We are not alone in the Breach

We are not alone in the Breach

This day is both personally, and communally painful. As individuals we are still called this Lent to find that “secret” place where only you, or I, and our God can see. In fact, at least initially, it is only the Father who “sees in secret.” We don’t just hide things from others, or pretend we can hide them from God; we also hide them from ourselves. Do we really want to know why we keep doing what we consciously know we shouldn’t do, or do we want to keep classifying them to ourselves? Lent isn’t about making a checklist of our “don’ts” and resolving on our own not to do them anymore (When has that worked?). Lent is about finding that secret place in our hearts where we can declassify the motives for why we do the things we do, and discovering that the Father has known them all along, and is still with us in this secret place, loving us still.

But as I said at the beginning, we are here as one people, declassifying those secrets of communal responsibility that are perhaps, even harder for us to face than our individual failings. “We confess to you, Lord … our exploitation of other people … Accept our repentance, Lord … for our indifference to injustice and cruelty … our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us … our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us.” Each of us may say we’re not responsible for what our ancestors did, but we all still benefit from what they took from others.

But having wasted so much of what this prodigally blessed nation has received in the past, we all might be tempted to “shoot the finger” at someone else, as the people of ancient Judah were doing to each other, according to the prophet Isaiah. They had returned to their country and holy city, Jerusalem, after decades of exile. But their joy proved all too brief. Nature abhors a vacuum. And their native land hadn't been empty for the past 70 years. Neighboring tribes and nations had moved to fill that vacuum. And they had no interest in making room for the returning Jews. In the years after their return, the people of Judah faced constant harassment from the other tribes in the area. Their holy city had been burned to the ground. And any efforts to rebuild its walls faced attacks from their enemies.

So apparently they practiced self-denial, constantly. When we hear in today's reading, "we have fasted," it might be more accurate to say, "we have starved ourselves." They have starved, had ashes poured on their heads, borne the abrasive sackcloth. And yet they said, God has not seen them starving. God has taken no notice of their self-humbling. Isn't God supposed to respond when people fast, beat their breasts, accept ashes and wear scratchy sackcloth?

Through the prophet, God answers that the only reason they starve themselves is to serve their own self-interest. What good is their fasting if on one day they fast, and another day they quarrel and point the accusing finger? The word for "point" in Hebrew comes from the word for "shoot." They fasted one day and shot accusing fingers at each other the next.

Yes, they were scared, vulnerable, beset by enemies, and unsure of their future in that land. So what were they to do while their fortress walls remained broken? Each of them were to be repairers of the breach. When one army besieged a city, they tried to create breaches in those walls through which they could flood into the city and destroy the inhabitants. At times like that, only the bravest and strongest could stand in the breach and hold off the invaders long enough for the defenders to prepare their defenses, or their counter-attacks. Those who stood in the breach were to give their lives for their people. Before the breach could be repaired, it had to be defended. So, those who died defending the breach were also repairers of the breach.

Christ Jesus stood in the breach between us and God. On days like this, we are reminded that the breach between us and God can be more like a chasm. But Jesus the Christ stood in that immense breach. According to St. Paul, he knew no sin, so he could stand with the God whom we rebel against and are alienated from. But he became sin so that he could also stand with us on the other side of that breach. He himself did not commit sin, but he identified with us sinners in every way imaginable, even to the ultimate loss of control that is physical death. He did not try to manipulate his way out of death. He became as we are, in our fear and our powerlessness. He who knew no sin became sin, and so reconciled the sinners and the sinless One.

Jesus is always in the breach, always ready to help repair it after we have tried to widen it. And he invites us to join him in that breach, as an ambassador of reconciliation — that’s what Paul calls the disciples of Jesus just before today’s reading. The breach is not a safe place to be. It is a place of uncertainty. It is a place of conflict and opposition, even death. But it is the only place where we also find eternal life.

How each of us is called by God to be a Royal Ambassador is something that each of us must discern in our secret place. And the specific call may well change over the years, as it has from when I was called as a young Baptist joining the Royal Ambassadors boy’s group. To quote Isaiah, your call may be to mobilize for the loosening of injustice, or just to undo a yoke, share your bread or cover the naked where you can. Of course, you may feel too heavy right now to do anything other than just sit in that breach of that broken wall that our history may now feel like. But know that Jesus is sitting with you. For by becoming sin, Jesus accepted complicity with the human race in all its sinfulness.

The late Roman Catholic bishop Romano Guardini wrote a book called The Lord, a comprehensive meditation on Jesus’s life and teachings. In the very first chapter, he meditates on Metthew’s genealogy of Joseph, which includes Solomon the son of David and “Uriah’s wife.” Matthew can’t even say her name – Bathsheba. Guardini goes on:

He [Jesus] entered fully into everything that humanity stands for—and the names in the ancient genealogies suggest what it means to enter into human history with its burden of fate and sin. Jesus of Nazareth spared himself nothing. In the long quiet years in Nazareth, he may well have pondered these names. Deeply he must have felt what history is, the greatness of it, the power, confusion, wretchedness, darkness, and evil underlying even his own existence and pressing him from all sides to receive it into his heart that he might answer for it at the feet of God.

In just a moment, I will read the Church’s official invitation to the “observance of a holy Lent.” I personally invite you go deeper, to declassify your most secret self. And I also invite you to go into that breach and repair it as best you can with words of truth and mercy, not the shooting of fingers, because Jesus is already there, and so are we all, not in complicity, but in love and solidarity.

Ash Wednesday

The Rev. David Kendrick

March 5, 2025