Tag: Lent
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
5 Counterfeit Gods: A Reflection from Julie Pfister
It’s Ash Wednesday, the day the Lenten season begins. Lent is a time when we imitate Jesus’ own time of testing in the wilderness by confronting the sin and idols in our own lives.
We will observe Lent this year by preaching on the themes in Tim Keller‘s book Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Some of you have insinuated my blog could use a ladies’ touch. Well, here to prove I’m responsive and always a good listener, to reflect on the book, I’ve asked Julie Pfister, one of the most authentic Christians I know, to blog her way through the book.
I have had them myself; stickers on my shiny new SUV (not new or shiny anymore) showing that my family was on its way. A few of the right schools, waiting and hoping for that empty spot on the back window to have just the right University stickered to it showing the world just how smart and perfect the little family that I had made was.
Like most of us, I didn’t realize it as it was happening. Pride, like any other idol can be insidious, and so difficult to spot. But my children, my seemingly perfect little family was on its way. I wanted room in my car to carry around the whole hockey team. I wanted my kids to want to have their friends come to my home where I could serve up the milk and cookies.
They did for a while. Then, things started to awry. As Keller put it, its not that I loved my children too much, I just didn’t have any room left in my heart or time in my schedule (or theirs) for God. I wanted my children to be happy, successful, loving and to love me! Perhaps it is partly because of the culture I grew up in that the desire for the perfect little family was so important. Having happy, successful, smart, athletic, caring, loving children would validate me as a person – especially since I had quit my job and “sacrificed” (oh please) my career to raise my kids.
Like any false idol, it didn’t take long for the cracks in my perfect little life to really start to show. My children and family are a wonderful gift and precious blessing to me, but I learned a long time ago, what Keller reminded us, that until or unless we stop trying to map out perfect little lives for our children, and trust God to be their God in the inevitably bumpy and even tragic path that HE has for them, we will be brought to our knees.
Do we pray that they will be Humble, shunning the world and the trappings of success and searching for God? How do we view others children who go off the chosen accepted cultural track…high school, college, graduate degree, career, family, Do we think that there is something wrong if our children “choose” a different path? Are we not quick to give a qualifying response when we tell someone that our son or daughter is not in college? How honest can we be with each other when people ask how we are? How is Sally….Can we really just honestly pray that they will know God? Will we or they be ok if we pray that God will use them, that they will seek God and God will seek them…..if that means that they go against the cultural norms? How can we as parents hope that God will break our children’s hearts so they can be desperate for HIM. Do we trust God enough to want that sort of brokenness for them? What if we pray that our children KNOW God? Do we trust him with the pieces of their broken hearts? Do we trust Him to ???? It is so counter-intuitive for me as a mother for my children to want to feel the emptiness and desperation that I have felt. Do I want my children in the pit of despair?
That same pit that Christ reached down and pulled me out of and set my feet on firm ground and put a new song in my heart! I loved teaching at the Day School. With each new class I always felt a twinge of envy along with the joy of meeting the bright and shiny precious, babies and the hopeful, loving parents that brought them. I wondered how they might feel if their child called them something horrible and told them they hated them.
I hoped and prayed that their child would never get beaten to within an inch of his life or disappear for days and weeks at a time. I wanted to go all Isaiah on them and belt out….Get on your knees NOW and study and learn all that you can….not from Dr. Spock but from the Author of their Life….the Ultimate Educator….so that you are as ready and STEEPED in God and His Word that “when the rest of life unravels” He and his Word will be such a part of your fabric that you will not.
Some people still tell me, hoping to not offend, that I used to remind them of Barbie….Unless I missed the happily broken, God fearing, Grace loving, sinner Barbie, there is no resemblance.
2 Jesus Farts: A Lenten/Valentine Meditation for My Wife
The incarnation is one of the primary theological convictions of the Christian faith.
We believe the Holy Spirit “overshadowed” Mary and, through her, God took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. That’s our claim at Christmas. As St Athanasius put it, God became what we are so that we might become like God.
God became what we are. In all its dirty, unpleasant particularity. Jesus was fully human, as the Nicene Creed says. Not mostly human. Not pretty much human with all the crappy, embarrassing or difficult parts left out.
Most often we use words like incarnation or we talk about ‘God taking flesh’ without getting down to specifics about what that entailed or included. It’s like when it comes to the incarnation, there’s a subconscious part of us that screams: ‘Stop: TMI!’
The Gnostics, early Christian heretics, were the first to get squeamish about the implications of incarnation. The idea of God taking up residence in a human body just seemed unseemly once they stopped to consider all the dirty little goings on in their bodies during the average day.
Unseemly or not, the Church has always stood against Gnosticism and the various other heresies that have wanted to put an asterisk after that part of the creed ‘and became truly human.’
Like it or not, in Jesus God had a body just like yours.
Jesus may have been without sin, but he wasn’t without boogers. Jesus not only wept, you can bet your @#$ that he wiped his @#$. There aren’t any Carols about it (future undertaking?) but part of what we’re professing at Christmas is that Mary’s boy (aka: Lord of Hosts) grew up to spit,, poop and fart. He had moles on his skin, dirt on his feet and underneath his fingernails, and a smell that I’m sure his mom could recognize on his clothes. Contrary to Dan Brown, I don’t think Jesus had a thing with Mary Magdalene, but since he was fully human, you can be sure he didn’t escape puberty without a______________.
In a sense then, such things as farting are profoundly powerful theological expressions, for they convey God’s absolute solidarity with us in the incarnation. Just as water signifies the invisible grace of our justification and just as wine and broken bread signify Christ’s atoning work, so too is farting a sort of olifactory sacrament, signifying God’s absolute identification with us, TMI and all, in the incarnation.
As I tell my wife, ‘it may smell bad and be immature-according to your bourgeoise, Victorian, elitist standards- but what I smell…is the totality of salvation.’
Problem is, my wife doesn’t like it. The farting.
And that’s a problem.
Because, after all, my love for her is also supposed to be a sacrament, a visible sign of how God loves us.
And- okay it’s a bad analogy- just as Christ gave up his life out of his love for us, so too should I be willing to freely give up what I so frequently squeak out. Out of our love for her.
So this Lenten season, while other believers give up chocolate, porn, meat or drinking, I will be doing my ascetic best to give up farting.
I don’t want to puncture any images of holiness, decorum and perfection you might already have associated with me, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think Jesus probably had it easier in the wilderness than I will over the next 40 days.