Broken Free

Propers: Ash Wednesday, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The enemy of true religion is not irreligion but bad religion. Bad religion is religion for its own sake, religion practiced in order to make the practitioner look good. The point of alms, says Jesus, is not that we be praised for giving them. The point of prayer is not to show others how very good and pious we all pretend to be. And the point of fasting is not to look like you’re fasting, not to put on a show.

Jesus calls such false pieties hypocrisy, play-acting. And they are the very antithesis of religion. True religion is and always ought to be the enemy of hypocrisy. True religion fosters humility, charity, liberation, and loving-kindness. That’s why we so stress confession and absolution in worship: not to scrape and bow and wail and embrace melodrama, but because we need to be truthful.

We must speak the truth of our own failings, our own wickedness, our own selfish choices, and hear the truth of God’s sure and promised absolution. We really are in need of forgiveness, and we really are forgiven. That’s how we come here. And we go out, knowing that God is with us, knowing that God forgives us, so that we are now empowered in His Holy Spirit to set right our many wrongs.

Jesus stands in the tradition of the Prophets. Indeed, we believe He fulfills them. The Prophets were men and women who spoke God’s truth into our world, and Jesus is that same Truth, that same God, now revealed in the flesh. And take note that the Prophets present us with a God whose primary identifying characteristic is liberation from bondage, liberation from slavery. That’s who God is; that’s what God does. He sets the oppressed free. He leads them out Himself.

And so the Prophets are always concerned with justice, absolutely; always concerned with how the rich and the powerful tread upon the poor and the needy. The Bible has this twin witness throughout that hoarding corrupts while debt enslaves. And you can see how they’re connected, can’t you? Some people having too much leads to many people not having enough. It’s no coincidence that Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Usury is a serious sin in the Hebrew Bible, not because they didn’t understand economics, but because they knew that it’s predation upon the poor. Inescapable debt causes people, causes lives, to be bought and sold. And unsurprisingly, the God presented to us by the Prophets is not a fan of any form of slavery. The fall of Israel, north and south, is blamed on the people’s refusal to honor the Jubilee: that is, their refusal to forgive their debts and free their slaves.

This too is speaking the truth. This too is true religion.

But it goes beyond this. True religion must begin by addressing people’s needs, yet human needs exceed the merely material, do they not? Once we’re fed, once we’re clothed, once we’re housed, we find we still need more. We need to ask deeper questions. We have to address deeper needs: concerns of meaning, purpose, value, dignity, spirituality. And Christ does this. Christ proclaims our liberation not only from hunger and injustice but from sin and even death!

To know the forgiveness of God is to be freed from the fear of death and of hell, freed from the terrors that haunt us by night, freed to live selflessly, joyously, generously, unafraid of tomorrow for we know that God is with us. And no matter what may befall us, that promise of mercy, forgiveness, and grace, that promise of undying love from the Cross, sustains us, fulfills us, and raises us up from the dead. If God is for us, who can be against us?

I’m not saying that bad things won’t happen. I’m not pretending to “name it and claim it.” This is a fallen, broken world, where war is waged upon the innocent and terrible things happen to good people. I mean, just look at what we did to Jesus. But all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single flame. And in Christ that Light has come. There is no wrong He cannot right. There is no wound He cannot heal. There is no child He will not welcome home. Period.

In the words of Addison Hart: “Christ taught that true religion was a matter of the depths, of interior transformation, and that it must result in compassion … Jesus called it ‘the Kingdom of God’―[meaning] a profound revolution within oneself that led to the reordered and correct perception of all things.” Note again that true religion, according to Jesus, is about truth, generosity, and liberation. And this is the key that frees us from death, that frees us from our fear.

Tonight we enter into the 40 days of Lent. It is a period of prayer, repentance, instruction, and fasting, all leading us to the Great Three Days of Jesus’ Passover from death to life, His Crucifixion and Resurrection. The purpose of all this is to join us to Christ, to join us in Christ, so that we together might be Jesus for the world: one in His Body, one in His Spirit, one both in Word and in Sacrament, in fire and water, flesh and blood.

We join ourselves to His own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and to His own eternal life, already begun. Lent prepares us for this, for our dying and our rising. As it is written on the walls of St Paul’s Monastery at the holy mountain of Athos: “If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.” Get it?

This evening we place ashes on our foreheads, not for show, not to display our piety to the world, but as a sign of repentance and a reminder of mortality. Everything in this world is fleeting. Everything in this world is but ashes and dust. We are only here, my friends, for a little, little while. We live but 70 years, or perhaps in strength even 80. What then shall we do with the time that is given to us?

Will you make a lot of money? Will you buy a lot of stuff? Will you stream your life away? Or—will you be free? Free to live and love devoid of fear, of ego, of unfettered appetite. Free to live as Jesus lives, in you and in your neighbor. Fasting helps us with this; it trains us. It teaches us to let go of little things voluntarily, to place the spirit above the flesh, so that in time of crisis, when it really matters, we will be strong enough, free enough, to place the good of others before our own.

That’s what love is. It’s not a sentiment. It’s not a feeling. It’s the choice to put others first: to love them as Christ loves us. That is truly justice. That is true religion.

Is this not the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? … If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness … and the Lord will guide you.

All of this, my brothers and sisters, has already been accomplished—for us, through us, in us—in Jesus Christ our Lord. You are free. Now let us go and free the world.

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