Sunday, February 18, 2018
Sermon Audio
Full Service Audio
 
Welcome to the season of Lent! When I was growing up in the United Church in the 1970’s I never heard people talk about Lent in our church. It wasn’t taught in the Sundays School or reflected in the worship service in any way. There were no banners with liturgical colours; and I never saw people walking around with smudged ashes on their foreheads. My parents never told me that I should “give something up for Lent.” In fact, I was probably an adult by the time I heard that all these things and more were actually done in churches to honour the season of Lent!
 
My fiancé, Chris, is Roman Catholic, so he grew up understanding Lent as a very sacred time for Christians, a time of soul searching, repentance, confession and sacrifice. No meat on Ash Wednesday, and fish on Fridays during Lent. And even children were expected to choose something meaningful to give up for Lent, something that would feel like a sacrifice.
 
Now, as an adult, I will often give something up for Lent – one year, for example, I gave up wine, another year I gave up Facebook. Last year I didn’t give up one thing in particular, but I practiced small fasts from all food on certain days. I fasted for 24 hours from lunchtime on Wednesday to lunchtime on Thursdays, and Fridays I fasted from the time I got up in the morning until noon. Some people don’t give something up for Lent, but rather offer a sacrifice of time through increased daily devotions or extra volunteer work. Some people will come to church on an extra day each week during Lent, such as those who came for the Friday morning prayer service this past Friday. Others will make more of a financial sacrifice through increased charitable giving.
 
My first experience of giving something up for Lent was in the year 2000. I’d been hearing about the practice of “giving something up for Lent,” and was wondering if maybe this was something I should do, although I didn’t know why. I fussed about this for days! I was feeling compelled to give up coffee for Lent – but I didn’t want to! You are all already familiar with my love of coffee, so you can imagine the sacrifice this would be!
 
So I wrestled with this in the days leading up to Lent. The morning of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, I was still wrestling: “Why do I have to give something up? I’m not Catholic, that’s not my tradition!” But I couldn’t make a decision one way or the other. When I got to work in the morning, I was too busy to think about it, so I decided to have a cup of tea and decide later.
 
Well, that morning I happened to have three big dilemmas that were weighing on my mind, things that I was really anxious about, problems that I didn’t know how to solve. And you know, within 45 minutes of me having that cup of tea, all three of my problems solved themselves! So I gave up coffee for Lent!
 
Lent is not strictly Roman Catholic, though, and it’s not new to the Christian church. It was formally recognized as a 40-day season in the church year leading up to Good Friday and Easter at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 A.D. So this is something that has deep roots in the early Christian church, well before the Catholic and Protestant churches became differentiated. But the practice of Lent in the church predates the year 325 A.D., although its exact origins are uncertain. Lent is commonly thought to have been a period of preparation for those who were choosing to be baptized on Easter Sunday. For those forty days, the candidates for baptism would commit to an intense, immersive program of prayer and fasting and instruction in the scriptures and the Christian way of life.
 
There is also some evidence, however, that rather than a 40-day season leading up to Easter some early Christian groups practiced Lent as a 40-day season during Epiphany, commemorating the 40 days after Jesus’ baptism when he was fasting and tempted in the desert. Either way, the significance for us is pretty similar – the thought is that, as followers of Jesus, we are called to enter into his suffering – not to try to replicate his suffering, which we could never do, but to honour and appreciate his sacrifice on our behalf, through some small gesture of personal sacrifice on our part, either of our time or of something we typically enjoy.
 
Now, those of you who are really astute – or a little nitpicky, if you will – may have noticed that if you sit down with your calendar and count the days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday you get more than forty days (but who would do that?). I think it’s around 46, but I didn’t feel like counting it out - again. That’s because Sundays are not included as days of Lent. Sunday is always considered a mini-Easter, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, and not a day to mourn his death. So if you do decide to give something up for Lent, you can partake in whatever it is on Sundays. I did not know this little detail when I gave up coffee for Lent! 
 
Nowadays, Lent is not the only time of year we prepare people for baptism, so Lent is generally seen as a time when all Christians – not just candidates for baptism - reflect on our relationship with God and recommit our lives to following Him. During this time, we take a kind of “spiritual inventory” by intentionally look inward to see what there may be within us - within our hearts - that may need to be corrected, so that we can go deeper into our relationship with God, and live faithfully and enjoy the fullness of human life and loving relationships that God desires for us. 
 
It’s a time to reflect on whether there is something within us that is preventing us from growing closer to God and from knowing and carrying out His will for our lives; or there may be something within us that is creating an obstacle to building better relationship with other people in our lives. It’s a time to reflect on whether there is within us a spirit of selfishness? Of anger? Of arrogance? Of unforgiveness? Of pride? Of apathy toward our relationship with God? Or, are we lacking a spirit of love? Of charity? Of grace? Of humility? 
 
We don’t go into Lent with these questions already answered for and by ourselves. Lent is a time when we spend time with God in prayer to ask Him to search our hearts with honesty and with mercy. Psalm 139 is a Bible passage typically associated with Lent, as the Psalmist pleads with God saying “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” These words capture the sense that for a believer there is nothing worse than to have something in us that displeases God, as well as the sense that God alone is the one we can trust to show us the truth about ourselves, because He knows us and loves us more than any other.
 
For this reason, Lent is considered a sombre season, a season of repentance…not that it’s the only time of year to do that, but it’s meant to be more intentional and thorough during Lent. I think that’s why so many Christians and even whole churches have gotten away from practicing Lenten disciplines. Repentance feels like a bit of a killjoy to us, and I have heard every kind of excuse under the sun as to why people feel they shouldn’t have to do this.
 
Repentance is just not a word we like very much; just like we don’t like the words “confession” or “sin.” All of these words mean admitting that sometimes we fall short of being fully human, in its most noble sense, as Jesus was. It means admitting in a real and concrete way that we are not perfect, and that we may actually need to change something. This doesn’t go well with current cultural thinking where we shrug our collective shoulders, and say “oh well, nobody’s perfect;” or that we should celebrate our shortcomings as “that’s just who we are.” “Oh, you shouldn’t get upset if I yell at you; that’s just the way I am;” or “don’t let so-and-so make you feel bad; that’s just the way he is.”
 
And yet, the scriptures show us that God doesn’t want us to be simply satisfied with who we are. God accepts us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. God wants us to live full, abundant lives. He wants us to put our lives into His hands so that He might transform us into the image of His Son! As a colleague of mine once said, “We all fall short of being fully human. The obstacle is that our Church “niceness” refuses to acknowledge that our tendency to fall short is a fault that needs to be corrected, and not a gift that others need to appreciate.” 
 
Christian author C.S. Lewis says: “Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the Law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power – it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.” (From “Mere Christianity.”)
 
This is why we can’t fully experience the full joy of Easter Sunday unless we have intentionally journeyed through Lent. It is after we immerse ourselves into Lenten disciplines to turn our eyes inward to our own hearts, seeking the truth of God, that we can truly appreciate the price that Jesus paid on our behalf on Good Friday, and that we can celebrate the victory over death that God has won on Easter morning. It’s after we learn to admit our sin that we realize just how amazing God’s grace really is.
 
This is the reason so many people focus on spiritual practices throughout the season of Lent, the most common of which are prayer and fasting, in one form or another. But if coming before God and listening to what He has to say to us hasn’t been our practice – as with many of us who grew up in the United Church – it can be hard to know where to start, how to do this! Prayer is not something that just comes naturally to us, nor is it something that is easy. It’s a discipline that we learn and then practice. The vitality of our prayer lives often ebb and flow, and it takes effort to continue to improve our prayer lives throughout our time on Earth.
 
A few weeks ago a member of the congregation [Bill Melvin] gave me a photocopied sheet of paper with a few words Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a sermon on Psalm 42, and I have kept it close by in my office, to read it over and reflect on it again and again. Bonhoeffer wrote:
 
Being silent in God’s presence requires work and practice: it takes daily courage to expose oneself to God’s word and allow oneself to be judged by it; it takes daily energy to delight in God’s love. But this brings us to the question: What shall we do, in order to penetrate into this silence before God? Well, about that I can only tell you, in all humility, just a little from my own experience. Not one of us lives such a hectic life that he cannot spare the time, even if it is only ten minutes in the morning or the evening, to be still and let the silence gather round him, to stand in the presence of eternity and to let it speak, to enquire from it about our condition, and to gaze deep into himself and far out, beyond and above…  
 
…And whoever attempts this, working at it seriously day by day, will be overwhelmed by the riches which will flow from these hours. Of course, all beginnings are difficult, and whoever sets out upon this undertaking will find it at first an unaccustomed experience – indeed it may be quite an empty one. But it will not be long before his soul begins to be replenished and revitalized and to receive strength, then he begins to know the eternal quiet which rests in God’s love; stress and anxiety, hurry and restlessness, noise and clamour are stilled within him, as he has become silent before God who is his help.
 
I know that it is not easy to learn how to listen for God’s voice in prayer. Many of grew up learning that praying meant bowing our heads and giving our silent assent to the prayers being said in church or by a minister or someone else; or by saying prayers before a meal or before bed that we memorized growing up; or by giving all our requests to God, either as a wish list or as what I’ve heard called an “arrow prayer” (“Please God, let me find a good parking spot because I’m running so late!” Or “please, God, don’t let this bad thing happen.”). 
 
But many people – myself included - were never really taught how to pray in a deep and meaningful way, how to silently come into the presence of God, and listen to God’s voice. Many people have learned to practice meditation, either the kind where you empty your mind, or the kind where you recite a phrase over and over again. But while that can certainly have benefits that are not just physical and mental, but also spiritual, that’s still not actually listening for the voice of God, to hear what God is saying to us or what God wants us to do.
 
While I myself have learned many different kinds of prayer and meditation over the years, and have had a “satisfactory” prayer life in my adult years – if you can call it that - I only learned to listen for God’s voice in “listening prayer” about 3 years ago. But learning to listen for God’s voice through scripture meditation and journaling transformed my whole prayer life; it took my relationship with God to a new level; and it made me much more confident and effective in my ministry.
 
I learned listening prayer first through a good friend and mentor, Rev. Connie denBok, who many of you know from the times she has been at TEMC as a summer preacher. She introduced me to the prayer ministry of a church in Manitoba where I now often go on spiritual retreats; and the first exercise I learned from Connie was one that anyone can do, and, in fact, I now often use it as an exercise with small groups or when I’m giving pastoral care. 
 
She had me and a group of colleagues sit with pen and paper, and write out the question, “God, what do you like about me?” And then we were to write out whatever thought came into our heads. It was a good way to begin learning how to distinguish God’s voice from our own, because our own voices are often so self-critical, but God’s voice is loving and encouraging. If we ask God, “what do you like about me?” and we hear a critical or negative response, we can know for sure that that’s our own voice, and we can dismiss it and wait for God’s voice. Because God is never going to answer the question, “what do you like about me?” with criticism or condemnation. That’s a biblical principle taught by Jesus in the book of Matthew (7:9), when he says: “Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” God is not going to hear our request for reassurance and give us discouragement instead!
 
Many of us in my group of colleagues were in tears as we wrote out the answers that were coming to us, because when you’re used to thoughts that are self-critical it can be overwhelming to know that God actually does look on us with acceptance and that He truly delights in us! This simple, first exercise, and realizing that God looks on us with love, makes it easier to trust God with questions such as: “Is there something I need to change, or do differently?” or “Is there someone I need to forgive?” or “Is there some sin that I need to confess?” 
 
As the text that we heard earlier from Matthew 6 indicates, our Lenten practices of confession, repentance, prayer and fasting are not done to prove our superior piety before other people, or even to “prove” our piety before God – because God knows how impious our hearts often are! These exercises are an act of humility and obedience, where we might ask for God’s forgiveness in the areas where we have fallen short of our Christian calling, and for His guidance in the areas where we might improve. Because we know that God does not call us to confession and repentance because He’s a killjoy who wants to spoil our fun in life; rather it’s quite the opposite – He calls us to set down those things that have a hold on our lives that keep us from being the best version of ourselves that we can be, and that keep us from a full and deep relationship with God.
 
The purpose of Lenten prayer and fasting is to clear our hearts and minds of all distractions and open ourselves up to the voice and guidance of God. Then, when we come to Holy Week and Easter, we do so with hearts full of love and gratitude towards Almighty God, who looked upon our despair and our shortcomings, and reached down in love to lift us up, and make us members of His family, co-inheritors of His Kingdom with our brother and Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.