Saturday after Ash Wednesday: Letter 2 Notes

 

Letter #2

The Podcast for Today can be found HERE

The Propers for Today can be found HERE.

We begin this letter with the news that the Patient has become a Christian! And while that is certainly not good, Screwtape says – it’s not all bad either. 

 Sure Wormwood has lost his first Patient to the enemy – but it need only be temporary.  As Screwtape points out to his nephew.  “All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.” 

 Surprisingly – the Church can be of great help when it comes to the work of the Devil! 

6.      More importantly it is how the Patient SEES the Church.

7.      Certainly, there is no shortage of critics who criticize the church because they don’t believe in organized religion and it is a building full of hypocrites.

8.      First you have the people we know who put on their best clothes and their best pious attitudes on Sunday, but then cheat, lie, and steal Monday through Saturday. 

9.      Screwtape emphasizes once again, the Patient’s perception of “Real Life” which we saw in the 1^st letter with the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is a case of the immediate and real world versus the transcendent – the Kingdom of Heaven now and forever.

10.  Screwtape instructs Wormwood with his Patient to “Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew.” 

11.  It is this disappointment in his fellow churchmen, Screwtape notes, that will tear down his false image of the Christian life.  How can we live in a community of love and charity when the pews are filled with nothing but sinners.

12.  From there it is easy to give his Patient a feeling of holy superiority.  Surely, he is far more pious, righteous, and humble compared to his neighbor. 

 

What does the Bible say?

1.      Now compare Screwtape’s thinking to the Pharisees and the scribes in our Gospel reading today from Luke chapter 5.   Jesus has just healed a man paralyzed since birth.   Levi, the tax collector, has left his tax booth at the temple and is now following Jesus. 

2.      He gives a great banquet to honor Jesus.  The Pharisees and the scribes complain that Jesus is eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. 

3.      Now I find this rather remarkable because apparently the Pharisees and scribes are at the banquet taking advantage of Levi’s hospitality as well as those tax collectors and sinners.

4.      Also, tax collectors were among the most hated people in Jesus’s day.  They were local people who were hired by the Roman government or the temple officials to collect taxes from their neighbors.  They often extorted large sums of money from the local population. 

5.      If you are a tax collector then you probably would be socializing with other tax collectors and sinners.  So why were the Pharisees and scribes there too?  What’s more – why were they complaining?

6.      And then Jesus states the obvious – “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.”  The problem for the Pharisees and scribes is that we all fall short of the Glory of God. 

7.      So, the question for the Patient is not what is wrong with my neighbor, what is preventing me from loving God and my neighbor?

8.      Judgement in scripture is not about finding fault with our neighbors, but rather about God making us righteous.  It is about God making and remaking us perfect in His image.  The fancy theological word is Sanctification – use that in polite conversation this week.  It is always a work of God in progress.

 

Back to Screwtape, Wormwood, and the Patient

1.      Screwtape describes this dissatisfaction with the Church as a period of initial dryness and advises Wormwood to keep the Patient in this state as long as possible.

2.      He bemoans the fact that God allows humans to work their way through the doubts and crisis of faith because God wants us to freely choose to follow Him!

3.      And when we choose to follow in faith and to depend on God, we become “much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt. 

4.      This is another central theme in most of the letters.  Temptation plays on our emotions.  Think about it.  If we act out of emotion rather than faith, then we are going to worry only about ourselves.  It is all about us.

5.      Screwtape points out the value of keeping his patient thinking with an attitude of judgement rather than true humility – a trait this new Christian knows little about. 

6.      When he prays on his knees, Wormwood is to keep him saying the “religious words” that he has heard over and over again even though he actually thinks “he has run up a favorable credit-balance with God since he has “allowed” himself to be converted.” 

7.      After all, surely we are more holy and better people than the person in the pew next to us.

8.      The theological word describing this kind of attitude is works righteousness.  Think of it like a heavenly accounting ledger with debits and credits.  If our holy credits outnumber our sinful debits, then surely we have earned our way to heaven. 

 

Back to Scripture

1.      Look at the first verses from our Isaiah lesson for today:

a.      If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

2.      Wormwood’s challenge is to keep out of the mind of the Patient any thought that all of us in the church are equally sinners and saints. 

3.      One of the best descriptions of the Church I have ever heard is from St. Damien of Molokai, a Roman Catholic priest who worked with lepers on this Hawaiian island and once described the Church as hospital for sinners.  It is a place we can all be healed together in the Body of Christ.

4.      Going back to the beginning of the letter, when Screwtape highlights “all the habits of the patient.”  Those habits are often what is interfering in our relationship with God.

5.      As we close with our prayer for today, we will ask God to mercifully look upon our infirmities and to help and defend us from all our dangers and necessities.

6.      It is easy for me just to say the prayer, doing what Screwtape describes as “parrot talk” or just repeating words that sound holy without really thinking about what it is I am saying.

7.      But if we look closely at this prayer, our infirmities are our habits that separate us from God and our neighbors just as Screwtape describes in this 2^nd letter. 

8.      And the danger is that we will judge our neighbors rather than love them.

9.      And that our necessities will be all about us and our immediate needs and wants rather than how God is calling us to follow.

10.  Before we pray, a reminder that our next session for Letter #3 will be posted online on Monday.  Remember you can always post questions for me on my blog at www.innerdriving.blogspot.com in the Comments.   See you in Church.

11.  And now Let us pray –

Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities stretch forth your hand to help and defend us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for ever and ever.  Amen.