The Bright Sadness of Lent

The western liturgical calendar has us on the Mount of the Transfiguration for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. I am at St. Matthew's, Worcester. Next Sunday their new rector will be joining them, as they and we enter the holy season of Lent. 

The season that follows the Feast of the Epiphany varies in length from year to year. The reason for that has to do with when Easter falls. As you know, the wise men always arrive in Bethlehem on January 6. They are late, but predictably so! So if Easter comes early, you only need a few weeks to get to Ash Wednesday. If it comes later, as it does this spring, then you need more weeks. It’s math, but it’s pretty easy math.

Next weekend your new rector will have arrived and Fr. John will walk through this holy season of Lent, and the mystery of Holy Week, and ultimately to the empty tomb with all of you. It’s a great time for the next chapter of your life together to begin.

But before you set off with Father John, I want to remind you about how we have come to be on the Mount of the Transfiguration today. One of my favorite hymns for Epiphany is “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise,” which nicely summarizes the themes of these past seven weeks. It reflects on the ways that God is made manifest in the Incarnation: manifest at Jordan’s stream in the Baptism of Jesus – back on January 12. Manifest in the call of the disciples to come and follow Jesus, in the gospels we heard on the last two weeks in January as you thanked and said goodbye to Mother Judith. I was with you at the beginning of February when we recalled how Jesus was manifest as a forty-day old baby when his parents made the sojourn to the Temple in Jerusalem and were greeted by Anna and Simeon. And then over the past two Sundays, manifest in Jesus’ teaching ministry, especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

But God was not just made manifest a long time ago in a galaxy far away, or once upon a time: but God is being made manifest here and now if only we have eyes to see. One of the main themes of Epiphany is that Jesus is the Light of the world. But a direct corollary to that theme is that you and I are called to walk as children of that Light by allowing that light shine through our lives. We are called to illuminate the darkness around us so that the world may believe. So I wonder what epiphanies have come to you this Epiphany season, as you’ve said goodbye once again and as you wait for the arrival of a new rector?   

All of these themes culminate on the Mount of the Transfiguration. Moses and Elijah represent the two main figures of the Old Testament: the Torah and the Prophets. God seems to speak on mountaintops in the Bible, maybe for the same reason that so many of us feel closer to God when we hike up a mountain and look out over the vista. Whether that vista is a desert in the American southwest or multi-colored maple trees on an October day in New England or vineyards and olive trees somewhere in the hills of Tuscany, it is with good reason that we speak about “mountaintop experiences” as a metaphor for our religious epiphanies. The landscape itself very often helps to “open our eyes so that we might see God’s hand at work in the world around us.” In such moments we may feel the presence of God more fully and in those same moments may know the experience of being more fully known.

There is a shadow side here, however; or at least a temptation. We want to savor such moments of the faith journey by trying to hold onto them and even making them normative. I think that’s what the building booths idea is all about. Episcopalians love to build booths, to find ways to hold onto memories and to claim holy spaces. And that’s good. But it can also keep us from moving on. And Jesus is clear that he is moving on from the Mount of the Transfiguration to Golgatha. He’s also equally clear that we are invited along, to make that journey through Lent to the cross. Epiphanies are wonderful gifts for the journey and they sustain us, but faith is not one long extended mountaintop experience. We are called to listen to the Voice of God in this story which makes clear that we are called to listen to, and then follow Jesus, who insists that we are not only mountaintop people, but a people called to follow him the Way of the Cross.

I’ve traveled to the Holy Land five times and am working on another trip in May 2021. One of the times I was there, I had a chance to stand on Mt Tabor, which many believe was the mountain in today’s gospel that Jesus climbed with Peter and James and John. Our little band of pilgrims celebrated the Eucharist there and yours truly got to be the celebrant. It was an experience I will never forget. As the bread was broken and the wine was shared, it seemed very clear that Christ was in our midst. While I didn’t see Moses or Elijah that day, I could better understand that desire to try to hold onto such moments by building some kind of tabernacle. But of course our pilgrimage led us down that mountain and through the Judean desert. Like Peter and James and John we made the hard journey toward Bethphage and Gethsamene and ultimately to Golgatha, where we walked the stations of the cross in Jerusalem.

On Wednesday night I’ll be with you one more time to invite you into a holy Lent, a Lent that your new rector will share with you. Keep your eyes and ears open! I hope that those with ears to hear may reflect on what all of this suggests for a congregation about to welcome a new rector. Be loving and patient and gentle and kind and not arrogant or rude and not focused on building booths, but on making the journey together. Always with God’s help.

But there is one caveat I need to share with all of you. All that I have said to you so far today is shaped by the Western Christian liturgical calendar. While there may be differences between Methodists and Lutherans and Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, we all follow this same basic path from Epiphany to the Jordan River and then ultimately to the Mount of the Transfiguration; and from there to Ash Wednesday and ultimately to Easter morning and our songs of alleluia. As the hymn I mentioned earlier puts it, “…from there thou leddest them, steadfast to Jerusalem; cross and Easter day confess, God-in-man made manifest.”

My own experience of the Christian tradition, however, even when it has been quite ecumenical, has still tended to be very western. My experiences in the Holy Land, however, have reminded me that at its heart, Christianity is more of an eastern religion than a western one.  You feel that and smell it and see it when you walk into a place like the Church of the Nativity or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It really is true that in Christ there is no east nor west. But you experience that in a much deeper way when you worship with the Orthodox, whether Greek or Russian or Ukrainian or Syrian or Armenian.

In fact, you don’t have to go halfway around the world to experience that part of Christ’s Body. Worcester has ample opportunities to experience what I’m talking about as perhaps some of you know. When I was serving in Holden, I used to have my confirmands visit churches in Worcester outside of our tradition; they soon learned that the Orthodox take way more than an hour to worship!

Alexander Schmemman was the Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York and one of the leading liturgical scholars in Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. I’ve re-read his book on Orthodox Lenten practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha, many times now.

The weeks immediately preceding Lent are very different than what I have been describing as the journey that has brought us to the Mount of the Transfiguration. The Orthodox focus on five themes before they begin the Lenten journey: Desire for God (the story of Zacchaeus), Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee), Return from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son), Last Judgment, and then finally, Forgiveness Sunday. In other words, they get ready not with a long Epiphany season but with these five themes: desire, humility, return, judgement, forgiveness. Since Orthodox Easter falls one week after our western Easter this year – on April 19 – next Sunday is when our Orthodox siblings will be celebrating Forgiveness Sunday.  

A friend of mine who was a student of Schmemann’s once described to me how this works. The liturgy for Forgiveness Sunday involves an elaborate dance as each person in worship is able to say to every other person there, “Forgive me, for I have sinned.” Now most of you know how hard it can be for us to forgive someone who has hurt us very badly. But at the very least, even when we aren’t yet able to forgive someone, we can remember that God forgives all who confess their sins and are truly penitent. So the liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you” because, to be honest, that might not yet be true. Rather, it is this: “God has forgiven you.” Even as this dance is unfolding the choir is singing Easter hymns.

The theological point, whether one is shaped by eastern or western Christianity is the same: Lent gives us forty days to work on forgiveness and reconciliation. But there is something sensible to me in beginning with the reminder that God gets there before us. When we confess our sins, when we truly repent, the good news of the Christian faith is that God does indeed forgive us. Lent, then, becomes a time for us to try to live more fully into that reality—a journey toward Pascha. The journey that claims us as Easter people.

The holy season of Lent is an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s abundant love, which then allows us to more fully embrace the Paschal mystery by becoming instruments of God’s peace and ambassadors of reconciliation. It is not meant to be a private time, even if confession is personal. Lent is about being liberated from sin. The triumph of sin is well-known to us: that experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred. The first chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin, however, is forgiveness, for it opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality, to God’s reality.

“To forgive,” Schmemman writes, “is to reject the hopeless dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.” There is an atmosphere created in Lent, he says, a state of mind that our worship creates. This spirit of Lent is meant to help us to experience the “bright sadness” which is the message and the gift of Lent. We are invited to enter this season of “bright sadness” in order to experience that mysterious liberation, a liberation that makes us “light and peaceful” by illuminating an inner beauty that he compares to “an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.” 

Maybe that image gives us our connection between east and west! Maybe that is where the Mount of the Transfiguration converges with Forgiveness Sunday. It gets us to, as Don Henley once put it, to “the heart of the matter" which I think is in fact about forgiveness. And maybe it’s the perfect place to start the journey with a new rector and with the reminder that neither John nor all of you will get it right all the time.

Forgiveness gives us the chance to remember that the Church’s one Foundation really is Jesus Christ, her Lord. Hold onto that truth, as the journey continues. Always with God’s help.