A sermon by the Rev. Jane L. Patterson, Interim Director of Theological Field Education, given in Christ Chapel on February 9, 2005

Ash Wednesday
Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 103; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

The prophet Isaiah said, "You shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water, whose waters never fail."

Children in Godly Play classes learn that it takes time to get ready to receive a mystery. The four weeks of Advent and the six weeks of Lent, they learn, are the times the Church sets aside to get ready to receive the mysteries of the incarnation and of the cross and resurrection. We stand today at the beginning of the time set apart to ready ourselves to receive the great mystery of Good Friday and Easter, and as we do, I keep remembering one of the stories Roger Paynter told us back in Advent.

He told us of a letter written from prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his fiancée, in which he said that he was in a place in which the waiting of Advent made sense to him, as he waited and listened every day for the sound of the key being turned in the lock, the sound of his prison door being opened from the other side. What an apt comparison that is for the attentive waiting of Advent, but I think it also serves us in Lent, to imagine ourselves not only waiting, but getting ready for the door of the prison we find ourselves in, the door of the prison we have made for ourselves, to be opened from the other side. You see, I have a feeling that, if we don't ready ourselves, we won't even notice that the door has been opened, and we won't recognize the One who holds the key.

I believe that during Lent God invites us into the process of our justification, so that we can turn and receive it as a gift at Easter. Now what do I mean by the process of justification?

The first job I had after college was in a small printing cooperative called the Hampshire Typothetae. We printed small, fine editions of books on hand-made paper, bound by hand, mostly with wood-engraved illustrations. My job, as the lowly apprentice (besides fetching the crullers and coffee), was to set lead type by hand, just the way Gutenberg's apprentices probably did in the sixteenth century, letter by letter, upside down and backwards.

For someone setting type by hand, justified left and right margins are a labor of infinite patience. You don't just type "control L" and "control R" into your computer and watch the magic happen. You set the letters into the line, and then you take tiny slivers of brass and copper, and distribute them across the line in such a way that a careful reader won't even notice the spacing. The whole page should have an even, gray cast to it, with no obvious white spaces. Justification is all about keeping a constant, unwavering relationship between the edge of the type and the edge of the paper, left and right. In theory, if your paper was shaped like a triangle, then justified left and right margins would perfectly reiterate the shape of the triangle. Setting type well by hand is something you do with both your body and your mind together. You learn the California job case the way you learn a computer keyboard. Your hands know it, even better than your mind does. But at the same time your mind has to be constantly analyzing the relationship of type to paper, as you justify, spacing the letters evenly, filling out the lines.

I know it sounds as though we're a long way from the kind of justification that Lent is all about, but I think we're not. In the invitation to the observance of a Holy Lent, which we will shortly hear, we are exhorted to "self-examination and repentance; …prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and…reading and meditating on God's holy Word." It would be easy to think that these things we do, to get ready for the prison door to open, are all about us. We examine ourselves, we turn ourselves around, we sit alone in our prayer closet, we discipline ourselves, we sit by ourselves and read the Bible ever so conscientiously. But, from the craft of typesetting, I know in my bones that justification is all about relationship, a relationship of complete attentiveness to the margins, to the one on my right and to the one on my left. In typesetting, constant relationship to the margins results in justification.

So -- who is on my left? and who is on my right, way over on the margins where I might ignore them?

On my left is Stephen Taylor. Stephen is the thirty-two-year-old son of close friends of mine. Stephen has been having seizures ever since he was four years old. He went from a normal, bright four-year-old, to someone who was just slipping behind his peers, to someone fighting to retain any semblance of himself. Stephen's mother, Marjorie, is a tireless fighter for justice for people with disabilities and the chronically ill. Marjorie drives from San Antonio to Austin a couple of times a week to meet with legislators, to lobby for decent access to healthcare and for an answer to the care of the mentally ill and the disabled that helps them live in private homes, with people who care for them like family, rather than in institutions.

There has been a big uproar in San Antonio over the closing of institutions to house the mentally ill and severely disabled. Because Stephen is on my left, I know I need to listen to every family like his, pay attention to their experience, let them teach me what they really need, and why. Because Stephen is on my left, I pray every day in thanksgiving for Rosalinda, who cares for him in her home, and for Marjorie and Doug who love him, who desperately love him.

On my right this week are two women I met at a conference on education and healthcare I attended last weekend. The first is Amalia, whose daughter attends a Junior High School in Brownsville. The school is situated in a low place, and when it rains, the children have to wade through ankle-deep water to get to school. Then, when they get there, the aging roof leaks down on the classrooms, and they can hardly work. Another woman, Angela, an elementary school teacher from El Paso, said that in her school there are not enough desks for all the pupils, so the students who don't have an assigned desk have to wait to see if anyone won't show up that day, and then they take that desk. If everyone is present, then two or three students will end up sitting on the floor.

The first thing any of these students learn in their schools, before they learn anything else, is that no one in the state of Texas really cares about them, or about their education. It's no wonder that many of them drop out before graduation from High School. Angela and Amalia, their children and their students, are on my right margin. For this reason, I am reading everything I can get my hands on about school finance reform, and talking to everyone I know about how important it is that we commit not just to testing our students but to educating them, in clean, well-ordered, safe schools, with intelligent and compassionate teachers.

Two slivers of brass, four slivers of copper, one more brass, one more copper, and a raggedly line of type slowly falls into justification, left and right. I talk to my neighbors about institutionalization versus home care; I vote in an election; I read the newspaper; I listen to a friend; and slowly my life falls into the pattern of justification. I can't see it, I can't measure it, but I know it because the prophet Isaiah, beloved of Christ, quoted by him, imitated by him, tells me so. God spoke through Isaiah:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. (Isaiah 58:6-11)

The self-examination and repentance we are called to in this season have everything to do with straightening up our relationships with one another, and consequently with God. Our prayers are not signs of our superior spiritual discipline, but rather they should draw us out of ourselves, and into the tow of God's intense love of our least neighbor; our fasting should link us -- not to our own inner strength -- but to all whose hunger is not by choice, as well as to the fact that we simply do not live by bread alone; our self-denial should open us up to full-hearted affirmation of God and of those others with whom we share the world; our saturation in the Word of God should remind us that everything that lives is a Word of God, and that we are held in life, on our left and on our right, by the cooperation of God and all that God has created.

Justification is partly a given, a fact. It is given through our birth, given through the self-offering of the one person Jesus for all people, and given to us again, one by one at our baptism. God has set us, from our first breath, in right relationship to God and our neighbor. But from that moment, we begin to make the choices that lead to freedom, or the choices that bind us in self-delusion. When we live with attentiveness to the margins, then we begin to feel the raggedy edges of our lives lining up, coming into right relationship with the mercy of God. From what I have experienced, Lent after Lent, I am beginning to think that the footfall I am waiting for in the corridor of my prison, the hand turning the key in the lock, won't be the footfall of Jesus or the hand of God, because God has given all our keys away to others. Listen for the howl of the hungry. Listen for the cry for justice. When you hear the call from the margins, when you rise to answer, your justification is near. God has given the key of your prison to your least neighbor. Be ready.