Wednesday of the First Week in Lent

Lectionary: 226

Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
and of my sin cleanse me.

Our relationship with God begins in repentance, as does the season of Lent. Astounded by the goodness, beauty, holiness and authority of God, overwhelmed by the mercy, courage and generosity of Jesus, and swept into the joy, willingness and energy of the Holy Spirit: we feel grief and remorse for our past. Realizing that God was always there, aware and attentive to us, we remember all the wrong and stupid things we have done in his sight. “Oofda!” as they say in Minnesota.

While we must contemplate the goodness of God – fixing our eyes on Jesus -- we cannot do so without attention to our sins. They are too real, too demanding and persistent to be ignored. Like the blood of Abel, they cry to heaven for attention.

The memory of sin invites us to consider and explore the fearful depths of our own nature. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina we meet a woman who simply refuses to look inward. She cannot acknowledge her own sins or foolishness. Whatever is wrong or sinful or worthy of blame belongs to someone else. She looks in the mirror and sees only what everyone else sees, an astonishingly beautiful woman. The last woman who might be able to speak to her, a sister in law, recognizes a fluttering in her eyes which indicates her refusal to engage. Anna was eager to show Dolly her splendid lifestyle but firmly closed any glimpse of her soul.

Considered one of the greatest novels of all time, I found it painful reading. As much as I might want to sympathize with a drop-dead gorgeous woman, I could find nothing attractive. Charming and seductive, she is toxic. In the end her memory is erased by the onset of World War I as surely as a sandcastle disintegrates under the tide.

Lent challenges us to look inward and face the fearful defensiveness that evades self-examination and self-awareness. But the fear of looking inward is always worse than the actual event, because the Lord takes us by the hand as we go. Yes, I have sinned and I wish I had not. But God's grace embraces the whole of my life and these events, as critical as they have been to me, are not the whole story. There is mercy and there is the promise that my life, in the end, will be a gospel story.