Sexagesima (The 60th Day Before Easter)

“If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”

Last week I said that Candlemas – that festival which we commemorated last Sunday – really marks a significant change in the focus of the church year and in our journey through it, a change the comforting, cozy, sentimental nativity scene, the warmth of Christmas and the joys it brings, to something more austere, grim, and difficult – Jerusalem, Golgotha, the cross.

As I said then it’s not all that much different in our lives; St. Paul once wrote of himself that, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” There’s a point in all our lives when we put away childish things, that moment when we turn our faces to the challenges of adulthood, of parenthood, of aging, of dying and come to see that life is not going to be fair, easy, or pain free. When we’re young we think that things will tick along as they always had, but the wizened and the aged and those already seasoned in suffering know that this simply isn’t true.           

We are making this change, from the glow of learning who this child truly is to the harshness of his crucifixion and joy of his resurrection – wine mingled with myrrh, as he drank on the cross, bitterness with something from happier times.

This time is a journey that we set out on each year, it’s a season that we call Lent which begins towards the end of this month on Ash Wednesday. Lent, as we’ll hear plenty about, is a season of repentance, of preparation, of shriving(confessing sins) – where we get shrove from – but this season is also, like our lives, not a moment but a journey that we have to take over and over again.

Growing up Roman Catholic, going to confession during Lent and fasting from something were non-negotiables, they were simply part of the yearly living out of our faith from as far back as I am able to remember. Little journeys undertaken each year – often kicking and screaming – that had a cumulative effect on me, shaped my spirituality, my identity, and my vocation.

But in order to really suck the marrow out of Lent, to truly give ourselves to it and to partake as fully as we are able we need to prepare ourselves for it, just as we would for any journey. And that’s where the time in which we find ourselves comes into the picture.

Last week, though we celebrated Candlemas, was technically a Sunday called Septuagesima, this Sunday Sexagesima and next Sunday Quinquagesima, the seventieth, sixtieth, and fiftieth days before Easter. Three Sundays set apart from Epiphanytide which we just closed, and from Lent which we have yet to fully begin. Three Sundays that are meant to prepare us through prayer and scripture to begin the Lenten journey in a right spirit.

Last Sunday, had we heard it, the Gospel would have told us about the labourers in the vineyard, those who go out early and those who go out late and yet receive the same wages. Paul would have told us in his Epistle to run the race that is set before us so that we may obtain the prize. Readings both which tell us that Lent is a labour, the spiritual life is a labour, obtaining the virtues in this life is a labour; nobody would expect to strap on a pair of skates for the first time and the next day be drafted into the NHL, we become what we hope to be through practice and through labour.

The world is always going to provide us with tempting things to lull us away from this work, from virtue, and from a deeper relationship with Christ, and often those temptations are familiar, even comfortable, but comfort itself can be a great way to keep us from the work of spiritual growth; ask the athlete – it’s nicer to sleep in than to hit the cold rink at 5am on a Saturday, but you won’t learn to skate better. In Lent I will encourage us to think about fasting, of giving something up that makes our lives even just slightly less comfortable so that we can be alert and have our eyes fixed on the end of that race which Paul spoke of last week.

Today the Gospel gives us this parable of the sower, another passage that speaks of labour, growth, and intention. The seed – God’s word – falls in different places, Jesus tells us, and in one place gets trodden down and eaten by birds, in others it withers because it’s among stones, and in another it falls amongst thorns and is choked out, but some falls upon good soil and bares fruit.

Jesus is speaking about those sorts of things in our lives that seek to deter us from growth, the temptations that steal us away from virtue and from a life that grows and lives in Christ. There will not be fruit in every place where the seed lands, not every heart is ready, not every soil fertile. But the promise in the Gospel is that for those places where the soil is ready, fertile, and good, the fruit will be returned a hundred times over.

The question that comes to mind this season, that we are being urged to consider during this time of preparation for Lent is a question about the state of our hearts – which type of ground does ours most resemble?  Are there stones within us – heavy things we’re unwilling to move, things that drag us down and make us sluggardly, weights we need to let go of? Are there thorns in us – those prickly parts of us that harbour anger or resentment towards others, towards God, our circumstances, or even anger at ourselves? Or like the seeds in the first instance is our interior life just…the wayside, a place to which we pay little attention or care, where important things get trodden down and carried away?

We are meant to desire to become good soil – but how?

I think Paul reminds us in the Epistle today that it is really a co-labour with God. We labour, our praying, our coming to church, our fasting, our charity is a way of opening the doors of our hearts, but God fulfills. Paul’s laundry list of sufferings that he seems to be bragging about to the Corinthians is not Paul’s way of tooting his own horn about how great a follower he is, but a way of glorifying God and saying – look at everything I’ve suffered, look at who I once was, and look at the ways that God has brought good out of my suffering, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”

This is why we pray in the collect today, as we prepare for the labour of Lent, that we don’t put our trust in anything we do, but that we put our trust in what God is doing through us.

Lent will be a time in which we work to improve the soil of our hearts and souls, a journey we may be undertaking for the 90th time or the first time because we – like our gardens – are always in need of improvement and work. Our work will be of letting God in so that our labour be not in vain, but that God may make of us good soil that will bear fruit a hundredfold.

“If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”