop of the Episcopal Church answered Tina Turner’s question: “What’s love got to do with it?” The sermon preached at the Celebration of New Ministry when I became rector of St. Luke’s in Granville was a response to the question: “What if the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about?”

Borrowing the idea, I want to ask the question asked in one of the great hymns for Lent: “Lord, who threw out these forty days?” Yes, I know it’s “Lord, who throughout these forty days?” but the change makes it possible for me to raise an important question: why do we avoid penance?

Lent—the church season that began on Ash Wednesday—is a penitential season, a season during which we have the chance to say, “We’re sorry.” And that doesn’t sit well with us—or at least with some of us. The fact is, however, that we’ve got a lot to say we’re sorry about, if not as individuals, then as part of humanity.

The confessions we say in our services—the so-called “general confessions”—hint at good reasons for repentance. “We have not loved you [God] with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” Or “we confess that we have sinned against you, opposing your will in our lives. We have denied your goodness in each other, in ourselves, and in the world you have created.”

The consequences of our inactions and our actions are everywhere. So, to acknowledge these consequences, to say, “We’re sorry,” and to ask God’s help to amend our lives, is the right thing to do. And bless our Christian traditions, we have Lent to help us.

I am not talking about what the English priest H.A. Williams once described as, “the secret and destructive pleasure of doing a good orthodox grovel to a pseudo-Lord, the pharisee in each of us we call God and who despises the rest of what we are.” No, I am talking about apologizing to the God who pines for us as the father pined for his Prodigal Song and embraced his lost child before the son could even get the first words of regret out of his mouth.

That God is waiting with open arms for us...always.

Blessings,

Stephen Applegate

Art credit: Rembrandt (circa 1620–69). Return of the Prodigal Son [Etching, pen and ink]. The Met Museum, New York, NY, United States.