Penance is Not the Point
First Sunday of Lent Homily
By Rev. Dr. Beverly Bingle
February 21, 2021
Fr. Roger Karban says that Jesus’ first disciples did not drastically change their lives and follow him from town to town because they believed he was God.
It was because they listened to what Jesus said and saw value in imitating the way he thought and the way he lived.
Jesus did not create a new religion. He was a Jew, and he never stopped being a Jew. He showed his followers how to change their lives by having them look closely at how to practice the core principles of the faith they already had.
Eventually his way became their way.
His followers were Jewish, too, but political and social upheavals eventually split them, one step at a time, from Judaism.
Times do change, but the search for God remains.
Our readings for this first Sunday of Lent give us some details about that search from the past.
We hear about the great flood, a story written much later than the time it describes, a time seen as full of people living lives that were far from holy.
And we hear about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry of proclaiming the good news at a time when people were living under the thumb of the Roman occupation and suffering from the corruption of their religious leaders whose main focus was on pleasing the Roman rulers.
Throughout history that same dynamic has repeated itself: the prophet speaks, people listen, things change, then eventually an institution is set up and new corruption sets in.
As Biblical scholar Verna Dozier put it, “The dead hand of tradition kills the new thing that God is always doing.”
Our times look a lot like that.
Injustice and oppression come from every direction: from powerful people acting in their own interest, from government policies, from church rules.
And people suffer.
They get battered, beaten down.
They die.
Government works at a snail’s pace to move toward justice.
Our national sin of racism is an obvious example, with law after law enacted to make sure that policies end up subjugating people on the basis of skin color.
Sexism is another example, with policies that discriminate against women in the workplace and against LGBT folks wherever they go.
But our government is not the only power that fails to root out injustice.
Our institutional church keeps unjust policies in place long after the people in the pews see that they are not right and just.
The hierarchy’s sex abuse cover-up goes on, as we see from regular reports of new revelations.
And the official church statement that LGBT relationships are “intrinsically disordered” and “objectively disordered” because they can’t procreate is still church teaching.
The hypocrisy is obvious when that same reasoning is not applied to heterosexual couples who are infertile or past childbearing age.
Our culture is becoming more and more enlightened about racism and gender identity, but as Karl Rahner said, “The church always runs weeping after the cart of history.”
What Jesus did in his time is the same thing that we, as his followers, are called to do in our time.
Jesus looked around at his culture and listened to John the Baptist and was baptized.
He took his baptismal commitment seriously and went off to pray about it for the significant number of 40 days, paralleled by our 40 days of Lent, both reflecting the 40 years that the Israelites trekked through the desert searching for the Promised Land.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Jesus were to walk into Toledo in our time and look among us for a house of worship.
Too often I suspect that he and his teaching would NOT be acceptable in our churches.
We call Lent a season of penance, but penance is not the point.
The point is metanoia - time to step back and take a look at ourselves and our world and decide whether we need to change something…or not.
Amen!