Revealing the mess underneath

Homily for March 15, 2015 (Fourth Sunday of Lent)
2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23; Psalm 137; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21
Parish Mission, Five Holy Martyrs Parish, Chicago

This is how it can be in Chicago:  on Friday, March 6 the low temperature in the city dipped to near 0 degrees.  It seemed as if our current month was picking up where the most frigid February in the city’s recorded history had left off.

The following day, however, things had changed dramatically.  The streets downtown were crowded with shoppers; car washes had lines stretching down the block; the songs of robins and the honking of geese filled the air; and joggers and bikers filled the paths in the parks and along the lakefront.  It was about 40 degrees.

Over the past week, our city has slowly begun its annual transformation from winter to spring.  While snow will of course remain a threat until April or May, an annual rite of seasonal change has been set in motion, accompanied by southwest winds, warmer temperatures, and longer, sunnier days.  Those miserable mounds of grey ice and tired piles of snow have given way to pavement and grass.

In the process, they have also revealed several months of accumulated dirt and trash that had lain hidden since winter began.  March may be hopeful; but it’s not always pretty.  The arrival of spring is welcome; but the task of spring cleaning is not. It can seem like getting a root canal or a colonoscopy:  necessary but not exactly pleasant.

Lent is the Church’s version of March in this part of the world—indeed, the very name of this liturgical season is derived from an Old English word for springtime.  Just as the receding snow and ice often reveal the mess underneath, so our observance of Lent can also show us some things about ourselves that aren’t so nice to see:  weaknesses, dependencies and addictions, and sins.  Most of the time, we would rather not look.

We live in culture in which Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other social media have enabled and sometimes even encouraged us to put forth only the best of ourselves (whether true or not).   At the same time, TV and the internet seem to have a greater penchant for scandal, tragedy, controversy and other bad news; and this, too, has bled into our use of social media, which is too often used to tear people down rather than build them up.   Transparency, whistle-blowing and exposing what’s in the shadows is great…as long as it’s not about us.

That’s human nature.  We sometimes prefer darkness to light.  We would rather avoid the guilt, shame and vulnerability of being exposed and perhaps even more the pain and hard work of change.  Consider the tone of lament that the author of 2 Chronicles uses in our first reading as he recounts the wholesale and serial infidelity of the people of Judah:

 

Early and often did the LORD, the God of their fathers, send his messengers to them, for he had compassion on his people and his dwelling place.  But they mocked the messengers of God, despised his warning, and scoffed at his prophets, until the anger of the LORD against his people was so inflamed that there was no remedy.

There was, in fact, a remedy; but it was one of the most awful in the history of Israel:  the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem, the slaughter of many, and generations of exile and servitude in Babylon.  It was the painful purging of an open wound. 

Thankfully, it wasn’t—and isn’t—the end of the story.  God gave his people a way back and the chance to start over.  At the end of the exile, God did it through Cyrus a foreign king.  Centuries later, God would do it again but this time in a far more personal and universal way.  As John so famously proclaims in his gospel:

For God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

 Paul, writing to the early church in Ephesus, similarly recalls:

God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ…raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus…

This gift of grace, Paul further notes, is a reflection of the inherent dignity we have as God’s handiwork, “created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.”  In other words, we have been created and saved for a purpose.  Just as the ice and snow of the winter melt, replenishing our lakes and rivers and watering the earth, so God uses this season of Lent to help thaw and transform those parts of us that have become frozen by indifference or habit or numbed by despair.

Once freed, we can use even what once seemed to be the ugliest parts of ourselves to do God’s will.  We see it whenever an alcoholic or addict shares their “experience, strength and hope” to help another to recovery.  We see it whenever an ex-convict tells students a cautionary tale of what can happen if one neglects education and looks for the fast buck.  We see it when we discover at Easter that we are a little more like Jesus than we were on Ash Wednesday. +