March 16, 2011
My Dear People,
The best thing that could ever happen to anybody in this room, the best thing, is that your sin would be literally exposed on the 5:00 news; [that] your deepest, darkest, most-embarrassing sin, the one you work the hardest to hide, would be broadcast on the 5:00 news.
--Derek Webb, singer songwriter
These words were playing in the back of my mind as I wrote my sermon for Sunday. More to the point, Webb's edgy assertion helped me arrive at the decision to talk about my habit of chewing tobacco.(After chewing for twenty years, and daily for four, I quit a month or so ago.)
There was and is a feeling of vulnerability, and a touch of embarrassment, in the acknowledgement. There was and is, however, more than those feelings, a sense of liberation, similar to the feelings that came for me years ago when I got sober. Indeed, an old A.A. saying comes to mind, "We're as sick as our secrets."
And I don't want to be sick anymore.
+
In this season of Lent, we can ask ourselves: what do we need to bring out into the light, into the open?
It probably will not be on a local newscast, and may well not be on a Sunday morning; it may be while sitting with a priest and saying the Rite of the Reconciliation (see Book of Common Prayer).Whatever the case, we are not meant to work out these things on our own. We need one another.
We need one another to get well. We need one another to be well.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
