SPEAKER_01: A reading from Isaiah.
SPEAKER_01: Shout out, do not hold back.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your voice like a trumpet.
SPEAKER_01: Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins, yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
SPEAKER_01: They ask of me righteous judgments.
SPEAKER_01: They delight to draw near to God.
SPEAKER_01: Why do we fast, but you do not see?
SPEAKER_01: Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?
SPEAKER_01: Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers.
SPEAKER_01: Look, you have fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.
SPEAKER_01: Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.
SPEAKER_01: Is such the fast that I choose?
SPEAKER_01: A day to humble oneself?
SPEAKER_01: Is it to bow down the head like a bull rush and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
SPEAKER_01: Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
SPEAKER_01: Is not this the fast that I choose, to lose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke?
SPEAKER_01: Is not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house when you see them naked to cover them and not to hide yourself from their own kin?
SPEAKER_01: Then your light shall break forth like the dog, and your healing shall spring up quickly, your vindicator shall go before you, and the glory of God shall be your rearguard.
SPEAKER_01: Then you shall call and the Lord will answer.
SPEAKER_01: You shall cry for help and he will say, Here I am.
SPEAKER_01: If you remember the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of the devil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall shine in the darkness, and your gloom will be like the noonday.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parked places, and make your bones strong, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.
SPEAKER_01: Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.
SPEAKER_01: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: We will read Psalm 103 responsively by the half verse.
SPEAKER_01: You are full of compassion and mercy.
SPEAKER_01: You will not always accuse us.
unknown: Nor will you keep your anger forever.
SPEAKER_01: You have not dealt with us according to our sins.
unknown: You will reward us according to our wickedness.
SPEAKER_01: For as the heavens are high above the earth, so will your mercy great upon those who fear you.
SPEAKER_01: As far as the earth is from the West, as a parent cares for a child.
SPEAKER_01: For you yourself know where we are made.
SPEAKER_00: A reading from 2 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_00: So we are ambassadors for Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Since God is making his appeal through us, we entreat you.
SPEAKER_00: For our sake, he made him sin, he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_00: As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.
SPEAKER_00: For he says, At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.
SPEAKER_00: See, now is the acceptable time.
SPEAKER_00: See, now is the day of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way so that no fault may be found with our ministry.
SPEAKER_00: But as servants of God, we have commended ourselves in every way through great endurance and afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left, in honor and in dishonor, in ill repute and good repute.
SPEAKER_00: We are treated as impostors and yet are true, as unknown and yet are well known, as dying and see we are alive, as punished and not yet killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing and yet possessing everything.
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord.
unknown: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_02: The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Matthew.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus said, Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
SPEAKER_02: So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others.
SPEAKER_02: Truly I tell you, they've received their reward.
SPEAKER_02: But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.
SPEAKER_02: And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.
SPEAKER_02: Truly I tell you, they have received the reward.
SPEAKER_02: But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.
SPEAKER_02: Whenever you fast, do not look dismal like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.
SPEAKER_02: Truly I tell you, they've received the reward.
SPEAKER_02: But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others, but by your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.
SPEAKER_02: Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal.
SPEAKER_02: But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither raw moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal.
SPEAKER_02: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
SPEAKER_02: The gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: And of course, other people will see it.
SPEAKER_02: I hope they do.
SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you why.
SPEAKER_02: I think Jesus is talking about, frankly, the way we so often and ordinarily practice spiritual disciplines, which is competitively, which is a way of saying, if I really bust my butt and I show God how much suffering I'm willing to do or endure, I will prove to God that I love God and I will earn myself a little bit more grace today.
SPEAKER_02: If I take up a really hard, Lenten discipline, I mean, if I give up something I love, like chocolate or wine.
SPEAKER_02: If I'm really miserable for the Lord, God will be happy.
SPEAKER_02: Boy, I've grown up that way most of my life, and nothing could be further from the truth.
SPEAKER_02: Don't you think?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, didn't God create us so that we would have life and have it more fully, not more miserably?
SPEAKER_02: This, I think, is Jesus asking us to consider what our piety looks like.
SPEAKER_02: See, the truth is, I think the world has had enough public displays of piety, and I think what the world desperately needs are some public displays of repentance.
SPEAKER_02: Repentance.
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to bore you, but quick, quick, quick bit here.
SPEAKER_02: Four words in the Bible give us repentance.
SPEAKER_02: One is changing direction.
SPEAKER_02: You repented when you turned into the parking lot because you changed the direction of your car.
SPEAKER_02: Another one is getting a new mind.
SPEAKER_02: Like you know, somebody who used to annoy you, and then one day you just found this thing about them, and then, well, it wasn't annoying anymore.
SPEAKER_02: It was endearing.
SPEAKER_02: Then there's this other word that means making right what you did wrong.
SPEAKER_02: Of course, the fourth word is the fact that we can't always do that.
SPEAKER_02: If I hit you, I've hit you.
SPEAKER_02: How do I undo that?
SPEAKER_02: So it's mourning the fact that some of the things we do are undoable.
SPEAKER_02: When the words come out, the genie is out of the bottle.
SPEAKER_02: And of course, what we have to do is try to regain the trust that we've lost.
SPEAKER_02: Repentance is about that.
SPEAKER_02: Repentance is about us changing the course, changing the way we look at other people so that their lives and ours can be bigger.
SPEAKER_02: This whole Linton journey is not about making life smaller for anybody.
SPEAKER_02: It's about making life bigger for everybody.
SPEAKER_02: I want you to know one of the neat things about talking to kids about this, because we have this fantastic day school here, and I was talking to the fourth and fifth graders yesterday about what they might consider, what's something that they could do.
SPEAKER_02: We talked about how Lent is really not about a fad diet.
SPEAKER_02: It's not about how 40 days I'm gonna lose 10 pounds and back to my old habits.
SPEAKER_02: Frankly, the way this is supposed to work is we say, I know my life would be bigger if I did blank.
SPEAKER_02: And I'm gonna do that.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna do that for 40 days.
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna do that for 40 years.
SPEAKER_02: If you pick something for Lynn, I would challenge you to pick something for the rest of your life.
SPEAKER_02: And if you don't want to do it the rest of your life, don't pick it.
SPEAKER_02: What did our kids say?
SPEAKER_02: They said, you know, one of the things we think we could think about doing is giving up jokes at other people's expense.
SPEAKER_02: That was from 10-year-olds.
SPEAKER_02: Listen, I don't know if they're gonna make it.
SPEAKER_02: I struggle to think if I could do that for 40 minutes.
SPEAKER_02: You see, that's work.
SPEAKER_02: That's work, but that's not being miserable.
SPEAKER_02: That's about having bigger life.
SPEAKER_02: Boy, what if we put that on public display?
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if people would think we were cool, but I sure think people would realize there's larger life when we choose to live that way.
SPEAKER_02: Surely to God, Lent is about that.
SPEAKER_02: Something that takes our time.
SPEAKER_02: I got two kids, and listen, I rarely do the right thing, but sometimes I say the right thing.
SPEAKER_02: And my standing line with one of my kids has been it is never too late.
SPEAKER_02: It just gets harder.
SPEAKER_02: It's never too late to turn in that missing work.
SPEAKER_02: Your score just gets lower.
SPEAKER_02: It's never too late to go out for freshman soccer, even when you're a senior.
SPEAKER_02: It just gets harder.
SPEAKER_02: It gets harder because we're so used to just being stationary, or we think, oh my gosh, people are gonna think I'm too old to be enjoying Sonic the Hedgehog comic books, or whatever it is we do.
SPEAKER_02: But see, Lent is about saying, you know, it is never too late.
SPEAKER_02: And even though it gets harder, well, gee golly, isn't that the point we come to church anyway?
SPEAKER_02: So we don't live normal lives, we live extraordinary ones.
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that why we come here every Sunday, you know, and have the same old food every Sunday, they're gonna need surprise.
SPEAKER_02: That food we say, God is ordinary stuff that's got calories and feeds our body.
SPEAKER_02: Please give us something extraordinary from it.
SPEAKER_02: Energy to be bigger people.
SPEAKER_02: Not so that we can earn your love, but because we've already got it, so we can live into it, so we can live the bigger lives you've dreamed for us before we were born.
SPEAKER_02: See, I think Lent starts really from this phrase: I continue to say and struggle to live into that there is nothing we can do to make God love us anymore, and nothing we can do to make God love us any less.
SPEAKER_02: We start there and we say, okay, what's the point then?
SPEAKER_02: The point is to enjoy what God dreams for us more.
SPEAKER_02: So I don't know what you need to fast from this length.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what you need to give up on so that you can have something bigger.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you need to give up on Lent this year because you've been doing in a way that was damaging to your spiritual health the last 75 years or 17.
SPEAKER_02: If that's what you need, put it in God's hands, it'll be fine.
SPEAKER_02: You don't give up anything, guess what?
SPEAKER_02: God's not gonna love you any less.
SPEAKER_02: You give up eating meat and wine and give up driving and listening to music, guess what?
SPEAKER_02: God ain't gonna love you anymore.
SPEAKER_02: No, we don't do this to please God.
SPEAKER_02: We do this because God is already pleased.
SPEAKER_02: And how can we live into God's pleasure more this year?
SPEAKER_02: In some ways, I hate that the principal service is at 6 p.m.
SPEAKER_02: Because frankly, this is this one day when we get to walk around with this weird thing in our head and hope somebody asks us, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_02: And I hope we're able to say something like this God has more in mind for me than I'm living right now, and this year I intend to do something about it.
SPEAKER_02: Amen.