Sometimes, not often and never intentionally, the secular calendar and the sacred calendar mesh.
The liturgical calendar has us in the midst of Lent. Lent is traditionally a time of fasting, prayer, reflection, and study, leading up to the solemn events of Passion week. Lent is usually associated with giving up something, making some small personal sacrifice in order to better understand the immense sacrifice made by the Son of God.
But this is also a season of sacrifice for secular society as well. Bulging with post-holiday poundage, gloomy with the guilt of festive over-indulgence, we're easy targets for the diet and exercise industries. Every channel on TV hawks diet plans, diet pills, and diet placebos.
Even cooking shows are all dedicated to low-cal, low-fat, low-expectation fodder created to flatten our appetites while refusing to fill our bellies. And exercise machines are everywhere, machines that look like something the greatest Inquisitors from the Middle Ages would have welcomed into their torture chambers. We are invited by commercial after commercial to voluntarily strap ourselves to these macabre machines that cost thousand of dollars.
How many of you remember as a child giving up something for Lent? Do you remember what you gave up? (You may want to make this a karaoke moment.) Perhaps you gave up sweets, or you gave up meat, or you gave up cartoons, or you gave up movies.
Whatever you gave up for Lent, it was with the strict understanding that as soon as the resurrection was successfully accomplished, you would stuff your face with candies and honey-glazed ham, zone out in front of the tube on Saturday mornings, and hit the local cinema every Friday night. In fact few of us ever really gave up anything for Lent - we simply postponed our usual activities and indulgences for a few short weeks.
After all, after Easter were there any after affects?
Jesus' words to Nicodemus were so confusing because they were so challenging. Nicodemus approached Jesus at night, suggesting he wasn't really comfortable being seen with this strange teacher, this unpredictable wonder-worker. Yet with his best company manners, Nicodemus addresses Jesus politely, appropriately - giving him possibly even more respect than he felt Jesus deserved because it seemed the presence of God surrounded this peculiar rabbi.
Imagine Nicodemus' surprise and confusion when Jesus not only fails to acknowledge the courtesy he has been accorded, but he confronts this Pharisee with a whole new agenda.
Jesus refused to allow Nicodemus to pigeon-hole him as some miracle worker who enjoyed God's blessing, or as yet another Rabbi who taught the mastery of the Torah. Instead Jesus challenged Nicodemus to completely refocus his vision. Jesus challenged Nicodemus to look for the whole Kingdom of God instead of being satisfied with glimpses of miracles. To view this Kingdom, Jesus announced, would take more than ordinary sight. It would take spiritual insight. Nicodemus might be a learned rabbi; he might be a respected leader of the Jews; he might be the teacher of Israel: but if he wasn't born of the Spirit, he was blind as a bat.
In order to understand Jesus, in order to comprehend Jesus' true identity and mission, in order to hear the full symphony of Jesus' message, Nicodemus had to TAKE ON a new identity: he had to become one was who Spirit-born. Only in the Spirit could Nicodemus come to experience the Kingdom of God and recognize Jesus as the Messiah who was bringing it into the world.
Lent isn't about giving up small indulgences or small vices, just so that we can greedily wallow in them post-Easter.
Lent is a moment in time when Christians are given the profound luxury of looking at ourselves and seeing what we lack.
In other words, Lent is less about giving up than taking on. Lent is our annual opportunity to TAKE ON that which will enable us to draw closer to the presence and power of God. Lent isn't a time to give up so much as it's our opportunity to add on, opening ourselves more fully to that unpredictable Spirit which blows where it chooses and that we don't know where it comes from or where it goes.
I learned this about Lent from Dr. Kendall K. McCabe, former Dean of Faculty at United Theological Seminary, who taught his students in worship class that the real spiritual discipline in Lent isn't to give up a bad habit that one shouldn't practice at any time, but to give up something good in order to receive something better.
Instead of giving up for Lent, why don't we take on . . .?
Take on what, you ask?
1) How about take on family prayer time? When is the last time you as a family conducted family devotions? What if you were to take on the spiritual practice of family devotions a couple times a week, or even every day, for the season of Lent? What if you were to take on a 30 minute period of gathering together as a family around a table or in the living room and reading the Bible, discussing what you read, and then praying together?
2) Or here's another take on. If tithing is seen as giving up 10% of your income, what if you were to take on 10% of the needs of some family or the needs of some ministry of this church for Lent?
3) Or here's another take on. Instead of watching those soaps or reading those novels, what if during Lent you were to take on the reading of a devotional book a week? It could be a spiritual classic like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, or it could be a contemporary spiritual classic like Conrad Gemp's Jesus Asked or Greg Paul's God in the Alley: Seeing and Being Jesus in a Broken World.
4) Or here's another take on. What if you were to take on the spiritual discipline of daily meditation? Meditation reactivates the immune system and restores the mind. The Mind/Body Medical Institute (MBMI) established by Herbert Benson at Harvard University Medical School says that stress accounts for 60% of all doctor visits . . . others argue that it's more like 90%. The more stressful our lives, the more multitasking we do, the more meditation we need. There are many meditative practices that you can take on, from more Eastern forms (which are very popular today) to one of my favorite meditative practices: dropping into a church sanctuary or chapel for prayer. In the words of an old saying:
I like to step inside a church to rest and think and pray, the quiet calm and holy place can drive all cares away.
5) Or here's another idea for a take on. What if you were to take on the discipline of only saying nice things about people? The expression "don't speak ill of the dead" doesn't begin to address the issue of ill-speaking. Do you think dead people are harmed by our speaking ill of them? It's living people who are truly harmed by ill-speaking. What if Christians were to take on the spiritual practice of only saying kind, nice things about people? What if Christians were to rebuke with gentleness and kindness the slice and dice spirit of others who can't seem to say a positive thing about anyone?
It's more important we don't speak ill of the living than we don't speak ill of the dead. Often those stones we throw at others come back to haunt us, as Bill Bennett (gambling addiction) and Rush Limbaugh (painkiller addiction to oxycontin, which is 5 or 6 times as addictive as heroin) found out the hard way.
6) Or here's another idea for a take on. What if we were to take on someone's grief? Every week some member of this church suffers a death in the family. Are we being present to each other's grief and sorrow? Do you know how debilitating grief can be?
After 9/11, a program was created by Congress in which each victim of 9/11 was guaranteed a minimum of $250,000, a projected payment of 1.5 million (tax free), and a maximum of between 8 and 9 million. At its final reporting, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund delivered $7 billion to the families of those killed on September 11. Some of the awards were $6 million or more. All you had to do was apply, and Kenneth R. Feinberg, a Washington lawyer who worked free of charge, computed your share of the pot.
The most interesting part of the story to me, however, was the 13 victims who chose neither to apply to the government fund or to sue the airlines or government agencies in any liability in the attacks. In other words, here were 13 families of 9/11 victims who couldn't climb out of their grief just to fill out the forms! Grief can be that crippling! Grief can be that debilitating! Can we take on each other's grief and sorrow?
Taking on leads to taking up . . . the cross.
The whole point of a Lenten season is to lead us to the foot of the cross, to bring us to our knees in gratitude and awe at the love flowed from the cross of Christ. The more we are able to take on during these few short weeks, the more opportunities we have to stretch our souls and experience the unpredictable winds of the Spirit, the greater the possibility that we may feel the directional breezes in our lives shift, realigning ourselves towards the Kingdom of God.
Lent isn't a season of barren, joyless, self-deprivation. Lent should be the annual opening up of our soul's windows, allowing new possibilities and greater responsibilities to find their places in our lives.
What will you take on for these next few weeks, so that you may be ready for resurrection, the greatest event in the history of the universe, even ready for the arrival of the Kingdom of God?