March 9, 2025 Sermon

Sometimes it feels like you just can’t get ahead. That is what this new year has felt like in our household at least. In January, all three of us came down with a rather nasty cold, followed by a bout of norovirus in February, and then a case of flu at the very beginning of this month. It’s felt rather like being the ball in a pinball machine, uncontrollably bouncing from one thing to the next. On a larger macro scale, I’ve heard from many of you that this is what this season of life is feeling like in total. The chaotic reeling from one moment to the next. In ways big and small, I think many if not all of us are feeling a dizzying sense of destabilization, and in the midst of that I come now inviting us into this Lenten season of reflection and return. Return to the places of comfort, and certainty, and coherence.

And that return begins with quiet. The quieting of our minds and bodies so that we might be still and hear the voice of our Lord who comes especially close to us at this time of fasting, repentance, and return. Because friends, I don’t know about you, but right now it just feels like what I need is a break. A moment of quiet, a moment of stillness, a moment… just a moment… for everything to pause and stop and breathe. For the chaos and the craziness to be still for even the briefest of seconds.

This year for Lent, as we lean into this theme of quiet I am going to invite us to reflect on the ways we can experience quiet as a process of reorientation towards God. This Sunday we begin with the sense of quiet as an act of emptying, and in the next few weeks we will think about quiet as an act of listening, quiet as an act of waiting, quiet as an act of returning, and quiet as an act of rejoicing. But again, today we start with this sense of quiet as an act of emptying.

Emptying ourselves, whether as an act of quiet or for some other purpose, can often feel very scary or intimidating. It can sometimes even feel inappropriate or injustice - that we are being quiet when we should be loud and forceful, emptying ourselves when we should be full of action  - and I think, honestly, that our Buddhist friends can sometimes help us see the important and impactful role quiet emptying can play in our lives. As I’ve talked about before, I think sometimes that concepts and examples from other faith traditions can help us more fully understand and strengthen our own Christian experience and witness. The four noble truths of Buddhism are that 1) life is full of suffering, 2) the cause of suffering is rooted in our worldly attachments and desires, 3) that we can experience and end to suffering through letting go of our attachments, and 4) that the path to letting go involves acts of emptying through a right ways of living like, right speech, right conduct, right mindfulness, etc. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman is great modern example of what this looks like. After a privileged upbringing with a successful ivy league career and marriage into New York high society, he suffered a traumatic eye injury in the early 1960s, and realized in his recovery that the chaos of his fast paced, high flying, cosmopolitan life was profoundly dissatisfying and unfulfilling. The long story short is that a journey east set him on a course of self emptying reorientation and deep quiet that renewed his spirit and eventually returned him to the very same New York but as a man with a gift of silence and contemplation to the city that needed both desperately.

We have an incredible Christian witness of this same caliber here in our very own state. Elizabeth Ann Seton was born to a wealthy and prominent Anglican family in New York City in 1774, and while she was raised and formed with a deep sense of service to those in need, her life was beset by one tragedy after another. Her mother died at a very young age, her family experienced several financial setbacks, and her husband died at 34 leaving her widowed with five children. What might seem an insurmountable level of suffering and heartbreak instead drew out of Elizabeth a quiet self emptying and resolve to continue being a presence of compassion and care in a world full of suffering. She entered the Roman Catholic Church and became a prominent champion of education for orphans and impoverished children. She was invited by the first Roman Catholic Bishop in the United States to come here to Emmitsburg Maryland, where she started the first Roman Catholic children’s school in the US and founded an order of nuns committed to children’s education. In 1975 she was canonized as the first Roman Catholic saint born in North America.

These are all examples of what we find in this invitation to quiet emptying. What we find today in Jesus fasting and emptying himself in the sparseness of the desert landscape.