Lent began four days ago and I’m already tired. Today is the first Sunday in Lent, but it actually began on Ash Wednesday when we marked the sign of the cross on our foreheads using the ash from last year’s palms. As we made the sign of the cross on our foreheads we heard the sobering words from scripture, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Barbara Brown Taylor comments that
Until this past year, I always heard that sentence as a negative comment on flesh, or at least a cautionary one. As grateful as you may be for that body, I heard Ash Wednesday say, as good as God may have made you, don’t get too attached to your incarnation for it is made of perishable stuff.
And yet the truth of the matter is that I like my body, I am attached to it—literally and figuratively—and so I don’t always greet Lent with as much enthusiasm as I know I “ought to.”
The positive spin the Church uses to promote it has to do with how healthy it is for us to engage in a time of “self-examination and repentance; prayer, fasting, and self-denial.” It’s also an opportunity to read and meditate on scripture, in short, to give up some things and to take some things on.
Nancy Threadgill was our preacher on Ash Wednesday and went right to the heart of the matter when she questioned our motives for whatever Lenten disciplines we might assume. Lots of times I can justify my own Lenten disciplines as being good for me: no sugar, caffeine, a little more exercise, a little more Bible study. Who could argue with that? Well, Nancy said that God could argue with that. She said that God is not a kind of heavenly Weight Watchers but is, rather, One who wants to know us and to love us and One who wants us to know and love God.
And so Lent is intended to identify those things that keep us from knowing and loving God. It’s intended to show distractions for what they really are: namely, replacements for God in our lives. My dependence upon sugar and caffeine needs to be revealed not because they’re bad for me—they may be—but that’s not the point. They need to be revealed as potential competition for God along with a million other habits and self-centeredness for which I need to repent.
The word that I need to spend some time with and to struggle with in this liturgical and spiritual milieu is the word guilt. “Guilt” is written large in Lent and it’s written large in the recesses of our hearts and minds if not in the forefront of our hearts and minds. I love the story of the little boy who decided to run away from home and was observed by a bemused policeman walking around the same block three or four times. Finally he asked him what he was doing and the little boy replied, “Well, sir, I’ve run away from home but my mother always told me never to cross the road.”
You know, I think that little boy had it right. He was making his point but kept a respect for the rules. It’s not safe for little boys to cross the road by themselves, especially those who are burdened with their suitcases. He carried a little bit of guilt with his rebellion, a little reminder that there will always be some tension between freedom and law and that a healthy respect for both can lead to a healthy personal balance.
And that, I believe, is what Lent is ultimately all about. What it’s not about is setting up some kind of impossible standard of self-denial—some might even say self-flagellation—that has a mystical, medieval or monastic aura we might find perversely romantic. It is, instead, creating some space for God and the recognition that there is precious little space for God in so much of life today unless we are content with what it is on Sunday mornings we sandwich between sleeping in and brunch or sports. You might say to me I’m preaching to the choir because here you are, however sandwiched you might be, and that I’m using guilt to my own advantage especially as I’m the only one allowed to speak for these ten minutes. You would be right on both accounts, but part of my discernment as I hope is yours, is to make a distinction about those things of which I ought to feel guilty and those things of which I am best served not to feel guilty. There are too many “oughts” and “shoulds” as it is coming at us from all sorts of directions, to have one more added in the form of a demanding, judgmental God with all his rules and regulations. But, you say, God gave us the Ten Commandments.
True enough, and I kind of like the billboard in Tennessee that says, “What part of Thou Shalt Not don’t you understand?” Ordinarily I would quibble with that kind of fundamentalism and guilt-inducing mechanism, but it also reminds me that I need to put God’s commandments into perspective, that in fact God’s commandments were a gift of God’s love for God’s people. They are a kind of mother’s rule not to cross the road by yourself. Mom isn’t being mean. Mom loves you more than she loves her own life and would do anything to keep you safe. But God is also the kind of mom (since we’re using that analogy) who wants us to understand that it is love rather than control that God’s interested in, that the Commandments and rules can never be ends unto themselves but are the means of revealing a profound desire to live in relationship.
Now that’s a long way from giving up sugar but comes close to a wonderful Lenten rule, in fact a rule for all seasons, that Bishop Arthur Lichtenberger gave to us,
Fast from criticism and feast on praise;
fast from self-pity and feast on joy;
fast from ill temper and feast on peace;
fast from resentment and feast on contentment;
fast from jealousy and feast on humility;
fast from pride and feast on love;
fast from selfishness and feast on service;
fast from fear, and feast on faith.
