Lent as a Place

A post from a previous season: A few years ago I wrote a book, You Gave Me a Wide Place: Holy Places of Our Lives, published by Upper Room Books (2006). Unfortunately the book is going out of print, so buy several copies for yourself now and more for your friends, LOL. The following is a paraphrase of some material in chapters 1 and 4 and also new thoughts that have to do with Lent. I was thinking about Lent, and also the theme of “place,“ which is one of my favorite subjects. I wondered: Lent is a period of time, but can you think of Lent as a place?

We can connect the temporal season of Lent to particular places in our lives, and also we can think metaphorically about the place of Lent.

One place is the wilderness. As I wrote in my little book, we tend to have a positive feeling about natural wilderness in our own time, more so than the Bible in which wilderness is either neutral or threatening: for instance, the different kinds of geographical regions, or specially the area of the Dead Sea, or the Sinai region that was the scene of the Israelite wondering.

“Wilderness” is an apt spiritual metaphor. In Exodus 15-17, for instance, the Israelites moved among dry places where no drinkable water was available, and they grumbled with sufficient seriousness that Moses sought God’s help. Many of us can think of times when we felt discouraged and tested; we couldn’t see the nature of God’s provision and wondered what was going on. Perhaps other people had let us down; perhaps we messed up our own lives; perhaps life was filled with stress through no one’s particular fault. Anxiety, distress, “what if” thoughts, difficult periods of waiting, and other things fill wilderness times. In turn, we associate particular places in our lives with feeling lost and discouraged. What are the places of your own life that you connect with "wilderness" and an apparent lack of fulfillment of God’s promises?

Waiting on God is actually a positive thing, though it may not feel very positive! Read scriptures like Isaiah 40:31, Psalm 25:5, and Psalm 33:20-21. But even Bible people struggle with a sense of God’s absence, for instance, the author of Psalm 42 and 43 which expresses emptiness and disappointment. The psalmist wants God, wants to be with God, and knows that he will eventually praise God again, but for now, God seems missing. I love this psalm because here, in God’s Word, are words about a person who is having a faith crisis! The psalm’s sick bed is, because of its immobility, also a place of “wandering” amid a feeling of God’s absence. What are some of your places of waiting on God?

Along those same lines, another place of Lent is the familiar place that has been changed in such a way that our comfort is disrupted. As I wrote in my little book, the telephone or the mailbox are innocuous places--until we are waiting on news of, for instance, medical results, or the safety of a loved one. In those times, everyday places can become foci of fervent prayer, waiting, and dependence upon God.

I'm also thinking about how our worship experiences can become focused during the Lenten season. For instance, a pastor might change the nature of the congregation’s worship space in order to help people understand God and faith in different ways. I found a blog, http://pubpastor.blogspot.com/2010/02/lent-worship-space-transformation.html, that describes ways this congregation has experimenting with worship space and styles.

How wonderful! I pray fervently for any pastor who attempts such a thing. It’s not good when a pastor takes a “This is good for you” attitude with the congregation. On the other hand, a pastor needs to find helpful ways to challenge people that does not elicit so much frustration from the congregation that the purpose is defeated. Some church folks become stuck in their ways--and punitive if you upset them--so the pastor has to use patience, discernment, and prayer in order to challenge folk in their worship. A pastor can make Lent-oriented worship changes that are both interesting and spiritually helpful (like our pastor is doing during this 2013 Lenten season) so that people can experience God in fresh ways that, in turn, can build upon their previous experiences of God.

The main “place” of Lent is God! You can think of God as a place! It’s a venerable tradition. I noted in my book that the Bible sometimes “localizes” God’s presence, as on the mountains of Exodus 19 and 1 Kings 19, and verses like Deut. 16:16 and Isaiah 8:18. But these have to do with God’s desire to be present in certain places rather than a limitation to which God is obliged. Even the holy Temple is not the special place of God apart from his will (e.g., Jer. 7:1-7; 22:16, Isaiah 66:1-2, Acts 7:48-50).

The Bible refers metaphorically to God in place-terms. God is our machseh, that is, “dwelling place” (Deut. 33:27, RSV), or “refuge” (KJV and NIV). Psalm 46:1 calls God “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” In Genesis 28:17, God is maqom, “How awesome is this place!” During the rabbinical period the word maqom became a metaphorical name for God, as in Philo writes, “God … is called place, for He encompasses all things, but is not encompassed by anything.” Also, a midrash refers to God as "place" because God is “the place of the world.”A scripture like Psalm 139:7-10 shows how God comes to every place where we are and is not limited to our circumstances.

As I write in my book (p. 26): “Christians, like Jews, honored God who is unbounded by time and space, the God who is a dwelling and refuge for all who call upon him. Jesus becomes the “place to go” to know God in spirit and truth (Matt. 7:25, John 4:21-24), the “new thing” that God has done by which we might know God (Isa. 43:19, Heb. 1:1-2). Jesus is the place that encompasses all places, because in and through him all things came to be (Col 1:15-20). Not only that, but through Jesus Christ God has broken down all barriers and has accomplished all that is necessary for peace, reconciliation, and salvation (Eph. 1:5-14, 3:8-14). He is present for us in whatever place we are, until the close of time (Matt. 28:20, Rev. 22:13).”

I’ve written in my other Lenten posts that we need to be careful: we need to center Lent around God and let our practices clarify God's providence and will. If we think of God our maqom and machseh, our Lenten observance is focused upon our true place and true home.

Lent and Friendships

A strong biblical theme is the kinds of friends we choose and the people with whom we associate. Just a few examples:

Listen to advice and accept instruction [from a trusted companion]
that you may gain wisdom for the future (Prov. 19:20)

Happy are those
   
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,

or take the path that sinners tread,
   
or sit in the seat of scoffers (Ps. 1:1)

Make no friends with those given to anger,
   
and do not associate with hotheads (Prov. 22:24)

But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not even eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging those outside? Is it not those who are inside that you are to judge? God will judge those outside. "Drive out the wicked person from among you." (1 Cor. 5:11-13)

Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? (2 Cor. 6:14-15)

This is one of those truths that we find among religious traditions. For instance, the Qur’an (4:69) teaches:

And whoever obeys Allah and the Messenger [the prophet Muhammad]---those will be with the ones upon whom Allah has bestowed favor of the prophets, the steadfast affirmers of truth, the martyrs and the righteous. And excellent are those as companions. 

A Buddhist scripture, the Dhammapada (6:78), teaches this: One should not associate with bad friends, nor with the vile. One should associate with good friends, and with those who are noble.

I don’t seek the council of these kinds of teachings so often these days, but I certainly agree with them! Your friends may not be leading you to manufacture meth or to cheat on your spouse or take money or other awful things, but your life can really be shaped by people with whom you associate.

Not only do people lead you the wrong way in life, becoming trusted confidantes who turned out to be untrustworthy and harmful. People also shape your life depending on how they support you, build you up, and help you in your time of need. We all have held onto people in our lives who were not that way, or who were that way but inconsistently. Hindsight is always clearer than our situation at the time.

As you grow, you realize that certain personalities are not compatible with yours. I try not to have acquaintances who are very strong willed, nor people who are fault-finding and critical, who scrutinize my words and actions, nor folks who engage in put-down humor. Certain people are “on” all the time, and I find that tiring. It's not that I dislike such folks (though sometimes I do!). It's just that I've learned from experience that friendships with these kinds of persons tend to be less "successful" friends compared to folks with other kinds of personalities.

(On the other hand----to contradict myself, I guess----the dynamics of friendship don't necessarily follow compatibility. I've lots of friends with whom I don't share certain common interests and personality traits, and many of them are great friends! If you love each other, respect each other's interests, and are "there" for each other, then compatibility doesn't necessarily matter much. You have a connection and rapport, you trust each other; you have a mutual desire to make time to be in contact, no matter how busy "life" is otherwise. Plus, compatible friends can disappoint! I had a good, very compatible friend once, who said she'd invite us over for dinner soon then I never heard from her again, and she never responded to my calls. Later, someone told me that she was terrible at returning calls, so I just gave up.)

I once had an acquaintance who liked to tease people then covered the down-puting things he said with remarks like, “Oh, you’re so sensitive!” I realized (again, in 20/20 hindsight) that he really lowered my self-esteem and I should’ve figured out ways at the time to deal with my feelings, instead of being buffaloed by his retorts. Your life can really be shaped by people with whom you associate, more than you realize at the time, because they change your feelings about yourself and that effects many other aspects of your life.

Paul talks about associating with ‘believers,” but not all Christian people are folks you may have anything in common with, and some of them may be difficult people, too. They’re human, after all. Think of all the Christians you've known who are "hotheads" (to use the Proverbs 22:24 word), for instance. None of us are perfect and we’re not all compatible with each other. So just because someone is Christian doesn’t mean you're going to be friends with them.


As a younger Christian I tried to find friendships among other Christians, and I thought there was something wrong with me that I didn’t have many friends, and some of those friendships weren’t very happy. I was naive and thought that “Christian” meant friendship-compatibility, which it doesn’t! What I needed (and did find as time went on) were Christian friends (any kind of friend, really: some of my best friends over the years have not been Christians) who believed in me and built me up, and vice versa.


Something I’ve noticed is that when you have one or two “complainers” in a friendship group or collegial group, then the whole group can become very negative. Bitchiness is contagious! This is a very bad situation in a church (or any organization, really) because the negativity, the identification and and nurturing of grudges and complaints, begins to have a poisoning effect on everybody. It’s a real hazard of certain kinds of church small groups. The strong, contagious effects of negativity is one of the reasons the scriptures teach us to select our companions well.

Since Lent is a time of self-assessment and introspection, it’s a good time to think about the relationships in your life, and the kind of balance your life has. I have no good advice on how to deal with difficult folks; I’ve struggled with that, too, and I’ve been a trying friend to others in addition to having trying friends myself. Sometimes the person is a close relative or an employer---not someone whom you can just unfriend on Facebook or otherwise stop being in touch. It’s something about which to seek the Lord’s guidance---and it might take a long time before you see, in hindsight, how the Lord guided you.

There is a Swedish saying that describes the best kind of friend and, in fact, unintentionally describes God’s love, too:    

“Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it.”

But remember: if you want that kind of friendship, you have to be that kind of friend, too!

Plowshares and Swords: Three Different Texts

http://changingbibles.blogspot.com

Psalm 51 Needs More

Psalm 51 was one of the Ash Wednesday scriptures. I wouldn’t want to say that you haven’t fully experienced the amazing peace of forgiveness if you haven’t first felt in your heart the ache of sin—the sin that has hurt people, made a mess of things, and made you afraid for your relationship with God. Nor would I, for obvious reasons, recommend sin and error as a prelude for a relationship to God (Romans 6:1-2). But Psalm 51 is a wonderful assurance when you’ve stumbled (or, perhaps more commonly, that you just feel very inadequate and "beat up on yourself" a lot). Sometimes we stumble publicly, as did David, more often our failures are comparatively private but our consciences dog us.

What the psalm may lack, though, is a very strong assurance of God’s forgiveness, which, after all, hard to see if you’re troubled. It's a prayer from the perspective of the sinner, but there are scriptural assurances that should be read along with the prayer, for instance Romans 7:24-25, where the assurances of Christ's salvation of lost, broken people is affirmed. If you’re in (what I call) a “Psalm 51 state of mind,” you need to simultaneously keep firmly in mind that we have forgiveness and restoration already through Christ. You need to remember that just because you feel very badly, that God doesn't feel the same way about you as you do about yourself.

In fact, recently I read a book that made an interesting point from a different angle. The author noted how afraid he had once felt concerning Matthew 25:46 and its promise of eternal punishment. What a terrible fate lay in store for people who denied Jesus unwittingly! But the author realized … by the criteria of Matthew 25:46, Jesus’ disciples were all heading to Hell! Soon after this passage, they all denied and forsook him, not by failing to help the needy, but in the literal sense: they abandoned him in his most desperate time. But what happens?  Jesus appears to them, loves them, and promises his eternal companionship (Matt. 28:20).(1) Passages like this are also great assurances that God never ever gives up on us, no matter how badly we've messed up.


1.  Matthew Linn, Sheila Fabnicant Linn, and Dennis Linn, Understanding Difficult Scriptures in a Healing Way (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001), chapter 2.

Ash Wednesday and Lent

from clenmoore.org

A post from a couple years ago.... Many of us will spend part of Wednesday with an ash cross upon our foreheads. Many of us will practice some kind of Lenten discipline, whether giving something up or adding something to our devotion. My question is: How can we prevent these practices from becoming self-centered rather than Christ-centered? To put it another way, how can our Lenten practices point to Christ rather than to ourselves?

To help answer these questions, I thought about a couple interesting passages from Paul, 1 Cor. 9:24-27 and Galatians 6:12-15. The first passage alludes to the original Greek sports. Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable garland, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified (1 Cor. 9:24-27).

Someday I may make a list of Paul passages that I wish he had expressed better or differently; this is one. Obviously Paul would never teach salvation by works, but a person unfamiliar with Galatians and other letters might use this 1 Cor. 9 passage as a proof-text for "earning" God’s love. We never ever ever earn God's love; it's simply ours in abundance. That's why Paul is so grateful for the empowering cross of Christ, as discussed below.

Understood in context with the whole letter, 1 Cor. 9:24-27 refers to the self-discipline we need to love. We can certainly be very disciplined Christians--evidenced at Lent--but we’re wasting our time unless our spiritual practices lead to love, kindness, gentleness, and other gifts sketched by Paul in Galatians 5. (This, by the way, applies not just to Lent but to spiritual retreats like Emmaus, service ministries at your church, small groups, and other ways.) So the aim of spiritual practices is to curb our selfish inclinations so that we can display the lovingkindness and compassion that will definitely "show Christ" and not just proclaim Christ.

This point is depicted even more startlingly in the second Paul passage. Several years ago I wrote a short study book, Paul and the Galatians, for Abingdon Press. Paul’s hope that the pro-circumcision teachers at Galatia would “castrate themselves” (Gal. 5:12) is a notorious text. I think an equally startling text is just a few sentences down.

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh. May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! (Gal. 6:12-15).

The explicit bitterness of Gal. 5:12 makes it a more obvious put-down than here in Gal. 6:12-13 which, you might notice, contains a double entendre. “Flesh” (sarx) means the sphere of human existence--a word usually used by Paul in distinction to God’s Spirit---but “flesh” here can mean the circumcision itself. To restate Paul more crudely, the pro-circumcision teachers are boasting about their penises (i.e., their circumcision), and they want to boast about the Galatian men's penises, too (i.e., to boast about converts to their belief that circumcision is necessary for Gentile Christians)!

Expressed so rudely and absurdly, the whole issue is clearer: boasting about our own righteousness is foolish. Only the amazing gifts of God--the cross of God and the consequent gift of the new creation through the Holy Spirit--are properly boasted about, according to Paul.

I’m very aware how regrettable is Paul’s language for contemporary Jewish-Christian fellowship. Paul faced different issues and a different circumstance than our own time, when many of us are seeking to help heal centuries of Christian anti-Judaism. Paul is upset here, not because he is prejudiced against Jews and their religion, but because he believes God has opened up amazing possibilities for Gentiles via God’s faithfulness to the Jews. Jews had always had (male) circumcision, but the Galatians were Gentiles and had never been required to adopt this Jewish sign of the covenant. And yet the Holy Spirit had been given to the Galatians--thus including Gentiles within God's covenant-faithfulness--without them doing anything to earn or deserve such a gift! God had already given them freedom and equal standing as heirs and children (Gal. 4:7). For Paul, this was an amazing, wonderful blessing for the Galatians (and others).

That's why Paul was so angry; the pro-circumcision teachers convinced the Galatians that they had to “make sure” they were truly within God’s will. For Paul, that was tantamount to saying that God’s gifts of freedom and favor were unsatisfactory: just in case the Holy Spirit is not enough, we need to “cover our bases" by adding a traditional rite. But how could the Holy Spirit be not enough?

As we study the Bible, we discover numerous gifts of transformation that the Holy Spirit provides as we’re touched by God’s love.

· Humility: a willingness (hypothetically, at least) to wash the feet of someone who has not “earned” your love but whom you love, nevertheless, as Christ loved his very imperfect disciples.
· Peacefulness: a kind of understanding of God that surpasses a purely cognitive agreement of doctrines about God
· Suffering: a condition we’d prefer to avoid, but which is biblically attested to be potentially a sharing in Christ’s own life.
· Loving-kindness and compassion: a desire to ease the suffering of others (certainly not to inflict it) because—to use a cliché—you feel the other’s pain. (Etymologically, compassion means “to suffer with.”)
· Knowledge of God: you can see God in the needs of the other person
· Love for enemies: you feel no hatred or anger for someone who has mistreated you (or, at least, you regularly turn to God for healing of your hatred).
· Contentment: a tranquility independent of your circumstances
· Joy: not just happiness and mirth (wonderful as those are) but a confidence that you understand the meaning and direction of life.
· Avoidance of certain circumstances: those wherein you might succumb to a temptation to which you’re prone, and you know yourself well enough to know your weaknesses.

To connect these gifts to our Lenten disciplines: we must keep in mind that these gifts are not characteristics that we’re supposed to achieve through will-power and discipline. Nor are our disciplines add-on rites about which to boast as if they, in themselves, make us righteous. [T]he fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things (Gal. 5:22-23). Paul is being sarcastic again--of course no law (including laws stipulating circumcision) would define these qualities. They are gifts of the Spirit’s “new creation”. We, in turn, can open ourselves to the Spirit's love as we seek to understand more fully the depth of God's love.

Paul’s affirmation in Galatians 6 can be an excellent guide and focus during the upcoming season. Everything relies upon the power of God through the cross of Christ and the transforming Holy Spirit, and whatever personal righteousness I might bring to the table counts as nothing. How wonderfully freeing is that! And yet our Lenten disciplines are not worthless because God can use them--and, indeed, God can lead us into undertaking them. 1 Cor. 9:24-27 alerts us that the power of God can tragically elude us if we're not careful. And so, aware of how easily we can become unloving, we strive to focus on seeking the Spirit's gifts of love, kindness, and gentleness which, in turn, show Christ.

Lincoln and Darwin

Interesting article about Lincoln and Darwin, both both 204 years ago today. http://soulache.posterous.com/?tag=abrahamlincoln

Popes in the News

Today's announcement of the upcoming resignation of Pope Benedict XVI made me think back to one of the very first news stories I remember: the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963, when I was six. We weren't Roman Catholic, and I didn't know what a pope was, but I was intrigued by what I thought was his last name: XXIII. I asked my mother about it and she explained it was Roman numerals.

Mom was more forthcoming about Roman numerals than she was, the previous summer, when the TV news reported the death of Marilyn Monroe. The reporter described her as a "sex symbol," and I asked Mom about that, too, but she thought that was something a five year old shouldn't know about!