Sermons: February 2010

Sermon

February 14, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

The Rev. Vern Hill 

Sermon: “Going up to the Mountain”

‘Let’s go up the mountain.

Let’s go up to the place where the land meets the sky

where the earth touches the heavens,

to the place of meeting,

to the place of mists,

to the place of voices and conversations,

to the place of listening’... 

Such has written the theologian, William Loader of the Uniting Church of Australia.  Australians have this rather large chunk of land called the outback – places to take walk-abouts, places interrupted by high country which gives birth to such poetry.  I have a strong attachment to his poetry for these high country places here in our own land.  I have spent most of my life losing the fat battle, but there have been a few windows of opportunity for two footed mobility.  Such was one 10 year period when I was involved with junior and senior high camping for the Church.  I tended toward camping that was on the primitive side – at least out of doors sleeping.  But the best experiences were with backpacking.

In the course of those ten years I either chased kids around or wandered with a few friends along the ridges and down into the stream bottoms of the Golden Trout Wilderness just south of Sequoia Park, covering a couple hundred miles.   I remember vividly the morning hike along a ridge watching clouds invent themselves along the path just in front of me.  I also remember rather vividly the lighting strike in the old snag about 150 feet up the trail – not my most brilliant moment for being out and about in the midst of pops and flashes.

I cherish these experiences some 30 years ago now, those days before the noise and dust of quads and trail bikes and the glut of people seeking to find a Disneyland adventure in  Bambi-land.  Then the high technology on the trail was a horse or pack animal. 

Going to the mountains was a pivotal time for me, a time of serious learning about competency, judgement and simplicity.  I came to understand why some describe the mountains as holy, as “thin places” of divine transparency.  Most important – I learned to set aside my agenda, my expectations, my likes – what I thought I needed for I could not control the menu; I could only experience and (big secret) enjoy.  The holy mountains are places to hear and listen to different voices and conversations; they are places to receive.  They are places to go up to.

I mention all of this because today is about mountain tops – it is about holy places and what happens to us when we visit them.

Our storyteller Luke tells us that Jesus takes Peter, John and James up on a mountain to pray.  And while there some rather spectacular things happen – Jesus’ face is changed and his clothes become dazzling white.  Suddenly two others appear in “glory” – Moses and Elijah. My own sense is that this is another resurrection appearance story that became strategically moved early on in the Gospel writing process to make connections between Jesus and others who had stood on holy ground.  Jesus stands among Moses and Elijah in this affirmation of his personhood.

With this our storyteller provides us with a quite different answer to the Gospel question of Jesus – who do people say that I am?  For the most part the Bible testimony answers this question within the backdrop of apocalyptic, end of times thinking and the longing for a Messiah.  Jesus is the Son of Man, the Christ, the Messiah.  But Luke opens up another understanding of Jesus in vs 31 that we only occasionally find within our Easter liturgy and earliest of hymns.  In that verse Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah appear and speak of Jesus’ “departure” in the yet to come holy week experience.   The Greek word used for departure here is exodus – a very purposeful choice of words.   Luke casts Jesus as a new Moses, who brings with his being a new Law and who will deliver us – Jew and Gentile - from the slavery to the many powers that deny true life.  This is a new Exodus story – echoes of this we will hear spoken of in the darkness of our Easter Vigil gathering when we light the new light of the Easter Christ candle and celebrate the one who crossed the Red Sea waters of death to new life -  slavery and bondage transfigured into liberty and a promised new home.

What our storyteller is saying is that we meet in Jesus the transforming power of the mountain top – the embrace of the broken and misguided by the holy.  The great mistake in coming to the truth of this story is failing to make the connection, this moment of aha! – that transfiguration, metamorphosis, epiphany, rebirthing is for us.  Jesus leads us by this transfigured moment into how we reconnect with what we are created to be, how we come to ourselves, how brokenness begins to heal.  This is not simply a story about something spectacular that happened to Jesus.  It is about ourselves – it is an invitation, a bidding, for us to walk upon holy ground, to search out the thin places where God may move us from triviality and fear and misdirection into a new level and depth in existence.  We can be changed, in the twinkling of an eye.  Not by coercion and power, but by invitation and suggestion and imagination.  What we can receive in a transfigured moment, in a visitation to a thin place, is a new learning about God and each of us.  As Jesus was transformed before Peter, James and John, God’s “will” (God’s heart’s desire) is to transform us.

If there are these thin spots at the mountain top, it must mean that we spend most of our time in the thick places, in the city among the concrete and steel landscapes, noise, traffic, crowds, have-to-dos, chatter, clutter and twitter.  Technology and commerce hardly breeds spiritual moments.  But I recall an important learning on that first visit to the mountain top.  There were no thin places, no epiphanies, no transfigurations.  My only thought after that first 2000 foot elevation change was that I was going to die!  Then there was the freezing cold, followed by the rain and wet firewood and then God’s special little gift – mosquitoes.  Over the visits, what changed?  I gave up my consumer mind – I gave up the notion that I was there to be served, to have whatever I thought I needed taken care of.  I finally arrived at the mind location the Beatles sang about – “Let it be.”  Then is when stuff happens.

I now understand that thin spots – holy places – don’t belong just to mountain tops, sites of quiet beauty.  They are here for us, but we have to enter them without our consumer mind – the one with the voice “I don’t like that”, “That’s different.”  “I want this.” “I want it this way!”

This place, right here at this Table, is a thin place for those who will allow the liturgy and the sights and sounds to lead them, for those who can ride the flow without critique.  Thin places can appear at Taize, at Arron’s home on Tuesday mornings for Morning Prayer, at any time you can set “yourself” aside and allow a reading, a piece of music, a cooking recipe, a wood working project, fishing on the river, the quiet light of a candle or two million other possibilities – all of these become moments for transfiguration and the awe of new discoveries.

Our task is to stand back, get out of the way, and receive.  Don’t ignore or throw away what you may not immediately understand or explain or even at first like.  Rather meditate on them. Receive them.  Enter into them.  Perhaps even come to delight in them. And find your faith fed.  God gets a real kick out of our transfiguration moments.  Amen.  

Ash Wednesday     Isaiah 58:1-12

February 17, 2010     Psalm 103

Grace Episcopal Church    “Lent” by George Herbert

A Meditation on “Lent” by George Herbert  Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 

Poetry can often be God’s still small voice amid our external and internal clamor, sometimes comforting, sometimes urgent. 

Poetry slows us down. This is why for Ash Wednesday I’d like us to reflect on the poem “Lent” by George Herbert. Herbert was a great 17th-century poet; he was also a fellow-Anglican, whose feast day we celebrate next week. 

“Welcome deare feast of Lent.”  Isn’t that nice? So simple. Inviting. He’s opening the door and welcoming us in. Not just to a feast, but to a “deare feast.” 

But don’t get too comfortable. Ambiguity abounds. Lent isn’t a feast! What’s he up to? And the punctuation is ambiguous! What kind of writing is that?!  

There’s no comma after “Welcome.” So does the line mean “Welcome, deare feast of Lent,” an invitation? Or is at a command: “Welcome deare Lent”? Or both? From the very beginning the poem is both comforter and commander. 

Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,

He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,

                                 But is compos'd of passion.

The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now:

Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow

                                 To ev'ry Corporation. 

The next stanza, I think, holds the key to the poem: “The humble soul compos'd of love and fear / Begins at home, and layes the burden there”—“When doctrines disagree.” Ouch.  

The humble soul compos'd of love and fear

Begins at home, and layes the burden there,

                                 When doctrines disagree.

He sayes, in things which use hath justly got,

I am a scandall to the Church, and not

                                 The Church is so to me. 

“When doctrines disagree.” 

Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, just think “St. Paul’s” or “All Saints’” or “St. Luke’s.” Or, if that doesn’t work, try “Bakersfield Episcopal Church.”  

Forget that stuff, the soul says. Your work’s at home. Which means both our home, our homestead, and the home that houses our heart. 

Herbert will return to the metaphor of home in the last stanza. Now he turns from squabbling Christians to true Christians: 

True Christians should be glad of an occasion

To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,

                                 When good is seasonable . . . . 

The poet now employs that device so beloved by the English Metaphysical poets: paradox. For these poets, paradox is as comfortable as sitting before a roaring fire with a glass of fine sherry. Is it any wonder that most of them were Anglican? 

Meditating on the paradox of abstinence and fullness, Herbert, like Jesus, flips over our assumptions and expectations: fasting is fat, while satiety brings starvation. 

Besides the cleannesse of sweet abstinence,

Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,

                                 A face not fearing light:

Whereas in fulnesse there are sluttish fumes,1

Sowre [Sour] exhalations, and dishonest rheumes,2

                                 Revenging the delight. 

But asked to keep “sweet abstinence,” in today’s reading from Isaiah the people, fasting, grumble at God: 

"Why do we fast, but you do not see? 
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" 

Oh, boy. Watch out.  

God replies:

 
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, 
and oppress all your workers. 

I love that “Look.” Like trying to patiently explain something to someone who’s very hard-headed.

 
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight 
and to strike with a wicked fist. 
Such fasting as you do today 
will not make your voice heard on high. 
Is such the fast that I choose, 
a day to humble oneself? 
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, 
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? 
Will you call this a fast, 
a day acceptable to the LORD? 
Is not this the fast that I choose: 
to release the bonds of injustice, 
to undo the thongs of the yoke, 
to let the oppressed go free, 
and to break every yoke? 
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, 
and bring the homeless poor into your house . . . ? 

That is pretty tough stuff. 

Herbert both answers Isaiah and turns to what we can do: 

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring

And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,

                                 And goodnesse of the deed.

Neither ought other mens abuse of Lent

Spoil the good use; lest by that argument

                                 We forfeit all our Creed. 

It 's true, we cannot reach Christ's fortieth day;

Yet to go part of that religious way,

                                 Is better than to rest:

We cannot reach our Savior's purity;

Yet are bid, Be holy ev'n as he.

                                 In both let’s do our best. 

I love the conclusion of that stanza: “In both let’s do our best.”  

That sentence at first groans beneath the weight of cliché and platitude. But when it gets up and stretches, it has far more power than we expected. Yes, we’re unable to go the full measure with Christ; nor can we attain his purity. Good to know. 

But . . . “Let’s do our best.” Our best. Churches should have a sign over the front door: WELCOME. NO HALF-ASSING IT ALLOWED.  

But now the poet helps us see what our best effort can bring: 

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,

Is much more sure to meet with him, than one

                                 That travelleth by-ways:

Perhaps my God, though he be far before,

May turn, and take me by the hand, and more

                                 May strengthen my decays. 

“Perhaps.” Perhaps my God may turn and take me by the hand. Perhaps my God may strengthen my decays. 

Now that is an honest man.  

But now, further on up the road, faith overcomes doubt: 

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast

By starving sin and taking such repast

                                 As may our faults control:

That ev'ry man may revel at his door,

Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,

                                 And among those his soul.

“And among those his soul.”

The poem has ended with paradox and certainty. We improve our fast by “starving sin.” Fasting, we now see, has very little to do with the body and everything to do with the soul: both the sins and the virtues of the soul.

Now, as the poem promises earlier, we come home: “The humble soul compos'd of love and fear . . . / Begins at home.” In fasting we feast.

But not so fast there. Once again Herbert, like Jesus, upends our expectations and pushes us out of our morally lazy comfort zones.

Shoved out the door, each of us, paradoxically, is now a reveler—but not, as we expected, in our comfy parlors and dining rooms. We Lenten revelers now revel at the borderland of welcome and danger, compassion and fear of the other: we revel at the door, “banqueting the poor.”

And as we banquet the poor, each of us also banquets his poor soul. As we banquet the poor. We get to revel only if we banquet our poor soul and the poor. We get to revel only if we banquet the poor and our poor soul.

      Welcome, deare feast of Lent.

Lent is an invitation into the holy and terrifying banquet of self-awareness.

In the darkness and light of our souls, holy self-awareness begets God.

Amen.

Sermon for Lent 1

February 21, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

The Rev. Vern Hill 

If you will grant me a bit of patient understanding, for the second week in a row I would like to reminisce about one of those past a-ha moments in my life.  I had finished seminary a year earlier, and I and my first congregation had endured each other for a year.  Now I exercised the opportunity to flee eastward into Utah on a camping expedition.  We found our way to Moab and what was then Arches National Monument – an amazing, lonely place of dramatic red and yellow and brown rock structures thrusting into the sky with an occasional open arch.  The road in from Moab was ten miles of dirt washboard.  Today it is industrial tourism at its worst, pavement and full services.  But then the camp area was undefined, deserted, dusty, windswept and quiet. . . in other words – perfect.   Little did I know that all of this would serve as good material to begin preliminary work toward an ex-marriage.  Still, as I was to learn in time, the place held special opportunities.  The Ute Indians had called the whole area of shapes and shadows looking eastward to the La Sals “the place where the sun lingers.”  The Ute word is beyond my pronunciation capabilities and the stark emptiness nearly beyond grasp.

But in those two weeks of wanderings for the first time I began to understand what I now refer to as the necessity of the wilderness and I began to understand the place of the desert in the religion of the Hebrews.

Our liturgical season of Lent is built upon the notion of the necessity of the wilderness – the visitation to wild places.  The word “Lent” comes from an old English word meaning “to lengthen”, an obvious reference to the lengthening of days as the sun’s overhead progress marches from the south toward the Spring equinox, the warming of the ground, and the rebirthing of grasses and leafy things.  This is beginnings time; dying and rising time.  As practiced by the Church, Lent has been the season of abstinence or self-denial, a time of doing without, a time for fasting, a time of penitence.   Of all the actions in this list, the last – penitence, the regret arising from the self-awareness of how badly we can misunderstand the Cry of Creation and then our turning and embracing of new directions and self-understandings – I believe this remains most useful  for us and is most true to God’s voice speaking from scripture. In the book Heroes and Villains by Mike Alsford, these words from the conclusion speak to the “penitential moment” of self-awareness - 

“We are human beings with all the strengths and weaknesses of our species.  Occasionally we reach the heights of heroic self-sacrifice and at other times we sink down into villainous self-serving.  Being aware of the extremes to which we can be drawn is, in my view, one of the most important pieces of self-knowledge we will ever possess.” 

Awareness, the penitential moment, comes from those wilderness episodes of truthful examination, those encounters when the Cry to Become what we have been created to be calls us away from what we have been tempted to settle into.

This 40 day time of Lent  reflects the pairing of two stories from scriptures that direct us to the paradigm I call this “penitential moment”.  One story is Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness.  Jesus retreats into the desert led by the Spirit – a powerful testimony to the necessity of this experience.  He is led into this by the Spirit.  Our storyteller tells us he was tempted and tested by the devil.  In this tossing and turning Jesus comes to an awareness of how the ancient words of God in the Torah and the prophets are to take flesh in him as the living and incarnate Word of God.  In these 40 days Jesus gains clarity with each question as to what he needs to empty himself of in order to be the one who he is coming to be. 

You may recall that last week I mentioned that our storyteller Luke offered us a sort of different understanding of Jesus.  On the mountain top Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus in this Transfiguration event and speak of Jesus’ “departure” in the yet to come holy week experience.   I pointed out that the Greek word used for departure is exodus – which was a very purposeful choice of words.  In a new Exodus,  Jesus as the Word made flesh moves before us as a Moses, delivering us from our slavery and the many threats that deny life as God has gifted it to us and creates a new Israel, a new human family, a new covenant people. 

This is our connection to the first Exodus story, from several thousand years earlier.  In words embedded in our first lesson which may be from the very earliest of our faith story, we hear of a wandering group of traders who settled in Egypt in a time of drought and eventually found themselves slaves to the Egyptians.  From the slavery of Egypt these “Hebrews” – these wanderers – led by Moses lived in the desert for 40 years.  Since it does not take 40 years to travel from Egypt to Palestine, this desert time had a greater purpose for them and us.

What do we learn looking at both these wandering experiences?  In what ways do they give us some direction to what a holy 40 days of Lent might be?  I think there are three learnings -

The penitential moment of the desert space is a time of detachment – a cutting off from what has gone on before.  Detachment comes not without discomfort.  The Hebrews on several occasions in those 40 years complained to Moses that they were better off as slaves than alone in the desert.  But detachment welcomes the possibilities of awareness – where are we / what have we become?   For us getting there may begin with a release from the general noise and confusion and clutter of our lives.  Whether it means leaving the TV or the computer off, twittering or facebooking less, or sitting quietly on the front porch, a holy Lent may begin with detachment for a un-purposeful period of time – a time of dis-connection and re-location, a time of un-distractibility.

From the first Exodus we learn that Lent may also offer us the opportunity to un-learn some things which have been getting in our way.  For the Hebrews it was the mind of a slave – it was thinking like a slave – belonging to a master.  It took 2 generations in the desert to unlearn slavery and to learn that they belonged to God as God’s own.  The desert time asks are there things which we need to unlearn, to set aside, to leave behind?  What are the names of those things which we have permitted to master our lives?  Are we always clear as to which “master” we are serving – to whom do we really belong?

The desert is also a place for discernment – of coming to new understandings.   Read a book.  Listen to some new music.  Dust off the abandoned flute in your closet; build something with your hands.  Review your fears and worries and the things which may cause you difficulty.    God has chosen to receive you as his own.  What prevents you from accepting this gift of such gracious hospitality.  Pray for understanding.  Pray to find your way into this new thinking.   Don’t rush –

Sometime ago when I first spoke of the necessity of the desert wilderness in our lives a woman came up to me after the service and said “that was interesting, but I’m too old to travel into the desert.”

I tried to explain metaphor – to make “desert spaces” anywhere.  I think she finally got it.  Still, I have to confess I would never give up that first experience at Arches in that magnificent loneliness.

Lent is a journey, that our faith and our awareness of what we are to be as God’s children cast in his divine image, may grow and be perfected.  At the end of this journey toward Zion’s promised land of the Kingdom, pray that in you, others may find more completely the grace of God and the love of Christ.  Pray for your renewed holiness.  Amen. 

Breaking the Body and Shedding the Blood of Creation:

God’s Gift of the Good Land* 

                                          To Gene Wahl,

                                          who preached that sermon 

February 28, 2010

Year C (RCL) 

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 Psalm 27 
Philippians 3:17-4:1   Luke 13:31-35  
 

In our reading from Genesis today, the LORD makes a covenant with Abram: "To your descendants I give this land." 

“I give this land.”  

I was in seminary for three years in the mid- to late-eighties. Each week in the chapel we would hear a sermon by a graduating senior. In my three years at CDSP I heard a lot of sermons. Only one of them—and it wasn’t mine—was on the environment and our Christian and human responsibility for God’s gift of the land, the good earth. 

Only one.  

Now I lay me down to sleep;

I pray the Lord the earth to keep. 

Our reading from Genesis today reminds us that the earth, like our lives, like everything, is a gift.  

Even more important, the earth is the covenant gift that God gives us. A covenant is a sacred contract; by contract we are required to care for the good earth, God’s gift.

I’d like to share with you today some thoughts on the best writer in America that most people have never heard of: Wendell Berry. Berry is a Christian; in his Sabbath poems he is our modern psalmist—but he is a psalmist standing outside the temple.  

Sabbaths remind Berry that above and before all else, the world is ours by grace. Grace, as Spanish Gracias reminds us, is a gift, something for which we are thankful. Being here by grace means understanding our part and place, necessarily humble, in creation.  

Berry is a Sabbath walker, not a Sabbath churchgoer. He acknowledges a deep hurt: "I feel deeply estranged from most of the manifestations of organized religion."  

Why is this? Berry accuses the Church of a failure of good stewardship: "The fact simply is that the churches, which claim to honor God as the 'maker of heaven and earth,' have lately shown little inclination to honor the earth or to protect it from those who would dishonor it."  

Our standard of living puts all of us in thrall to a captivity that clothes us in the finest raiment while imprisoning us in dungeons of our own devising. Religious or not, all of us in the West, above a certain income, occupy the same cell (those less fortunate sleep outside in the cold). Whether our clothier and turnkey is named Satan or Greed hardly matters. 

Berry believes that we're imprisoned, ecologically and theologically, because we don't take the Bible seriously: "Our predicament now," he says, "requires us to learn and understand the Bible in the light of the present fact of Creation" (emphasis added). 

Berry here has flipped things over on us. We usually hear that we should understand the present in light of the Bible. No, Berry argues—or perhaps “Yes, but also”—we should understand the Bible “in the light of the present fact of Creation.”  

The present fact of creation. Not creation as a forlorn factoid from long ago but creation as enduring mystery, continuing obligation, and joyful response. 

As Berry reads the Bible he sees "some virtually catastrophic discrepancies between biblical instruction and Christian behavior." He understands God's giving of the Promised Land as "a divine gift to a fallenpeople."1  

Divine gift. Fallen people. 

This giving, therefore, "is more problematical, and the receiving is more conditional and more difficult, than the giving of the Garden of Eden.” 

It would be wrong, however, to see Creation as God's doing and our undoing; the Creation, and our response, is neither that simple nor that linear.  

The Creation is an ongoing relationship, one that is, finally, deeply mystical: "We will discover," Berry urges, "that the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God." "Creation," Berry insists, "is thus God's presence in creatures . . . . we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God." 

Sin, therefore, is not mistreatment of God in se, in God’s own self, but mistreatment of God in aliis, in others, which includes all animals, and even the earth itself, God's presence.  

Sin is always relational. So, too, is forgiveness.

"Our destruction of nature," Berry rightfully concludes, is therefore "not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy."

When we rape the earth, we rape God. 

We Christians need people like Berry, standing outside the sanctuary and peering through its windows, the psalmist as prophet. Prophets force us to widen our understanding of sin: adulterating our land and air and water and food is just as sinful as sexual adultery, with undoubtedly greater consequences.  

Our problem is that we no longer see holiness in its particulars: "it is understandably difficult for modern Americans to think of their dwellings and workplaces as holy, because most of them are, in fact, places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of Creation.”  

If we desacralize Creation, we desacralize God; if we desecrate nature, we desecrate God. 

Saint Benedict, the medieval abbot, asked his monks to treat a hoe or a rake as if it were a Communion vessel. God calls us to extend Benedict's sacramental treatment to the earth that the hoe works and to all God’s creatures that on earth do dwell. 

A religious sensibility, Berry insists, is the only way to save the earth and ourselves. He says that the “truest and profoundest religious experience” possible to humans “may be the simple, unasking pleasure in the existence of other creatures. It suggests that God's pleasure in all things must be respected by us in our use of things, and even in our displeasure in some things.” He later powerfully adds, "It is in these pleasures that we possess the likeness to God that is spoken of in Genesis." 

The creation is not merely sacramental, but is itself a sacrament. Perhaps, indeed, Creation is itself the sacrament: without it, the other sacraments, dependent as they are on the things of the earth (water, bread, wine, oil), could not exist.   

With a startling metaphor, Berry reminds us that "we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament."  

A sacrament is a gift of and from God, but it cannot last or even exist without human hands to hold and nurture and shape it. When we break the body and shed the blood of Creation "ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want." 

Wendell Berry is a profoundly biblical and deeply spiritual writer; that is what, in fact, makes him so uncompromising in his condemnation of our present ways. His great service is to remind us that loving our neighbors means loving, truly loving, them, ourselves, the earth, and all her creatures.  

Just as we cannot divide ourselves from our neighbors and stay psychologically sane and spiritually whole, so too we cannot divide ourselves from the earth and earth’s children--all of them. To do so is suicide.  

Berry has us and our present economy on a suicide watch. The Hebrews long ago attempted spiritual suicide in the wilderness, but God continued to love them nevertheless, and led them to the Promised Land. It seems that each of our generations since has tried to commit suicide. 

Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned. 

This Lent, this always, let us remember that that which we sin against, the land, is made in God's image. As are we—not by right, but when we live on the land rightly, in God's good sight. 

Amen.