Preached by the Rev. David Henson
First Sunday of Lent
March 9, 2025
So, as many of you know by now, this Lent, I’ve decided to give up swearing for the season. I’m fasting from my favorite swear words. And you know what, y’all? it’s not easy. It’s actually really hard, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t failed every single day so far.
A mere four days into it, I haven’t managed a shred of Lenten success.
Which is to say, the Lenten season is going exactly according to plan.
Whatever it is you’re doing for Lent, whether it’s giving up sweets or alcohol or God forbid coffee, or trying to do Morning Prayer or acts of charity each day, or trying not to yell at your kids in frustration, other drivers in anger, or at the nightly news in outrage. Or even if you’re trying to work toward something more serious, like work toward reconciling a long fractured relationship …
Lent isn’t supposed to be easy. You’re not actually supposed to be good at Lent. You are supposed to fail.
And not because the season is supposed to be a miserable slog through our sin and shortcomings.
Rather because Lent is the season of mercy, the season we encounter the essence of who God is, because as Pope Francis reminds us, the very name of God is mercy.
Or perhaps to put it another way, Lent is the season where our infinite capacity to mess up, to break things in our world or in ourselves, is met with God’s infinite capacity for mercy.
So if Lent has in any way become about how bad we are rather than how very good God is, then we’ve completely missed the point of the season.
Look, I know the Great Litany doesn’t exactly predispose us to this notion, with its long list of terrible, no-good, awful things in the world. By the end of it, half the time I suspect at least half of you, would like the good Lord to deliver us from the Great Litany itself. Having our worship in Lent take on a more somber, penitential nature is something maybe only clergy look forward to. But keep in mind, even though the Litany feels like it will never, ever end, it eventually does and it never, ever ends with just a hopeless list of the evil and harm, but rather with mercy, proclaimed in triplicate, as if we want to drive that idea home as much as possible especially in the midst of bearing witness to the brokenness of life: Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
Our confessions, too, week after week, might begin our worship in Lent with the Penitential Order, but they never end with our sin. But rather with absolution.
It all ends, everything, always, in mercy.
That’s the paradoxical thing about our sin and shortcomings. It’s the place in our souls where we are most reluctant to go but it’s also the place where we come closest to full revelation of God.
Because your sin is precisely where you encounter the mercy of God.
And because we know that God waits for us where our pain is, where our sins are, where our brokenness began, where we most need healing, then somehow, in some strange way, our sin, our deepest wounds, our shortcomings and disappointments can also be the holiest place in our souls, the thin, sacred space where we encounter the reality of God and his unchanging grace. It is the place where your exhaustion, your shame, your anger find the gentle and healing embrace of God’s eternal disposition, which is mercy.
If that’s true, then the self-examination asked of us during Lent should never wind up devolving into a season of self-loathing. Instead, it becomes the season of pilgrimage to this holy site in our souls, that leads each and every year to the cross.
The moment when the reality of God’s mercy became not only incarnate but also eternally irrefutable.
We travel this Lenten pilgrimage road each year in order to remind us not how far we’ve fallen short of the glory of God — whether through our selfishness, sin, or myopic sight of the largess of God’s prodigal love for all—but rather we travel this road to realize again that no matter how far we think we’ve fallen, how many times we slip up and swear when we drop dinner on the floor or slip in the mud or get caught in traffic while late to an urgent appointment, God’s mercy is always at our right hand, a mere breath away.
Now, for many of us, the idea of mercy itself might feel archaic or outdated. We’ve been trained to think of mercy as a reprieve from deserved consequences or punishment for our shortcomings and sin. In that view, mercy is the cop who pulled you over but didn’t give you the ticket; the teacher who dropped your lowest grade so you could pass the class. Mercy is Aslan, the Christ-figure in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, taking the blame and the punishment for poor Edmund’s betrayal and lies, not only to save him but to liberate him and the whole world from evil.
This understanding of mercy is ubiquitous in our hymns, our liturgy, and even our casual religious language. For many us, myself included, the resulting sense of relief from this kind of mercy is holy and something we desperately need. And yet, I can still admit there’s something uncomfortable lurking at the edges of that sort of mercy, something that, if I think about it too long, reminds me more of our worst animal impulses as species for revenge than something that originates in the realm of saints, angels, and the divine.
Because it’s a configuration of mercy that depends on the threat of punishment. It calls to mind a beggar asking for mercy from the indifferent, or a criminal throwing himself at the mercy of the court, or tortured body being saved by a merciful hand, or of a traitor hoping the king might find mercy enough to spare his life.
None of that is wrong, and indeed, depending on the circumstance, it can be good and holy and of God.
But what if, at least sometimes, our fear of divine punishment only ever crosses our minds because it’s a distorted reflection of what we think we deserve rather than how God actually responds to us?
You see, there’s another way of thinking about mercy, one just as deeply rooted in Scripture, if not more so.
The very word “mercy” in Hebrew is essentially the same word for a mother’s womb.
When God is said to have compassion and mercy, the image that should spring to mind is not a forgiving hand staying the executioner’s ax in midswing, but of the hand of an expectant mother, resting on her pregnant belly, singing to the unseen child she is dreaming of and nourishing with her own body and blood, whose very body is protecting the most fragile and beloved thing from all that would assault or harm it.
God is the womb of mercy, a place of nourishment and growth, warmth and shelter, the very atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being, eternally in utero with God so that every day of our lives an be birthed out of the mercy of God.
And when we sin, and we most certainly will, we can always return to that womb of God, mercy, and be born again, and again, and again, for his mercies are new each morning and great is his faithfulness.
So, the suffering cross of Christ which we journey toward each and every Lent becomes less like the pain of punishment for evil and wrongdoing and much more like the pain of childbirth as he bears the sins of the world and births a new reality into existence; the resurrection victory becomes less like a traditional triumph over an enemy and more like a mother, having finally accomplished the miracle of birth, cradling her sleeping newborn tenderly, in the early morning dawn, while it is still dark, after a long night of laboring new life into the world.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about wombs is that even after birth, something of the newborn remains with the mother. Across species, studies have found lingering fetal cells in mothers who gave birth. Almost as if once you’ve carried and nourished someone in a womb and birthed them, they are always a part of you in some way. Part of their DNA remains with you; part of them is forever part of you; and without them, maybe part of you is never quite complete.
Maybe something of that is true with God and the womb that is his mercy. Once God has carried you and nourished you, as God has with all of us, God is always going to carry a part of you in him like a mother, no matter how far afield you may go, how often you might turn your back on him, how much you might mess things up, or even how often you swear.
Part of you will always be a part of God, and without you, God, in some way, would not be quite complete.
Which is why, at the end of everything, all things, mercy remains.
Always. It is the beginning and the end.
And so, as it turns out, no matter how much we might think again and again, no matter how much we might say over and over, in light of our sin and shortcomings, that, “Well, I’ll be damned,” the truth is, we actually never, ever are.