Lent 1 Year B

I want to ask you to imagine something along with me. It’s not going to be altogether pleasant, but hey, this is Lent after all. Here’s what I want you to imagine. You’re involved in a fight with someone. Not the fisticuffs kind. A long, protracted argument, the type where you keep trying to act civilly towards each other, but every conversation seems to lead in the direction of somebody getting mad.

Now the really bad news. This fight is with someone who is important to you. It could be a family member, or a good friend, or a colleague you trust and admire. You don’t want to just cast adrift from this person. So the argument isn’t going to end by just mutually agreeing to ignore each other. You’re stuck with it. You want to solve the problem, but you can’t see how. And meanwhile it’s making life miserable.

Imagine that the origin of the argument is that you did something wrong, - but you don’t realize that. You may even have looked back over what happened, but you can’t see that you’re at fault. There’s a blind spot. Instead, you’re frustrated because you just can’t figure out why this relationship has turned so prickly. You probably have some vague feelings of unease about it - there are warning signs. You’re on the defensive a lot. You’re mad at your friend even though you’re quite sure that it’s not their fault. You may even be feeling a little bit guilty, though for no reason that you can determine.

But the barriers are up. You keep clashing, over and over and over again. Each time, the same things get said, the same feelings get felt (and hurt). It never brings you even an inch closer to resolving the issue, whatever it really is.

What’s the solution? How do you escape from this vicious circle? Experience teaches us that there is a way. If you’ve exhausted your own resources trying to figure out what’s gone wrong, then you have to bring the other person into the picture - not now as the other party to the dispute, but as someone who can help. You have to find a way to de-escalate the argument, and instead hear what the other person is really trying to say to you. Never mind the rights and wrongs, the defensiveness and the self-justification. They have something they’re trying to say: “You hurt me,” and “You still matter to me.” And the only way to hear that is to stop talking, and listen instead.

That’s the story in our imagination. Many of us probably didn’t have to imagine too much of that. It’s a real story, that’s played out countless times every day in real human lives. Making mistakes, being blind to them, and then stubbornly sticking to our version of reality - those are very characteristic human traits. It takes a lot to shake us loose from our insistence on our own rightness, our own position at the centre of our personal universe. Very often it takes some external shock, as something happens to interrupt our cycle of behaviour and put it into perspective. But always, it takes grace - grace is also something that comes from outside or beyond us. The grace of the other person, hanging in there with us even when we’ve behaved badly. And the grace of insight, that bolt from the blue that tells us, there’s another way to handle this.

Up till now, I haven’t mentioned God in this sermon. At least, not out loud. But you probably realize that the whole thing has been about God as much as anything. And in a number of different ways. For us who have learned - or thought we learned! - to “see Christ in all people”, we have to come to grips that our failures in human relationships are a way of failing God. And the other side of that, the good-news side, is that the grace of other people’s love and forgiveness is also Christ at work, reconciling us to God just as much as to our neighbour.

And even when there is no ‘neighbour’ to bear the brunt of our self-justifying ways, God is still involved. Whether or not there are victimless crimes, there are certainly no victimless sins. The things we say under our breath, the fantasy world into which we retreat where we really can be the centre of everything, our failure to care for and respect our selves - or the non-human elements of God’s creation: these are all just other versions of that story where we get into an argument with someone and can’t get out. And the price of doing that is not a damaged human relationship, but a damaged relationship with God.

But there is one more version of that story that involves God, and it operates on a much bigger scale. It’s the story of creation - the story of the Bible - the story of God’s relationship not just with you or me, but with all of humanity of which we are a part. The story we imagined is so recognizable because it is our story! We are constantly locked into a struggle with God, not wanting to abandon the Wonderful Mystery, but at the same time not able to work out why our relationship is so strained. We are waiting for that moment of grace, when the barriers can be taken down and we can really listen.

Lent is above all a time for listening. Sometimes people have got it wrong by thinking that they can just run through a moral inventory during Lent, figure out what their sins are, and put them right. You can’t actually know what’s wrong in your relationship with God until you listen to God’s side of the story. God has a whole different perspective on who we are, why we’re here, and what it means for us to belong to God. We don’t hear that perspective very often, simply because we don’t give it time and space.

Over the next six weeks, I invite you to make time and space. Read what God says to you in the Bible - even if it’s something as simple as reading the Sunday lessons ahead of time. Pray, but don’t let your prayer be all about you talking and God listening. Let it be the other way round instead. And open yourself to other people who can be the word of God and the grace of God to you: hear what the people who love you are really saying; listen even to people you normally shut out of your life, people you don’t know and never hear. Take down some barriers.

When we really listen to God like that, there’s one thing we hear above anything else. God is trying to say to us, “You are my child, I love you, I am proud of you.” Once we’ve really heard that, and let it sink in, there are other things we’ll hear. We’ll hear what we’ve really done to ourselves, to others and to God, and that will be hard to bear. But it will come with the assurance that God is not going to let us go. It will come with the imprint of the Cross, where God has borne all the hurt we can do to him and still loves us. When we really listen, what we will find, above all, is grace.

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