|
|
|
|
February 2l, l999
Richard Lisher, a professor of preaching at Duke Divinity School, relates that his father met his mother about 50 years ago with one of the great pick-up lines of that era. Having seen his future wife at a young people’s Sunday night church gathering, he approached her afterward and inquired with the savoir faire of a Lutheran Cary Grant : "Say, do you go to the movies during Lent?" Lisher’s father was grateful that even back then the Church’s reach at Lent did not prevent an independent-minded young woman responding: "I think I can manage a movie even during Lent." The story points to a time when the Church and the season of Lent, whose beginning we observe today, set certain conditions on its members’ daily existence. Back then Christians could be expected during Lent to regard it as an especially holy season for extra prayer, extra self-discipline and extra churchgoing. You were expected to give up movies, or desserts, or skip a meal and fast, because these little disciplines helped you remember, if not always very successfully, Jesus’ sacrificial life and death. Back then Lent was the season when Christians shaped up. Doesn’t this all sounds quaint to us! We cannot return to a culture and time which are no longer ours, but we still need Lent. We need to seek to let the sacrifice of Christ shape our daily living. We need the sense of Lenten holiness. We need the tension of the incongruity between the Church calendar with its’ Lent and the secular calendar with its’ sense that life just goes on as usual. ****** It is usual to enter Lent with a reading from one of the Gospels, about the temptation of Christ. We do so from Matthew today:
MAUREEN YUEN , who served as lector, read Matthew 4:1-11 ***** In the film, THE TRUMAN STORY, Christoff, the director of the TV program which has programmed young Truman since his birth into the number one global TV character is asked by an interviewer how he could get away with using Truman in a real life series running 25 years without Truman suspecting anything? Christoff replied: "We accept the world with which we’re presented." We need Lent for it adds some dimensions and shadows to the world with which we’re presented. Two great themes of Lent are obedience and the wilderness, and these images are not normally pressed upon us by our normal world. Our normal world assures us that obedience is old fashioned and in opposition to our self-fulfilment. Our normal world says we have done away with the wilderness; we have slapped asphalt over the wildness. At first hearing about Jesus’ temptation, they seem on a level far removed from my ordinary temptation. Twice the devil says to Jesus: IF YOU ARE THE SON OF MAN. These are temptations of a supernatural kind: Who among us has known the kind of hunger of Jesus after 40 days of fasting, and thus who knows the intensity of the temptation to receive all material things for our survival. If one has suffered, then the devil’s temptation to spare Jesus from suffering, could resonate with us, but most of the time most of us coast along with good health. And who among us expects to be offered dominion over all things. Are our temptations not of a more ordinary variety: the temptation to cheat on our duties, our relationships and loves. And yet the struggle for power is fully human and does not await protagonists on the level of Satan and the Christ to inform us of its power. And all temptation, if succumbed to, ends up being cheating on God. And basically that was what Satan was tempting Jesus to do: to cheat on God. When he was tempted, Jesus’ exclusive defense was reliance upon the Word of God and obedience to God. Our Lenten journey with Jesus reopens the way of obedience to us. As Jesus was obedient to God, we too can through renewed obedience become engaged in a lively dependency upon God. We need Lent because we need to learn to be more obedient to God. Yes, obedience is a word out of favor with modern sentiment. And the seeming opposite of obedience, rebellion, is needed and can be creative. Some disobedience is necessary for growth. Children must separate from total obedience to their parents to become their own persons. But modern attitudes have become disconnected with reality. Not any individual and certainly no community can long survive on the romantic myth of independence, rebellion and rejection. Jesus is a helpful antidote to the poison of separatism and rebellion. He established his completeness as a person not by rejecting his Father in Heaven but in obeying him. Jesus said I must live from the Word of God; I will not tempt my God; I will worship only God and serve him. Lent raises the sticky question which our own upbringing would have us even deny as existing: whom do we obey? And the wilderness? Jesus temptation takes place in the wilderness which is meant to be cast as a second Eden, except a fallen Eden in which real evil rages and tempts humanity to fall again. The literal geographic setting for Jesus’ temptation was the inhospitable, barren hills of Judah east of Jerusalem. They crawled with lions and hyenas and scorpions in Jesus’ time. That wilderness was no romantic aslyum but a place of ultimate spiritual struggle. Modern people believed they have forever banished that wilderness; we confuse wildness with wilderness. True, we are on our way to asphalting over much of the wild areas of the earth. My first parish 37 years ago was in a still pristine valley then beyond the range of Los Angeles sprawl. It was a kind of Edenic place with few roads, thousands of acres of citrus and avocados, few people, clear skies. In sum, a perfect advertisement of the kind which l00 years ago began to attract the immigrant hordes to Southern California. It’s all gone now: super highways and asphalt have done in that lovely Santa Susana Valley of my first ministry. Our asphalt job deceives us, however, with the miscalculation that by asphalting over paradise and the wildness we have eliminated the Wilderness from our experience. The Wilderness is still with us. The power of Evil still crawls, usually subtly and aided and abetted by all the forms of modern rationalism and self-excuse, though now and then evil breaks forth to show its claws and teeth. And we are not far removed from danger. We need Lent because we need Christ more with us. We need to feel the tension between God’s way and our own. We need to become Lenten pilgrims so as to be strengthened as ordinary warriors against the dark powers and principalities. To assume the ashes of repentance and the purple cloth of penitence are to begin to arm ourselves with the strength of Christ to resist the blandishments presented to us. We need Lent in order to remember the person who began the resistance to evil and empowers us to resist temptation. Our Gospel readings, and the other scriptures of these six Sundays of Lent, help us remember Jesus through a series of dialogues: one with the devil as Maureen read today, another with a perplexed seeker named Nicodemus; a talk between Jesus and a blind man seeking the true identity of Christ; and a woman longing for meaning and fulfilment. The Sundays just before Easter, there shall be a couple of conversations about life and death which take place in Jewish cemeteries. The church’s Lenten journey does not follow our more familiar secular journeys: from a lower paying job to a higher paying one; from misery to happiness; from insecurity to self-confidence. The journey of Lent is in tension with these worldly goals and that is why it is necessary. We need Lent. Lent informs us with the threatening news that we are not out of the wilderness. We are not nearly as safe as we think we are. The beasts are barely at bay as our casual and total reliance, even at this late date in our history, upon horrendous military weaponry to solve problems like Kosovo and the Serbs, Iraq and other Arabs, the Kurds and their neighbors show. It is quaint, this idea that followers of God, should want to reject some small enjoyments and indulgences and pleasures, and that in the great scheme of the struggle between evil and God, it would make any difference. But the symbolism of Lent is potent if we are endorsing the way Jjesus took: He chose to say no to evil and the ways of the world which evil encourages. Jesus renounced the way presented and pushed upon him by the world and chose total obedience to God. Among other benefits, he thereby made possible our renouncement of evil at our baptism in Christ. Lent comes each year to help us to get a bit more back on an authentic spiritual path. It is not easy because Lent appropriately carries a cost to any true pilgrim. Flannery O’Connor has a story about a little girl who loves to visit the convent and the sisters there. But every time the senior nun gives her a goodbye hug, the crucifix on the Sister’s belt gets mashed into the child’s face. The mother nun’s gesture of love always leaves a mark. I hope this Lent will leave a mark upon you; welcome the mark of your sacrifice as evidence you are besting temptation and renewing your obedience to God. The Lenten journey we begin is one we can not and should not go alone; we need others to journey with us. We need to be the Church together this Lent. Lent is the way of the people of God and it is a journey whose every step is held up with God’s grace. And it is a journey whose end we see glorious in the One who has already completed the course for us.
|
|
|
|
The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
This page has been visited
times.
This page hosted by
Get your own Free
Homepage