Third Sunday in Lent Year C

Lent 3C_2022 March 20, 2022 Well, it’s been a week in the Lemburg house! On Monday, while I was in staff meeting, my husband David fell off a ladder while trying to get on the roof of our house. We spent all day Monday in the St. Joseph’s ER and learned that as a result of his fall, he fractured 4 vertebrae. The good news is that he’s going to be ok; he doesn’t need surgery, just time and space to heal. After my initial response of fear that lasted most of the day on Monday as we waited to learn just how badly he was injured, my emotions have been on a roller-coaster ride this week, plunging into the depths of some pretty intense anger and then settling into a high of self-righteousness and blame. “I’ve told him a hundred times not to get up on that roof! We’ve known and loved too many people over the course of our ministries who have had life-altering accidents that involved falling off a roof.” “Note how he waited until I was at staff meeting to do it because he knew I wouldn’t like it.” It felt so much better to replace my fear, my recognition of the fragility of all our lives, my helplessness in the face of disaster with self-righteousness. You might imagine my dismay when I am confronted by a picture of self-righteousness in our gospel reading for today. Luke gives us a strange little scene in which some people who are present listening to Jesus tell him about a recent current event in which Pilate has allegedly killed some Galileans (Jesus’s own people), who were making pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifice (just like Jesus’s parents did when he was young), and when they were killed Pilate, a character that everyone loved to hate because he did legitimately, regularly committer of atrocities, had their blood mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. The self-righteous indignation of those telling Jesus about this incident echoes across the centuries. But Jesus doesn’t respond the way they would expect. He talks about the need for all people to repent, the need for all people to be reoriented in relationship with God, for we never know when death may come for us. I’m reading sociologist Brene’ Brown’s new book Atlas of the Heart for my book club. In this book, Brown relies on many years of research (both her own and others’) to try to define and map out 87 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human and to open up ways to make and deepen more meaningful connections. This week, I was about half-way through and decided to scroll ahead to see what chapters were coming up when I stumbled upon chapter #12 titled Places we go when we feel wronged in which Brown tackles the emotions of anger, contempt, disgust, dehumanization, hate and….self-righteousness. (Man, I really hate it when the lectionary scriptures for the coming Sunday and stuff I’m reading for fun gang up on me! And this week, we also have the passage from Exodus 3—Moses’s encounter with the burning bush which I preached on a few weeks ago as an invitation to pay attention to how God’s Holy Spirit is showing up and working in the world around us. It’s like God is putting up a flashing neon sign in my life.) In wretched Chapter 12, Brene’ Brown first writes about how anger is often an invitation to examine what is going on deeper in our souls—how anger is like a sort of check-engine light for our souls, inviting us to be curious about what is really going on there, what is behind our anger. She offers a couple of graphics that show that behind anger may be shame, sadness, fear, frustration, guilt, disappointment, worry, embarrassment, jealousy, hurt, anxiety, loneliness, rejection, helplessness, and even overwhelming stress. And then she writes this of self-righteousness. She quotes John Mark Green who writes, “The self-righteous scream judgements against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.” And Brown continues: “I can tell you exactly what I was wearing and where I was sitting twenty-five years ago when someone in an AA meeting said, ‘Part of my sobriety is letting go of self-righteousness. It’s really hard because it feels so good. Like a pig rolling in [manure].’” Brown continues, “I remember thinking, Oh God. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I think I roll around in that [manure] too. From that day forward, I started thinking of self-righteousness as a threat to my self-respect, my well-being, and my sobriety. Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to add it to the abstinence list-it’s not as binary as having or not having a Bud Light or a cigarette—but I definitely see it as a slippery behavior that necessitates some self-reflection. And possibly amends.” i Jesus makes it clear in the gospel passage for today that the antidote for self-righteousness is repentance. Repentance starts with the acknowledgement from the opening line of our collect today: “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves…” and so we ask God to keep us safe in both body and soul. Repentance is acknowledging that we’ve gone the wrong way, or to put it in the poignant words from the Rite 1 confession that: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts…”. And repentance means an openness to once again realigning our will with God’s will. All of this has served as an invitation to me to recognize my own helplessness in keeping myself and those I love from harm, recognizing that we are all dependent on God’s mercy for that protection and that it doesn’t always look like I think it should look, and it has been an invitation to me to live into a deeper humility below the surface of my anger and self-righteousness. Your invitation this week is to examine where in your life you have felt a sense of self-righteousness lately. Examine what feelings might be lurking underneath, and ask God how you are being called to repent and reorient your life and your will with God’s. i Brown, Brene’. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House: 2021. Chapter 12. Anger part is on pp 218-222. Self-righteousness is from pp 238-239.