Tag Archives: Lent

Get down off your pedestal

John 1:29-34

“And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

One of the most powerful things I learned in my training for the ministry is to remember that, whether I like it or not, I was going to be viewed as a “representative of the sacred.” Regardless of my comfort level with being “God’s spokesman,” in many cases, that’s exactly how I would be viewed. As such, I developed a habit of reading myself in the character of Jesus in all of the Gospel stories. Whatever Jesus did, I thought I also had to do. If I was going to represent God to a particular community, then I had better bone up on what, exactly, I was supposed to be representing. And, truly, when one sends another in their place, don’t they expect to be well represented?

It is like when my parents used to say to me, “You are a Whitsitt.” I always had to remember that I was carrying that name into public. Whatever I did was going to reflect – well or poorly – upon my family.

But as pastors, I think this has gotten us in trouble. We have confused ourselves for Christ, when we should instead be playing the role of John the Baptist.

In this text, John is standing at the banks of the Jordan, calling people to repent and prepare for the Messiah, and then the Messiah shows up. John wants everyone to know it, and so he shouts to all who would hear everything that is important about this man, culminating with “This is the Son of God!”

Just prior to this scene, John has said point blank, “I am not the Christ.” John is clear with the people who are showing up that he is not the one that they are waiting for – the one who will take away the sins of the world. That job belongs to someone else.

As pastors, we are guilty of allowing our ministry to be about us and what we do. We are not strident enough in our protest that we are “not the Christ.” To be sure, there are people in our congregations who love to remind us that we are nowhere near being the Christ, but they are sure happy to ask us to perform miracles, aren’t they?

John offers pastors a great model for the posture of ministry: He continually knocks himself off the pedestal people try to put him on.

How have you been placed on a pedestal?

Rend your heart, not your clothing

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

“…rend your heart and not your clothing…”

At the beginning of Lent, the prophet calls us to repentance. But it is of a particular kind. Joel makes it clear to us three different times in today’s scripture lesson that the evidence of change the Lord seeks is different than the normal practices of penance.

Typically, when confronted with having lived a life that ran counter to God’s intentions, the people would go to the Temple, fast, and pray in torn clothing, It was a public display, but in that day (as in this one) it was easy to allow the display to be nothing more. The movements to this play were something that could be performed without much investment. The prayers are there to be said, so say them. The food is there to be abstained from, so abstain from it. The clothes are there to be torn, so tear them. Don’t make a big deal out of it; it is not a big deal.

But God wants it to be a big deal. Joel quotes the Lord as desiring that the people return with their “whole hearts.” In the ancient Hebrew imagination, the heart was considered the seat of the intellect. To “rend your hearts” is to change your mind. It is the same instruction that Peter gives to the crowd after his sermon in Acts. “Change you minds,” he says. “Metanoia. Rend your hearts.”

As pastors, we are guilty of “rending our clothing” all the time. When asked how we plan to take care of ourselves in the stress of the job, we rattle off pithy little truisms like “take a walk,” or “read.” We present these as Just The Right Thing, and people leave us alone. But as we continue to live a life in which we are stretched and stressed, overworked and under-cared for, taking a walk is not good enough. It is just one of several coping mechanisms, not a solution to the real issue: we have a wrong understanding of the work we have been called to do.

Edwin Friedman is right when he says that the best thing a person can bring to any situation is her own changed self. Now is no longer the time for you to rend your clothing. Now is the time for you to do the hard work of confronting the game you have been playing and begin changing your mind about the work of ministry. You can no longer do it all and expect a quick little walk in the woods to sustain you. The game has to change. You have to change.

How do you give into the game?

Giving up chocolate and beer for Lent is not what Jesus had in mind

In three days, it will be Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Naturally, folks are all abuzz about how to best observe. As I read through Facebook comments, tweets, and blog posts, I find that I have had all of the typical responses.

  • “I’m gonna give up chocolate or alcohol.”
  • “Giving things up is ridiculous. God wants us to live fully live. This whole practice is just stupid.”
  • “Instead of giving something up, I’m taking something on this year.”

Like I said: I’ve said and done each of these things. I’ve given up something that was that important, I’ve wholly rejected the practice as a part of my rejection of conformist religion, and I’ve tried to reframe “self-denial” into “self-giving.”

But each of these responses makes a mistake, in my opinion. Notice that all of them are about me. They have very little to do with what God might be doing, but about something that I’m doing. Each of these responses betray a belief that I am the one in control, that I am the one, ultimately, who matters. As Richard Rohr says,

Resurrection takes care of itself. It’s getting people into tombs that’s hard. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, most contemporary people, both liberals and conservatives, abhor boundaries.

This realization was a hard truth for me, and so I have returned to the classic Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I encourage you to do the same.

Prayer

Prayer is not about asking God for things. It is about establishing, maintaining, or strengthening your connection to God in Christ. We do this so that we can begin to see the world as Christ sees it.

This is the first, most foundational Lenten practice. If you do nothing else during Lent, commit to the practice of daily prayer (preferably silent and contemplative, like Centering Prayer or praying with beads). Lent is the perfect time to reignite your prayer life. It is the time of the year when we intentionally focus on dying in order to rising.

Fasting

Fasting (what we typically mean when we talking of “giving something up”) is not about doing without “something you LOVE,” but doing without something you need. We should be limiting our chocolate and alcohol intake anyway. What do you say we not use Lent as an excuse to go on a diet?

The point of fasting is to recognize our dependence on God’s provision. Typically, fasting is done once or twice a week. Try John Wesley‘s practice of  sundown to sundown on Mondays to Tuesdays and Thursdays to Fridays.

Almsgiving

If you are submitting to Christ through prayer and fasting, you will begin to see Christ in “the least of these.” When you do, offer yourself to the Christ you find in them. It’s really very simple, and it can be planned or spontaneous. Either way, it will be countercultural.

 

If you’re anything like me, you have to fight making spiritual practice into a self-improvement project. The Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are the best ways to avoid that impulse that I’ve found. As Craig Dykstra wrote in Growing In The Life of Faith, Spiritual practices are actually not ours. They are the practices of the Holy Spirit that we get to inhabit. That these practices are not mine is important, in my opinion. Whereas Lenten disciplines are intended to remind us of our dependence on God, we more often inhabit these practices as if we are the ones responsible for the outcome of our lives and the world.

In the end, whatever you do during Lent is between you and God, but let’s commit to engaging in disciplines that remind us of our dependence on God not ones that prop us up as the saviors of ourselves.