Lenten Humility: Admitting our Moral Culpability

We are delighted that Bobby Gross, author of Living the Christian Year and who has contributed previous series during Lent and Advent, has agreed to write a new series of Lenten reflections on the theme of humility.

In this series of Lenten reflections on the virtue of humility, we add to last week’s rehearsal of our human mortality a fresh recognition of our moral inadequacy (to put it mildly). In this pairing, we align with Psalm 90, which dramatizes these as fundamental marks of the human condition.

Immediately perhaps, somewhere in our inner being, we groan. It’s not that we imagine we are without moral flaws or failings, it’s that we don’t relish thinking about these things because self-examination stirs up guilt or shame, which we feel a need to admit to God and maybe others, which then requires that we do something about them, which is, of course, hard. There you have it, in the well-worn vocabulary of religion: conviction, confession, and repentance.

But each year Lent invites us to “go there” and stay a while.

This is good for us. This sustained focus over these weeks will deepen our understanding of our moral condition and our need for mercy and forgiveness and spiritual help. Or to put it more bluntly, our need for a savior. When we come to Good Friday at the end of Lent, this interior work will help us to better grasp the enormity of what happened on the cross “for us” and therefore to enter more fully into the dark but glorious mystery of Jesus’ death.

It will also help us as we worship week to week throughout the year. In liturgical churches, we “go there,” at least briefly, every week when we participate in the Eucharist or Mass. At a point in the service, the priest or pastor says: “Let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor,” whereupon, whether kneeling or standing, perhaps after some moments of silent prayer, we recite (or hear recited) a general confession such as this one from the Book of Common Prayer:

     Most merciful God,
     we confess that we have sinned against you
     in thought, word, and deed,
     by what we have done,
     and by what we have left undone.
     We have not loved you with our whole heart;
     we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
     We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
     For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
     have mercy on us and forgive us;
     that we may delight in your will,
     and walk in your ways,
     to the glory of your Name. Amen.

After which, we gratefully hear the affirmation of God’s forgiveness.

Then we take communion, which helps us to remember that we don’t confess in order gain forgiveness or repent in order to deserve mercy; no, we freely admit our sinfulness and failings and then aspire to live more holy and loving lives because God in his unconditional love gave himself for us when we were yet “sinners.” His grace precedes our penitence! We humble ourselves in order to access this grace more fully, to experientially realize what is already true. Graciously, he always lifts us up.

It’s as if, in Lent, we stack up a supply of wood to keep the fire of moral humility quietly burning over the rest of the year.

So, how can we deepen  our awareness of sin and our posture of repentance during Lent. Here are some suggestions.

Choose to sit with some scriptures that will help you do moral inventory. You could reflect on the Ten Commandments, what they proscribe and what by implication they prescribe (Deuteronomy 5). Or the Beatitudes of Jesus at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount, or possibly, the whole sermon (Matthew 5-7). Or you could absorb the moral proclamation of one of the Old Testament prophets, like Amos, or the ethical admonitions of one of the epistles, like James. Of the 150 Psalms, seven are known as the “penitential psalms” (6, 32, 38, 51, 101, 130, and 143).

Such scriptures can shape our prayers before God. Or you can utilize various liturgical prayers such as The Great Litany included in the Book of Common Prayer. If you do your self-examination by writing in a journal, those words on the page will translate into prayers of the heart.

You might ask a friend or spiritual companion to join you in honest conversation about aspects of your lives that are amiss and that you want work on. You can pray for one another. This can amount to a form of confession (which you can also efficaciously do with a pastor or priest or spiritual director). Mutual confession may lead to mutual accountability and encouragement.

I am a reader, so often I turn to books to help me do this work. A few years ago, I slowly worked my way through the magisterial volume by Fleming Rutledge, priest and theologian, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. I began it around Holy Week and let it saturate me over the following months. Her chapter on “The Gravity of Sin” took me deeply into the anatomy of my moral culpability. Here’s a sample:

To be in sin, biblically speaking, means something very much more consequential than wrongdoing; it means being catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God. It means to be on the other side of an impassable barrier of exclusion from God’s heavenly banquet. It means to be helplessly trapped inside one’s own worst self, miserably aware of the chasm between the way we are and the way God intends us to be. It means the continuation of the reign of greed, cruelty, rapacity, and violence throughout the world.[i]

Speaking of “the reign of greed” in the world (and in me?), I have chosen to read a book during this Lent that is sure to convict me and call me to some kind of repentance: Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond, Professor of Sociology at Princeton and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted.[ii] He writes like a prophet, like John the Baptist. Lord, give me ears to hear.

Fleming Rutledge acknowledges that we Americans are reluctant these days to speak of “sin.” She asserts “Sin is the universal human condition, but this is not fully obvious unless one is God-directed, God-saturated, God-intoxicated. The concept of sin is not anthropological but theological.[iii]

So, in Lent, we turn to God in humility to better understand and more honestly admit our moral deficiencies. We do this under his mercy. We do this because we want to be less of our worst self and more of our God-intended best self. Remembering our creaturely mortality and admitting our moral culpability, we readily pray the collect commended in the Book of Common Prayer for this third week of Lent:

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

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[i] Rutledge (Eerdmans, 2015), p. 174.

[ii] Desmond (Crown, 2023)

[iii] Rutledge, p. 180.

Previous articles in this series:

Ash Wednesday and the Gift of Lent

Lenten Humility: Remembering our Creaturely Mortality