Monday of the Second Week of Lent

Lectionary: 230

We have sinned, been wicked and done evil;

we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.

We have not obeyed your servants the prophets,

who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes,

our fathers, and all the people of the land.

Justice, O Lord, is on your side;

we are shamefaced even to this day....

The summer of 2020, despite the serious distraction of a pandemic, challenged Americans to study, learn, and assimilate our history. But white America much prefers the attitude of the fictional Stephen Dedalus, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

If our students get past the point of "Boring!" and "Who cares?" they might get the eerie feeling that the past does matter, and it's still with us, and we must know it or die.

At which point they shut the book and return to their STEM studies -- science, technology, engineering, and math. The nice thing about STEM is its remove from human messiness. Clean, neat, sharp, focused, ahistorical: only the weird student might ask how did we get to this point as his class recklessly plunges toward the future. Nor will their professors have much sympathy for the question; they have a syllabus and no time for irrelevancies.

The Bible encounters the same disinterested reception in the American Christian congregation. They believe they should hear the Word of God, they believe there is something here to direct their thoughts and guide their lives. They believe it is "the Good Book," and they are a good people who should know the good book.
But the Bible continually calls us to repentance for our sins and the sins of our ancestors.

We have sinned like our ancestors;

we have done wrong and are guilty.

Our ancestors in Egypt

did not attend to your wonders.

They did not remember your manifold mercy;

they defied the Most High at the Red Sea. (Psalm 106)

We might be able to forget our own sins. "They were the indiscretions of my youth and I am over that now!" But we feel neither responsibility nor remorse for the sins of our ancestors, and we're not prepared to surrender the gains they won by overcoming obstacles. Not even the obstacles that remain with us in the form of muttering unrest, entrenched poverty, endemic violence, and the threat of upheaval. 

Our gated communities, locked homes and cars, hypersensitive alarm systems, and stockpiled weapons with mountains of ammunition seem natural; as if, "Life was always this way. There was always crime, and we must always protect against bad people." Even our locked and barricaded churches fail to signal the distress of God's people because, "It doesn't matter, I don't need a church to pray."

And then we get another summer of 2020, with the prospect of more to come in 2021. 

Lent invites us to remember the sins of our ancestors: four hundred years of slavery, institutional segregation, and racism; the wars against Native Americans; the exploitation of Asian immigrants; the waste of our natural resources and pollution of earth, air, and sea. We must teach our students their history as the ancient Hebrews taught their children. 

Lent invites us and warns us: 

Come now, let us set things right,

says the LORD:

Though your sins be like scarlet,

they may become white as snow;

Though they be red like crimson,

they may become white as wool.

If you are willing, and obey,

you shall eat the good things of the land;

But if you refuse and resist,

you shall be eaten by the sword:

for the mouth of the LORD has spoken! (Isaiah 1)