“Behold, you desire truth deep within me and shall make me understand wisdom in the depths of my heart.” (Psalm 51:7)
Lent reminds us that being truthful with ourselves, with God and others is not optional. Without being truthful we cannot properly repent. Without repentance we cannot receive God’s forgiveness. Without forgiveness we cannot receive the cleansing, freedom and fullness of life Jesus suffered and died to bring us.
Without being truthful we cannot be our true selves. When we pretend, lie and deceive we become untrustworthy and lack authenticity. Those who listen to us do not know what is true or real and do not know how to relate to us.
Without being truthful we cannot be like God, for “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.”
Jesus described himself as the truth. “The Spirit of Truth leads us into all truth.” Love and truth belong together. When the disciples looked at Jesus they saw that he was full of grace and truth. “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”
Ash Wednesday invites us, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by “self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.” This is not to make us miserable but so that together we may draw closer to Christ our source of joy and love.
We also do it so we may become closer to each other. 1 John tells us that, “If we walk in the light as Jesus is in the light we have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.”
In our frightening, dangerous times when we find it difficult to discern what is true and false, it is important that repentance begins with us, personally.
Isaiah 58 reminds us that drawing near to a righteous God through prayer and fasting is hypocritical if we do it to seek our own pleasure and oppress our workers. God will not listen unless we sincerely seek justice for others. It is only when we feed those who are hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked and care for the poor that the light within us will be seen and we will be healed.
Ultimately we cannot be free unless we seek the freedom of all who are oppressed. We pray in a post communion prayer, “Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us, so we and all your children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise your name.” The fast God chooses is to “loose the bonds of wickedness undo the thongs of the yoke and let the oppressed go free.”
The Christian church has much to repent of. Church of England leaders have been accused of crushing and silencing those who have been abused instead of speaking the truth. As a result we have failed to safeguard the vulnerable and perpetuated their fear and anger. “The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God.”
We have condemned perceived failings of the LBTQI community while hiding the sexual sins of the powerful and they are justifiably angry. The Living in Love and faith Course which CTB45 are putting on at St John’s Longbridge and St Chad’s Rubery during Lent enables us to address our sins and do better by following six pastoral principals, acknowledging out prejudices, speaking into the silence, casting out our fear, admitting our hypocrisy and paying attention to power.
We are also judged for hypocritically supporting and having shares in institutions and companies that have supported slavery, oppressed the poor and damaged the earth.
We have heard many lies from politicians recently, particularly from President Putin who assured us he wasn’t going to invade Ukraine and Ukrainians had nothing to fear. As bombs drop and the death toll rises, compassionate Russians feel unable to demonstrate and speak truth to power, knowing that if they do so they will be viewed as traitors, arrested and suffer devastating consequences.
The Ukrainians clearly didn’t provoke Russia who has maligned them as Nazis and accused them of shelling within Russian borders.
Our prime minister offered lethal aid and, support militarily which we couldn’t possibly deliver without the support of others. This was reduces to economic sanctions, some of which had already been in place since 2018.
President Putin counteracted this by warning the international community of “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”
Nobody so far has gone to the aid of Ukraine because of the risk of a nuclear war or starting a third world war in Europe. Unless God intervenes and he may well as Ukrainians have gathered in their public squares and knelt to pray, Ukraine will inevitably be defeated.
Our Prime Minister Boris Johnson also has a strange relationship with truth. Rory Stewart, who left the Conservative Party in 2019 said he “ has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie - which may inadvertently be true."
It was wrong for our Prime Minister to give false promises and hope when we had no intention of putting ourselves at risk. He was right, however in saying Russia must fail.
The world has always struggled with the suffering which usually incurs when evil is confronted. During Lent we remember that our freedom from evil was won through the suffering love of Jesus who was nailed to a cross by an evil superpower.
How do we confront bullies who like Miss Trunchbull from Matilda terrorise those they see as weaker than themselves with the playground mentality that says, “I’m right and you’re wrong. I’m big and you’re small and there’s nothing you can do about it?”
We confront evil by clinging to the truth and speaking truth to power whatever the consequences are. We confess our own sins and those of our church and nation with which we have been complicit and we turn back to God by drawing closer to him. Like the Ukrainians we pray for God’s mercy and intervention knowing that he leads us from captivity to freedom and from death to life.