Lent I: Great Expectations

The First Sunday in Lent - February 26,2023

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Millsboro, DE

(the Rev Dr) Elizabeth Kaeton

 

Was anyone else required to read Great Expectations in high school?

It’s been a while so let me briefly refresh your memory in the “Cliff Notes” version: Charles Dickens's Great Expectations tells the story of Pip, an English orphan who rises to wealth, deserts his true friends, and becomes humbled by his own arrogance.

The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class.

 

Every couple of years, I think about that book – or, at least, the title – as we enter the Season of Lent. I have often set Great Expectations for myself, only to fail miserably. Oh, I’m sure you’ve done the same.

I’m going to give up chocolate, I say on the Monday before Ash Wednesday. Right! Sure, I am! In my mind, I’m a real champion of sacrifice. A veritable paragon of virtue.

 

Sometimes I even last to mid-Lent. And then come a Sunday when someone brings brownies to Coffee Hour and I can resist anything but temptation. Oh, I play neat tricks on myself. Sundays are not counted in Lent. Did you know that? Or, am I telling you something new?

 

If you count the days between Ash Wednesday and Ends Holy Saturday, you’ll find there are 46 days, including Lent. You have to back Sundays out of the equation to get to 40.

Wait. Did I just bring you to the near occasion of sin? Did you just figure out, as I did, that on Sundays, you can have whatever it is you’ve given up because Sundays are the Lords’ Day and never part of Lent?

 

Oopsie! You’re already drooling for sweets at Coffee Hour aren’t you? Or, tonight, you’re going to have that class of wine you’ve given up, aren’t you? Sorry. It was the snake made me do it. Which gets me to why it is I think of the theme of Great Expectations.

 

I think it started with God. In the Garden. God certainly had Great Expectations for Adam and Eve. They were great because they were simple: Just stay away from the tree in the center of the garden. Do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That’s it. Easy, right? Apparently not when there’s a snake and a woman involved.  

Great Expectations continues with Jesus, out there in the wilderness. He is tempted not by a snively old snake but the Devil himself. And, he gets tested three kinds of ways on three issues that are central to the enterprise of being human: Hunger, Power and Glory.

The difference in the temptations in Eden vs the temptations in The Wilderness is like the difference between playing Chutes and Ladders vs. 3-dimensional Chess.

 

Unlike Adam, Jesus passes with flying colors. Just as we expect him to. As St. Paul says in his letter to the church in Rome, “For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.”

 

I used to have a coffee mug my kids gave me. On the outside it said, “If you want me to live up to your expectations,” and on the inside it said, “lower your expectations.” Good advice for any parent. I find that I say that to God with some frequency. “Sorry I disappointed, God. Better lower those expectations a tad.”

 

From time to time, we all miss the mark. That’s just baked into our DNA as humans. We fail. We just do. We fail, we miss the mark, I think, because we forget what the mark is. We forget what it is this life is all about. Why we are here.

 

Let me give you an example. I want to tell you a story about Hank and Rhoda. Hank was a Hospice patient of mine. That’s not their names, of course, but Hank and Rhoda could be any couple in the rural area of Sussex County.

Of all the stories I heard about Hank these two about Hank and Rhoda became the bookends of all the stories of their 57 years of married life together.

Hank met Rhoda when he was 19 and she was 12. Rhoda was on vacation with her family in DE and when she and her two sisters walked to the dance hall they went by Hank's house where he was outside washing his car. That’s when he first laid eyes on her and was totally smitten.

At the end of her vacation, Rhoda went back home to PA and Hank went into the Navy. At the end of his Navy career, he was stationed in Philadelphia and decided, just on a whim, to look up Rhoda.

He went to the addresses he had for her only to find that her family had moved. Hank started calling everyone with her last name that was listed in the phone book (remember those?), asking them if they had a daughter Rhoda. He called and called and called all day and into the evening until he found her.

He surprised her one night when she was leaving her job at the A&P store and showed up in his Navy uniform and instantly won Rhoda's heart. At the time Rhoda was already sorta-kinda "engaged" to someone else, but once she saw Hank in his Navy uniform, she broke off her relationship with the other guy and "Hank and Rhoda have been together ever since".

The second story is one that is more recent. A few years ago, Rhoda need to be admitted to a local skilled nursing facility for a few weeks of IV antibiotics. Once she had the dose of medicine, she was allowed to come home for a few hours and had to be back to the facility by bedtime.

Hank was always used to Rhoda taking care of him, so when she came home he still expected her to clean the house, do the laundry and cook his meals. One day, while she was home, they had a disagreement and he was fussing and she decided that she was not coming home for the day anymore until she was discharged because she was just not able to do the regular housework and he just did not understand.

That night, he called his daughter and daughter in law and wanted a family meeting. He wanted an explanation of what exactly was wrong with Rhoda and why she was mad with him and then, his family told me, he cried. His "girls" told him that maybe he needed to do something special for Rhoda to show her he loved her and they suggested flowers.

Hank became very upset. "She knows I love her and I have never bought flowers in fifty some years and I am not going to start now," he thundered. Well, Rhoda wasn't going to give in either. She wasn't going to come home until Hank apologized.

The next morning, Hank called the florist and ordered "a dozen of their prettiest roses and he said he didn't care what the cost was". Then, he took the roses and his cane and went unsteady to the second floor of the Skilled Nursing Facility where Rhoda was staying.

The story was that no one was certain who cried more - Hank or Rhoda - but Rhoda called the girls that evening, crying happy tears and saying "in 50 plus years he's never given me flowers, much less roses." The girls said, "This story just goes to prove that it's never too late to give flowers and tell someone that you love them."

Well, yes. That is one thing that story just goes to prove. It also proves that it’s not so much the great expectations we have but the comfort we feel in the assumptions we have made.

And, it also true that life often tests us and finds us wanting but it’s never too late to rise to the challenge and exceed everyone’s expectations, even our own.

 

Lent is such a time. It doesn’t have to be grand and glorious or dramatic and tested on the battlefield. Forgiveness and redemption can be held in a simple bouquet of roses, brought by an aging, fragile body, to a spouse of over 50 years, and contained in a contrite heart.

 

I have learned that the most powerful three-word sentence in the English language – after “I love you,” is “I am sorry.” That one small sentence – said with truth and oftentimes courage – can melt a wall of ice built by anger and heal a heart broken by disappointment or betrayal.

 

Lent is such a time to examine our assumptions about our relationships, to take another look at the priorities in our life, to ask “What’s really important to me? What do I value most and how do I demonstrate that in how I live my life?”

 

Lent is a time to take out our household budget and see it as a statement of our theology – of what we believe about God. How we spend our money, where we place our treasurer, is a statement of our great expectations about ourselves and our family and God.

 

Lent is a time to admit our flaws and faults and those times we have trespassed against others and seek forgiveness for our trespasses and to forgive those who have trespassed against us.

 

Those are the great expectations of Lent, which are no less and no greater than Jesus has for us, which is to love ourselves and others as he loves us and sacrificed his life for the love of us.

And, to love wildly, generously, lavishly, and wastefully, the way God loves us. 
  

Amen.