Third Sunday in Lent--the Rev Melanie Lemburg
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.
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