I’d like to have a bit of a meeting with the young people present, but I’d like for the rest of you to listen in.
Have any of you ever chosen to stop doing something? Why was that?
You know, we’re starting a special season in the church year called, Lent. Lent is a time that lots of grownups use in order to stop doing things for a while. They won’t eat, or they won’t eat meat, or they won’t eat chocolate, or they’ll stop watching TV or following Facebook or something like that.
Some people take up a new discipline – like reading some portion of the Bible or praying at a certain time, or exercising.
(Have you ever given up something for Lent, or taken on something new?) Why do you suppose people do that?
Well, what I’ve heard is that people who take on a new discipline want to make themselves better people. They think that, maybe, if they can do what they’re doing for the forty days of Lent, then they might be able to keep on doing it after Lent is done.
And the people who give something up?
You know something we’ll all be giving up for Lent? “Alleluia!” That word, and the phrase, “Praise the Lord,” we put away for the season of Lent. Not because we don’t like God and want to praise God, but to show God how concerned we are about how things are with the world.
The idea is that, whenever someone who gives up something for Lent experiences a craving for what they once did, feeling the craving will be a reminder for them to think about God. We don’t live just on what we eat and drink, after all. We live also on the word of God, on what God has spoken to us through Jesus and through the prophets and apostles. So, it helps if we can be reminded of God. Being reminded of God, even if the reminder is hunger or thirst or the desire to do something we’re used to but have decided not to do, reminds us of love; because God is love.
You’ve heard of the Sermon on the Mount?
In the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells the disciples that trumpet blasts and fasting (like the ones on Yom Kippur) and long, loud prayers (like the ones during Gentile penitential seasons) really don’t make very much difference if you’re doing them to show others how pious you are. You have to do such things for your own benefit... privately.
Sometimes people like to talk about what they’re doing for Lent. And this can be a problem, because sacrifices and disciplines aren’t supposed to be something other people know about. In Jewish tradition, which is the tradition in which Jesus grew up, such things are called mitzvot. The word mitzvah means literally, “commandment,” but there’s a sense in this word which means, “something good you because it affirms your relationship with God.” Other people might benefit from it, but they’re not necessarily supposed to know about it. So, if you’re giving up something for Lent, keep quiet about it unless someone asks you.
A sacrifice during Lent is for you and God; it’s a mitzvah. It makes your relationship with God stronger, fuller, more meaningful.
It’s in this part of the Sermon on the Mount that he dictates a prayer that he says ought to be typical of the prayers they say. You know the one, “Our Father in heaven...” The disciples don’t ask Jesus to teach them the Prayer, the way that they do in Luke (“Sir, teach us to pray...”). No, here he says that this prayer would be a good example of the piety they should express. Look, you just need a quiet, few words, and these words are enough.
Jesus kept a fast before he began his ministry, for forty days. Fasts can be helpful for starting things like that. You sacrifice for a time so that you feel ready to go with some big and new project.
It’s important to understand, Jesus never says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Don’t do that penitential stuff.” He says, “Be careful about it.”
That’s not the way our spiritual forebears heard what he said in Matthew at this point – or at least the UCC contingent. The earliest Congregational churches had no stained glass. They thought that the pictures in stained glass could distract people from focusing on God. The Evangelical and Reformed movements that led to those so-named branches of our denomination wanted to practice piety better in America than the wider churches with the same name had been doing in Germany.
I think we may have blown the piety thing, though. Between the iconoclasm of the Congregationalists and the pietism of the Evangelical and Reformed, we kind of over-compensated for the practices the Catholics never parted with – especially the practice of personal, devotional sacrifice. We didn’t revisit the practices but instead abandoned them entirely, as if there is something somehow wrong with penance or fasting.
I tell you, there is something sensibly wonderful about having a pang in your tummy which you put there, remind you of God; or of leaving The Good Wife alone until rerun season; or of setting aside chocolate for forty days and not substituting it with something else.
And there is something spiritually splendid about having a bit of ash rubbed onto your forehead and hearing someone say to you, even in a droning sort of ritual way, “Remember mortal, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Not that we really need to be reminded; God knows, there’s enough death around, we cannot possibly forget.
We have relegated so much of our religion to our heads and our hearts, and that’s good too! But O the sweet vulnerability of allowing our religion to be imposed upon our bodies..! Even the most intelligent or the most heart-centered among us have to acknowledge that there is nothing quite so potent as an object lesson.
Kids have hearts and heads, but they’re not as developed as adults’ hearts and heads. They need ideas to happen literally. It helps to act things out.
And sometimes, that’s good for adults, too. Sometimes, it’s good to experience more than just bread and cup once a month and water once in a lifetime. Sometimes, you need to let your religion make a mess of you... to get the smudge and to feel a gentle pain you’ve imposed upon yourself.
So, to begin forty days, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll take tonight, and we’ll call it Ash Wednesday, and we’ll get ready for a big day called Easter. But we won’t say Alleluia (oops! I said it!) after this moment. And we’ll feel that little twinge every once in a while for forty days, much like Jesus did when he was getting ready to start his ministry. And the twinge will remind us of God and just how wonderful God is and how good it is to be with God.
Have a good Lent, beginning right now.
