The church is never its own reason for being. The life of the community of the cross is a life that doesn't just give to others only out of the surplus of what is unneeded by its own members. God loves us no matter what, and was willing to risk everything for the sake of the reconciliation of the whole world. What makes us think we can represent Christ by doing less?

The church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed, ceases to be faithful the moment it ceases to love God with all that it does and has-and that means the moment it ceases to love its neighbors as itself. And not just the neighbors the church likes, but - as Jesus commanded us - even our enemies, who are most in need of the love of Christ.

The church cannot be true to its own calling by trying to trade its institutional unity for the reconciling love of God that knows no bounds. This Lent of 2007 the Church, like individuals, needs to go to confession, to our corporate knees; we need to repent and seek again to be faithful, to be church, to be the community of the crucified, not a community of vengeance and purity. We are the church only when we hear the Good News that God died for us. Lent reminds us, that only as we confess our own brokenness - including not just our inability to love our enemies, but our lack of desire to do so - can the church serve as an agent of Christ's grace and Divine reconciliation.

Confession requires of us the honesty to tell the truth about ourselves, that we are a community all too willing to avoid suffering and conflict and risk and pain and division. There are moments when we have a greater chance of being reconciled with Bishops Akinola, Duncan and Minns, than with the person in our parish who wants a new presiding bishop or diocesan bishop or rector or wardens or vestry or building or different music, or no children being children or parishioners that are different than what they do! Our own desert temptation is to lose sight of the fact that Christ is unbreakably yoked with us in our humanity, including our fears and shortcomings, as well as our longings for the fullness of life precisely for all those in our world with only the power of vengeance at their disposal.

Lent is a season in the shadow of the cross therefore reconciliation always comes at a cost. Yet the cross is the light that God sheds on us as Christ's church, and in God's light, the invisible cross we each have worn on our foreheads since baptism becomes visible again, the cross with which we have been marked as Christ's own, forever, as servants of the crucified, the community of the cross.