The Reverend Paul DeLain Allick, St. George’s Church, February 25, 2009

Recently the Primates of the Anglican Communion gathered at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria, Egypt. Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams made welcoming remarks about the centrality of prayer. He called all parishes to concentrate more on prayer and less on being busy. He cited a parish he knows that has a rather large notice board. As he viewed the board “he wondered whether ‘there was…room in the week for God to find his way in among all these activities.” (The Living Church, Feb. 22, 2009, p.11)

Now an active parish is a good thing. A full notice board indicates life. But activities and programs are given their life by prayer. The Season of Lent calls us back to prayer. We enter upon these forty days to get quiet, to find our humility. In that effort we find one of the central hallmarks of the season: self-examination.

In monastic communities, self-examination is core to daily living.  Each night during Compline the community will take about five minutes of silence to look deep into the conscience to find out where our brokenness has come out today. It is an examination of motivation. Why did I do what I did today? Was it all about me? How did I honor God and my neighbor today? What should I do more of and less of? Did I do more talking than listening? Did I not speak up when I could have?

I spent about a year with a monastic community and took the discipline of daily examination with me. It has been a tremendous source of strength for me. This is why I always try to leave a bit of silence in our weekly Eucharist after I bid the confession. In order to truly confess and truly be reconciled to come to the altar to receive the Blessed Sacrament we have to examine ourselves.

Self-examination leads to the gift of humility. Humility means, literally getting grounded. When we get grounded we get back to God; we get closer to our own brokenness so that we know how to forgive others.
When we practice Self-Examination we are drawn away from examining others.

In our Litany of Penitence today we are going to practice some heavy Self-Examination. We will confess the pride and hypocrisy of our lives. We will confess that while we point the finger at others, we ourselves continue to fall short. In our glorification of self-esteem we use others to make ourselves feel better. We have all been negligent in prayer and worship. We get trapped in praying when it is convenient and we seek worship that feeds us before it honors God. For convenience sake we continue to support waste and pollution. In our seeking after prosperity we remain indifferent to the suffering of others.

Are we feeling bad yet? Are we uncomfortable? Are we denying that we do any of that? Is our self-esteem feeling threatened?

The Good News is that this isn’t about feeling bad. It’s about renewal. It’s about remembering how to practice stillness and peacemaking.

Humility takes tremendous courage and strength. It is easy to be angry, offended and accusatory; it’s hard to discipline ourselves to be loving, quiet and generous. God doesn’t want door-mat disciples with low self-esteem. God wants strong, loving and kind disciples living close to the ground.

This is how Self-Examination strengthens the mission of the Church: the ministry of reconciliation. We can’t be wise reconcilers until we understand our own weaknesses and challenges. In the end it’s about learning how to really listen to others and how to make room to listen for the Holy Spirit.

Soon this parish will be forming its Discernment Committee to profile itself and from that profile describe what kind of Rector it wants. St. George’s Parish is about to enter upon some serious self-examination. In that examination the question won’t be initially about clergy. It won’t be about who St. George’s wants to be in the future. It will be about examining who St. George’s is right now.

Your discernment committee will examine the strengths of this parish and it will examine the weaknesses. Indeed our whole diocese is in the process of discerning who we are and what we want/need in a new bishop.
The danger in parish or diocesan discernment for new leadership is to focus on what the last leader did or did not do. That is an important process but isn’t the whole of the discernment. It is the beginning where we vent our grief and/or anger. The real discernment comes when we examine ourselves: what has been the community’s role in our failures? How can we improve? Where do we need healing? Where do we need to admit our individual and communal short-comings?

I invite each of us to take this Lenten Season as an opportunity to examine the life of this parish; to confess our failures and to honor our accomplishments. It is only through rigorous self-examination that we will get to the humility which will get us to practice reconciliation which will lead us to resurrection. This season of Lent, Holy Week and Easter is calling us to renewal; a renewal based on an honest assessment of where we are and what motivates us. Amen.