It is my second favorite day of the year, the Sunday of Forgiveness, also known as Cheesefare Sunday. We gather for the Forgiveness Vespers in the evening, candlelight dancing in front of paintings of those who have walked this path before us. Vespers starts normally enough, until we come to the prayer, “Vouchsafe, O Lord”.
This prayer is in every vespers service, but this time the reader chants it slowly and repeatedly. As she does, the colors of the church are changed from light to dark. The priest changes his vestments to the dark red. Great Lent has begun.
If you are from a different tradition, the change in the color in the midst of the service, the sudden change in the melody of the litanies might not strike you. For us, it is like a great and clanging bell. The Lenten spring has sprung. There is no turning back. The sea of the great fast is before us, and on the other side is Christ’s resurrection.
This service, which began as a normal vespers, ends in the lenten pattern instead. The prayer of St. Ephraim makes its first appearance. “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust for power, and idle talk. Grant instead a spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant. Yea Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother. For blessed art Thou unto ages of ages. Amen.”
Sunday in church, the pianist played a lovely arrangement of the old Maranatha! chorus, “I Love You, Lord.” Then in response, we sang another chorus that has been a big part of my adult Christian experience, “Give Thanks.” In the more traditional service at our church, we sprinkle choruses like this in amidst the liturgy and I like it. But Sunday something struck me as I listened and sang through “I Love You, Lord” in my head. It would be easy for me to become nostalgic for many of these choruses, most of them written in the 1970’s and 80’s, when CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) was in its infancy and childhood., nostalgic for the way we used to worship, nostalgic for a simpler, idealized past.
Nostalgia differs from tradition.
Tradition encompasses a variety of received beliefs, practices, and associations that are passed down from generation to generation. Like nostalgia, tradition seeks to bring the past forward into present experience.
However, nostalgia is primarily affective in nature. Nostalgia is wistful remembrance. The word itself comes from two Greek words which, when combined together, signify “homesickness.” One of course can be nostalgic about tradition, but the two concepts should not be equated.
Nostalgia is something in which we indulge. That’s fine, as long as we treat it like a piece of rich cheesecake. Making a steady diet of it is not good for our heart health. The most dangerous thing about nostalgia is when it assigns sentimental value to past experiences to such an extent that it virtually defines those experiences as “truth.”
I recall reading Gordon MacDonald’s book, Who Stole My Church?: What to Do When the Church You Love Tries to Enter the 21st Century. MacDonald wrapped his lessons in a story about a pastor who was concerned about his congregation. Many of the newer and younger folks were pushing for “relevant” worship, music, and programs, while the older people who had been the core of the church for many years were resisting, unhappy with the idea of “losing” the church they loved. The minister wisely meets with representatives of the two sides over an extended period of time, hears them out, listens to their concerns, and gently helps them to think through what it means to be the church of Jesus, who broke down dividing walls and forged a bond of peace between disparate groups.
While the younger side sought “relevance,” the established group was decidedly nostalgic for the past glory of the church. As they met, they talked and laughed and reminisced about the songs they used to sing, the catchphrases they had used to talk about the faith, the inside jokes that had grown over the years between them, the spiritual passages they had negotiated together, the ways they used to meet and pray and laugh and study and worship together. All of this was extremely meaningful to these people, as well it should have been, and their minister affirmed the work of God in their lives as well as their love for each other and the church.
However, he recognized that their legitimate remembering had in some ways transformed into nostalgia. It became clear that they must be weaned from it or the church could face schism. He saw that they not only recalled the past with gratitude, they let it define “the Christian life” for them. In their eyes, what those pushing for newer ways were doing was redefining the faith itself. It was no longer simply about liking or disliking certain songs or practices. To them, “God” dwelt in the temple of their experience, and like the elders among the returned exiles, they were incapable of seeing “God” in the new temple: “Many of the priests and Levites and heads of the fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this temple was laid before their eyes” (Ezra 3:12).
Of course, on the other side, the present generation was making an equivalent error in terms of “relevance,” but at least they had the excuse of inexperience and immaturity. In a case like this, it is the older generation who represent “the strong” in Paul’s admonitions and the younger ones are “the weak.” It is the responsibility of the strong — those who “possess knowledge” (1Corinthians 8:10) — to exercise forbearance toward others in the church who lack a more mature understanding.
Yet . . . perhaps they weren’t as mature as their age and Christian experience might suggest. How can you call those who define their faith in nostalgic terms “mature”?
Many of us here at Internet Monk have come out of evangelicalism or other church traditions and found ourselves in a post-evangelical, post-ecclesiastical wilderness. On the blog we have most often focused our critiques on the push toward “relevance” that various forms of the church growth movement have imposed upon congregations and the almost complete disregard of church history and received tradition — “riding the wave” of “cutting edge Christianity” to “change the world for Christ,” and all that you know, along with the circus acts that have been devised to promote it.
But Michael Spencer, having been rooted in Baptist traditions in the American South, used to write just as strongly about churches that were little more than memorials to the “good old days” of the post-war era, when people wore suits and dresses to church, sang the “old hymns” (actually, fairly recent revivalistic gospel hymns), filled age-graded Sunday School classes, heard “real preaching” from the King James Version, and went forward for the invitation. Lots of good in all that, I’m sure. But Michael had seen how wistfulness for all that had killed churches dead. Real dead.
As I sat there last week, listening to choruses from one of the most formative periods of my Christian life, I had to fight off the nostalgia.
Those songs bring back memories of experiences and relationships and spiritual breakthroughs that mean a lot to me. But I can’t go back. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want the experience of God I had thirty or forty years ago to define my life now or embody “truth” in my mind. On the other hand, I want with all my heart to resist chasing Christian fads in the name of relevance. “New and improved” is marketing strategy, not chapter and verse.
Gerbils will run on a wheel, whether that wheel is “nostalgia” or “relevance.”
Neither one will get them anywhere. And who the hell wants to be a gerbil anyway?
Catholic and Evangelical members of ECT are listed after the article, and then there is a list of people endorsing the statement. At the same link, First Things also includes a podcast in which members of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, Fr. Thomas Guarino and Professor Timothy George, sit down with First Things to discuss the statement—its origins, content, and purpose.
I would like for us to take some time to think through this statement together here on Internet Monk. Without even reading it, you know that it contains what conservative Christians call the “traditional” position on marriage, and that they claim this comports with the biblical witness and the tradition of the Church. But I urge you to go to First Things and read through the statement carefully. Save it to your computer for reference if you like so that you can go back to it easily. Because this statement comes from both Roman Catholic and Evangelical spokespersons (albeit from the conservative ranks of each respective tradition), in my view it carries a certain ecumenical weight and deserves our consideration.
Today we will look at the preamble and section one, “Marriage, Christianly Considered.”
In the Gospel of St. Mark, the Lord Jesus teaches that “from the beginning of creation ‘God made them male and female.’” He then declares a great and beautiful truth inscribed in creation: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh” (Mark 10:6–8).
For centuries, Christians have proclaimed these words at weddings, for they express the gift of marriage long recognized by all humanity and acknowledged by men and women of faith: Marriage is the union of a man and a woman. This truth is being obscured, even denied, today. Because of that, the institution of marriage, which is essential to the well-being of society, is being undermined.
Building upon this foundation, the preamble goes on to say:
It is our Christian responsibility to bear witness to the truth about marriage as taught by both reason and revelation.
Marriage is the foundation of a just and stable society, and where the decline of marriage culture is evident, the common good is imperiled.
Christians must speak the truths about sex, marriage, and family life.
There can be no compromise on marriage. Our witness cannot be allowed to be obscured by the confusions into which our world has fallen.
The first section, “Marriage, Christianly Considered,” takes four scriptures and extracts lessons from them on the subject.
1. Genesis 1:27-18 — God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.”
2. Genesis 2:24 — Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.
3. Mark 10:9 — What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.
4. Ephesians 5:32 — This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
Newlyweds on the Eiffel Tower, Chagall
The first text teaches us that “maleness, femaleness, and their complementarity are among the central organizing principles of creation.” These are essential components of our human dignity. It is in the union of male and female that we participate in the divine creativity and its fruitfulness, and therefore sexual union must be approached with reverence and in recognition of its procreative potential. Furthermore sexual acts have spiritual and moral dimensions and should be exercised with self-discipline, as these acts “either honor or dishonor the imprint of the divine that is uniquely borne by human beings.”
The second scripture shows that marriage creates the new reality of “one body” that signifies a common life that promotes the good of the couple, the family as a whole, and the community at large.
Passage three addresses divorce. It first affirms that the human act of being joined together is also God’s work. God’s grace is at work in marriage, making possible a lifelong union characterized by faithfulness and participation in the power of God’s everlasting love. Though divorce may have been permitted and churches today take different views when dealing with its reality, God ordained marriage to be indissoluble.
The final biblical citation, from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, reveals that marriage is a sign of the union between Christ and the Church. It is an incarnate illustration of the “bond of peace” by which God has reconciled humanity to himself. Marriage can only serve as that sign when a man and woman are joined together permanently.
• • •
I will make a few remarks, and then open this up for discussion.
1. I agree that the full exhibition of the image of God in humanity requires both male and female. Furthermore, the union of male and female together in marriage is a unique and special gift of God for the blessing of the world. Men and women who marry are meant to be full partners in the work of representing God and his wise and loving rule in the world.
2. I think it’s a big stretch to say that “the gift of marriage” has been “long recognized by all humanity.” Certainly humans have always figured out that “male + female = baby” and have sought ways of organizing that in their societies. However, to imply that humankind in general has always welcomed marriage as a gift and has universally recognized the one man/one woman for life formula is a curious reading of history.
3. Is the institution of marriage being “undermined” in our day? If so, by what? The statement cites the sexual revolution, widespread divorce, dramatic increases in out-of-wedlock births, the casual acceptance of premarital sex and cohabitation, and a “contraceptive mentality” that separates sex from procreation. I am astounded that no mention is made of homosexuality, for the statement hammers the male/female point repeatedly, and it seems to me that this statement was drafted at this point in time in response to the “gay marriage” issue primarily. Be that as it may, I don’t think changes in our sexual or familial behavior has stemmed merely from human decisions to abandon morality. As I have argued elsewhere, technology, freedom, and affluence have made the world a much different place and have changed the dynamics with regard to all manner of human behavior and institutions. There is a cognitive dissonance between life in today’s world and many aspects of “traditional” morality and it’s not simply because people have consciously jettisoned that morality. If we Christians want to speak to these people in this world in these days, we will have to go beyond simply insisting on traditional morality and bear witness to an entirely different way of life that can come to terms with the vast forces bearing down upon all of us.
4. This statement expresses sublime theology, and its authors say plainly, “In this statement we speak as Christians to Christians, using the language of the faith.” To be sure, Christians do not all agree about everything said here, but still, generally speaking the statement stands as representative of a rather broad consensus of traditional Church teaching. What it does not do, at least at this point, is talk about what it means to live as people of wisdom and love among our neighbors and in our society. Is it possible that one might be able to separate one’s convictions about moral ideals from accepting that we live in a free and diverse society in which people who do not act the way we think they should still deserve equal protection under the law and should be spared the indignities of discrimination? If, broadly speaking, Christians agree on the point that “the crucial and fundamental truth that marriage is a stable union based on the complementarity of male and female,” how does that belief actually affect the way I relate to my divorced neighbors, my gay son, the couple in the church who are living together and unmarried, the single folks who never marry, or the genuine Christians who honestly disagree with my interpretation of Scripture on these matters?
5. The statement lacks eschatological perspective. As one commenter has noted, it only looks backward and deals with the present age and not forward to the new creation, when issues of sex, marriage, and family as we know them will have passed away. Certainly, because we live in the “now” and not the “not yet” we must face life in the present age. But the statement lacks proper Christian balance. God’s people are to witness not only to God’s moral standards for this age, we are to witness to the reality of the age to come. Jesus altered the very definition of “family” when he told his mother, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” And Paul commended singleness as a sign of the eschaton. The Church is not called to “focus on the family” to the degree that she forgets the temporal nature of all institutions in this age.
That’s enough for now. Discuss.
We’ll return and look at more of the statement another time. Read it. Think about it. Talk about it.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
From “London” by William Blake
• • •
Music Monday: Lent with Wilco
For the past two years I have chosen a soundtrack for Lent, an album of music from the popular culture of my lifetime in which I find lessons for the Lenten journey. Last year it was Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, and in 2013 it was the music of Townes Van Zandt. I’m continuing the tradition this year. For 2015’s soundtrack I have chosen an iconic recording of the new millennium, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, released in April 2002 after a difficult and contentious year for the band.
Electronic feedback and static is the primary sonic texture that runs through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from beginning to end. This is a perfect metaphor for the loneliness and alienation so many people feel in this modern/post-modern world. We are filled with information yet starved for intimacy and heartfelt communication.
Shortly after World War I, mysterious shortwave radio stations began cropping up on long-dormant frequency bands across the globe. These stations, dubbed “Numbers Stations,” are thought to have been created for espionage purposes. Allegedly, government agencies would broadcast encrypted messages to undercover spies, who would then decode the messages using a one-time pad, or cipher key.
At any given time, a radio listener could dial into one of these stations and hear an artificially processed voice reciting strings of phonetic alphabet and numeric code; transmissions intended to be heard exclusively by just one person.
In 1998, Akin Fernandez, owner of London-based imprint Irdial Records, compiled more than 100 unearthed recordings of Numbers Stations into a 4-disc box set entitled The Conet Project.
In the years leading up to the recording of Wilco’s fourth studio album, the Irdial set was a staple in frontman Jeff Tweedy’s car stereo. The singer was especially intrigued by the compilation’s fourth track, “Phonetic Alphabet – Nato,” in which an alleged Mossad agent repeatedly speaks out the abbreviation “YHF.”
The agent’s accent is tough to assign, though she delivers each word in a cold, comprehensible monotone: “Yankee…hotel…foxtrot…”
Tweedy would later explain his fascination with The Conet Project to Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot: “There is nothing more abstract to me than the idea of a country. These solitudes exist so apart from one another in this sea of white noise and information. And the beautiful thing is they keep transmitting to each other in the hope that somebody is going to find them,” he said.“And the beauty is that people still do, still find some meaning in another person, in a relationship, find some way to communicate, even though more often than not it’s in a way that’s not what they intended. Because some communication is better than giving up or not communicating at all.”
YHF’s actual release came after an excruciating birthing experience. Two members left the band at this time and Wilco’s label, Reprise, dropped them after receiving the completed product. It became clear that YHF wasn’t immediately accessible in their eyes and therefore not marketable enough for them to risk further investment.
The documentary, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart [trailer below] chronicles the season in which Tweedy and company made YHF and then tried to find a way to get it released. One person who speaks about these matters in the film is David Fricke, Senior Editor of Rolling Stone, and he explains why Reprise balked:
“It doesn’t tell me exactly who it’s for, it doesn’t tell me exactly what it’s about, and it doesn’t tell me exactly how much it will sell. There’s pretty stuff in there, there’s hard stuff in there, there’s mystery in there, there’s really sweet tunes, and there’s an abrasion in there as well. But it’s all there, and you really have to kind of sit with it, you have to allow yourself the time to get something out of it.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that a record highlighting themes of contemporary alienation and the challenges of interpersonal communication should lead to a season in which the band faced those very challenges? I have to agree with Fricke — YHF is a dense and evocative masterpiece that offers new insights and rewards with each repeated hearing.
Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic wrote a fine retrospective,“What Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Said,” for the 10th anniversary of the album’s release. Kornhaber notes how individual songs on the album effectively make these themes come alive. He says, “Again and again, Tweedy returns to the disconnect between what’s on his mind and what’s on his tongue.” He observes how “[e]ven the seemingly straightforward tracks confront the challenge of being straightforward.” The one song on the album that is actually unambiguous and free-spirited is “Heavy Metal Drummer,” with its libertine equivalent of childlike joy: “I miss the innocence I’ve known/playing KISS covers, beautiful and stoned.” Interestingly, it’s a nostalgia piece, looking to a less complicated past, “sincerely missing” the simplicity of those days. The rest of the record is built on a sort of sonic “weirdness,”which incarnates “the fuzziness of how people relate to one another.” I think Spencer Kornhaber sums up YHF well:
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘s triumph was in how it captured a facet of human nature: the way we all send signals, hoping that someone will understand them but also anxious about what happens when someone does. You’ll sometimes hear the album get called cryptic, or self-conscious, or difficult. And that’s fine. It’s really a soundtrack for the ways in which people ask to be misunderstood.
. . . Tweedy’s really singing about a universal, timeless crisis of communication.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot thus qualifies as an appropriate companion for the Lenten journey, a good prompt for contemplating the “mind forg’d manacles” we all have to deal with in a fallen world, and especially in our own age, when white noise, feedback, and static have increased to levels never before known among humans.
We cry out to heaven and earth, hoping someone will hear, understand, and answer.
Note from CM: In 2015 we will mark five years since the death of Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk. Today, we continue our “Sundays with Michael” series with an excerpt from a post that was originally published in February 2005.
• • •
I believe most Christians use the word “inspiration” to mean “the Bible is a magic book, where God speaks to us in unusual ways.” By this they mean that the contents of the Bible–the verses–have unusual power when read or applied. So if we were to transfer this idea to another book, and treat it as we treat the Bible, it might be like this: If we considered “Walden” to be inspired in the typical evangelical way, we would not be looking for the big ideas or the main point in Thoreau’s book, but we would be examining particular sentences to see if they “spoke to us.” The actual text of “Walden” would be secondary to our use of verses.
So on, let’s say, the matter of changing jobs, we might find a sentence that says, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” and we would conclude that this verse is God telling us to change jobs. Or another sentence might say, “I left my job and moved to the woods.” This, we would say, is God speaking to us. Now we might be able to read the entire book and sustain that conclusion, or we might find–if we studied better–that the book didn’t sustain that particular use of an individual sentence. It wouldn’t really matter, however, to most of us, because God used the verse to speak to us, and that is the way we read the Bible.
Or, for further example, say someone is facing a troubled marriage. He reads and discovers a sentence in “Walden” that says, “I did not speak to another person for over a month.” From this, he concludes that God is telling him to not argue with his spouse. The fact that this is a universe away from what Thoreau meant with that sentence would be irrelevant. This is how we would be using “Walden” as a “magic book.” Recognize the method? I think we all do.
If we were committed to the “magic book” approach and someone were to teach “Walden” as a whole, telling us the main ideas and message in the book, we might not consider that particularly impressive. It is nice to know what the book says, we would say, but the use of the book as a “magic text” doesn’t depend at all on understanding the meaning of the overall book, or the message Thoreau was conveying. Introductions and analysis of the book as a whole would almost be a secondary, and mostly useless, exercise in comparison to the more exciting and personal “magic book” use of “Walden.” We might be confident, in fact, that the ordinary reader can handle the “inspired Walden” with far more relevance for his life than the educated scholar handles the same book, because the scholar doesn’t believe that the sentences contain the power. So ignorance is no barrier in the magic book approach. Recognize that, too? Uh-huh.
I hope you can see the parallels here with our use of the Bible, and the many “magic book” methods that are commonly used to present the Christian life as growing out of the Bible. Take a recent Joel Osteen sermon I liveblogged at the BHT. In the message, Osteen used part of the story of Elijah. God told Elijah that ravens would bring him food at a certain brook. From this, Osteen preached that God will provide us what we need to be blessed if we show up at the right place in life and look for God’s blessing. This dubious use of the Bible is applauded within evangelicalism as completely appropriate because it is “magic bookism,” and it speaks to us about our lives and concerns, which are always tantamount in our minds. Yet it is hardly a leap to say that this grabbing of a few verses and using them as the basis for a mystical principle for being blessed is a very strange way to approach the Bible’s message to us. But it honors the Bible as a “magic book”, and far more people are listening to Joel Osteen, a man who arguably couldn’t present an introduction/exposition of any Biblical book if asked to do so, than are listening to preachers and teachers who understand what the Bible is and is saying.
Hello, imonks, and welcome to the weekend. Ready to ramble?
This may not be a good week to go old school…
You may have noticed that Lent began this week. For you Baptists, here’s an explanatory article. So then, Wednesday was Ash Wednesday (Baptists, see here), and at least one Church was ready with drive-thru service. Clergy at Advent Evangelical Lutheran Church in Upper Arlington, Ohio, applied ash to the foreheads of anyone who stopped in the parking lot of the church for two hours Wednesday. Some comments on Facebook criticized the church for cheapening the observance, but Rev. Aaron Layne reasoned that it could be a first step back for some people who haven’t been to church in years. Hmmm. Your thoughts, imonks? Are you for or against drive-thru ashings (is that a word? Don’t judge, I grew up Baptist).
Best long read of the week: The Atlantic’s What ISIS Really Wants. I learned more from that one article about the nature and goal of ISIS than anything else I have read by far.
Most of us are familiar with the sugar factory known as Krispy Kreme donuts. But did you know that they have stores in England? That must have really messed with the Brits when they saw how us yanks were spelling crispy and cream. But the odd spelling came back to bite the company when a store in Hale began a new promotion: Krispy Kreme Klubs. Yeah, they went all out in promoting their “KKK Wednesdays” until some Facebook commentators not completely ignorant of American history persuaded them it might be a bad idea. Of course, what made it worse was the promotion was accompanied by ads for “Colouring Tuesday” and “Facepainting Thursday”.
Lent is a time for lamenting. The Book of Psalms teaches us that lamenting is a primary form of prayer in an unjust and unloving world. Through lamenting prayer, we cry out to God in the pain of our suffering and weakness, beseeching him to restore righteousness and peace to our world. In our individual lives and in the various communities which we comprise, there is always much to lament. For we are broken and flawed, and so then are all our relationships. Throughout Lent, we will focus on various aspects of life today which should lead us, I think, into a faithful practice of lamentation.
We begin today with a quote from the always interesting Wendell Berry for your contemplation in this regard. This is taken from an interview at The American Conservative,which I encourage you to read in its entirety. Here is a portion of that discussion in which Berry speaks about what he sees as the basic practices of Christian faith and some major problems in today’s Christianity, especially here in the U.S.
The core tenets [of Christianity], I think, are an undiscriminating neighborliness, help to “the least of these my brethren,” love in response to hate, mindfulness of the present rather than the future, peaceability, forgiveness, justice, and above justice mercy.
My concern about modern Christianity? I don’t know when, why, or how it happened, but at some time the mainstream denominations put themselves in charge of the Sunday job of accrediting people for admission to Heaven, turning the workdays, the human economy, and the material creation over to the materialists. And so it became possible for people to commit their souls to God while participating in an economy dedicated to the swiftest possible extraction and consumption of everything it values in God’s world, with unlimited collateral damage to all creatures, humans included, that it does not value.
Once this desecration of creation, of life itself, becomes conventional economic practice, then the submersion of the Gospel in nationalism and the waging of Christian warfare readily follows. Once war is accepted as the normal condition of human, including Christian, life, then spying upon citizens, imprisonment without indictment or trial, torture of prisoners, and all the malpractice of a tyrannical “security” evidently follow and are justified by leaders. If the life of the poorest being that crawls on the earth is not respected as a great and holy mystery, then it may be that humans go “free” of all limits, become disoriented, and are truly unable to find themselves.
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
• John 12:24, NRSV
• • •
Lent is not about getting better.
Lent is about preparing to die.
The word “lent” means “spring.”
But Lent is not the spring. Lent leads to spring, as death leads to new life.
Lent is the muddy, mucky fecund field awaiting the deposition of the seeds.
Lent’s destination is a cross and Holy Saturday.
Darkness, a forsaken hill, a sealed tomb.
The death of God, hope’s demise.
From strength to weakness, from weakness to humiliation, from humiliation to death, from death to burial.
The lenten season is traditionally the time when catechumens are prepared for baptism.
Forty days of getting ready to drown.
Lent is the death bed vigil.
As we say in hospice, it involves coming to terms with our terminality.
I have sat with patients and their families during those vigils, some of them interminably long.
It is the hardest thing to answer when someone says, why must they linger so?
Why indeed, for forty days, must we watch ourselves dying ’til we’re dead?
I have seen and participated in approaches to Lent that differ from this.
Dubbed “adventures,” “training,” “journeys,” “discipline” or “formation,” the focus was on getting better, stronger, more mature, more capable. Casting off death so as to become more alive. Stripping off the sin that so easily besets us and running a good race to the finish.
I don’t know.
Forty years in the wilderness didn’t make Israel stronger. It was just long enough for the old generation to drop so that God could make way for a new one.
And I’ve changed how I visualize Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness too. Somehow I used to have this idea of Jesus standing strong at the end of forty days, triumphantly rebuking the devil so that he had to flee the Savior’s power. Frankly, that’s probably hogwash. After forty days of fasting, it was more likely a gaunt, weakened and sickly Savior who could barely whisper his replies. Mark tells us that the wild beasts were circling and that “the angels ministered to him.” Now I picture a haggard, dusty body laying face down in the sand, the hyenas and buzzards eagerly watching for that final breath. It took supernatural beings to come and lift his chin and drip water through his parched and chapped lips along with a tiny bite of food. Jesus in extremis, guarded from jackals, nursed back to health one sip, one crumb at a time.
That’s what forty days of dying looks like.
I don’t want to die. I doubt you do either.
Which is why Lent is hard for us after all.
We can talk all we want about what’s coming on the other side, but it’s the death bed we’re all trying to avoid.
We want the fruit without the mud and the muck.
Death we can live with. It’s the dying part that’s hard.
But that is Lent.
It’s not about getting better.
It’s about dying until we’re dead.
I don’t normally put two posts up on one day anymore, but today is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), the day before the Lenten season begins, and I would like us to talk about something. Let me put my thoughts in a brief paragraph for you to consider and respond to today:
One measure of our grasp of the freedom of the Christian life is how we view and participate in celebrations like Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday). Seems to me many of us are quite ready to beat ourselves up in Lent, but don’t feel comfortable letting loose to celebrate, feast, and revel on this day. Jesus was known more for his gluttony and wine-bibbing than for his asceticism.
. MacDonald wrapped his lessons in a story about a pastor who was concerned about his congregation. Many of the newer and younger folks were pushing for “relevant” worship, music, and programs, while the older people who had been the core of the church for many years were resisting, unhappy with the idea of “losing” the church they loved. The minister wisely meets with representatives of the two sides over an extended period of time, hears them out, listens to their concerns, and gently helps them to think through what it means to be the church of Jesus, who broke down dividing walls and forged a bond of peace between disparate groups.
As I sat there last week, listening to choruses from one of the most formative periods of my Christian life, I had to fight off the nostalgia.
Music Monday: Lent with Wilco
Shortly after World War I, mysterious shortwave radio stations began cropping up on long-dormant frequency bands across the globe. These stations, dubbed “Numbers Stations,” are thought to have been created for espionage purposes. Allegedly, government agencies would broadcast encrypted messages to undercover spies, who would then decode the messages using a one-time pad, or cipher key.
[trailer below] chronicles the season in which Tweedy and company made YHF and then tried to find a way to get it released. One person who speaks about these matters in the film is David Fricke, Senior Editor of Rolling Stone, and he explains why Reprise balked:
The Internet Monk Archives 