A Taste of the Faithful Life
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Giving Up Lent for Lent
“This year I’m giving up Lent for Lent.”
It sounds like a comedian’s joke, but I’ve heard it said by real ministers of the gospel (and not just by sneering “evangelicals” who don’t practice Lent anyway but want to score imaginary points against those who do).
Lent is supposed to be a time of self-reflection and spiritual renewal in the days before we pass through the horrors of Holy Week and celebrate the joy of Resurrection Sunday.
There’s nothing wrong with giving up something we enjoy (such as chocolate) during Lent. Self-denial is about learning the proper place of things that are good but not essential. We deny ourselves the joy of some good so that we can discover what is not only good but essential.
We can take it too far, of course, and focus on what we’re giving up rather than on what we’re gaining from the experience. And sometimes the whole exercise just feels like it’s too much to endure.
As we stagger out of our pandemic shelters and vaguely wonder if we can go maskless in this situation or that, Lent feels more like a weight holding us down than something that will raise us up. Would it be wrong to give it up this year?
This is the first spring in 30 years that I have not been in some sort of pastoral role during Lent. I don’t have to worry about worship planning or sermon preparation or most any kind of spiritual leadership. I am responsible for my own Lenten journey alone. No others will look to my example.
So my Lent has been disorganized, scattershot, probably not nearly as fruitful as it could have been. After having my forehead marked on Ash Wednesday, I have observed no special spiritual exercises – nothing beyond my ordinary habits of prayer, devotional reading and a bit of study if a question comes up.
I have done, basically, what I suspect most lay people in the church do every Lent. Maybe it’s enough for them. This year, I think it’s enough for me.
After only nine months of retirement from pastoral ministry, Linda and I are still struggling to get back into the habit of Sunday morning worship. We have ties to many churches, we want to renew relationships with people in them all, and getting around to them all takes time.
We also have a new grandson three hours or so away (and the remnants of a nasty cold he passed on the last time we visited; kid germs are toxic to adults). Some mornings, it’s just hard to get to church.
(Note to pastors: If you don’t understand how hard it is for many people to get out of bed on Sunday morning, your lack of understanding could be crippling your ministry.)
We’ll eventually get back into the habit of regular public worship. Next year, maybe I’ll observe a “proper” Lent, whatever that may be. This year I’m content to give up Lent for Lent.
Self-denial during Lent is about giving up something valuable to gain a better appreciation of something essential. Lent itself is valuable but not essential. Heartfelt worship and devotion to God are essential. I’m content to give up Lent now if that leads me toward greater worship and devotion.
May God bless your Lenten journey and fill your heart with joy on Easter!
Church+State=Disaster
If you are still unsure about the wisdom of entwining church and state, you should look at Russia.
It is good that the Russian Orthodox Church has rebounded after years of oppression under Communist leadership. It is bad that the church has now climbed into bed with a different authoritarian government.
Patriarch Krill (Cyrill) is a longtime ally of “Vlad the Impaler” Putin. A short time ago Krill gave the church’s blessing to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Brutal military tactics featuring atrocities against civilians, a vicious program of destruction that leaves nothing worthwhile standing – not to mention a totally baseless and fictional rationale for the attack itself: Krill blesses it all.
He shares with Putin a love of “traditional values,” Russian style, and a hatred of all things from the morally degraded West, especially anything related to that gravest of all possible sins, homosexuality.
Maybe that’s why so many “evangelicals” in America proclaim their love for Putin. He hates some of the same things they do, and “evangelicals” typically go ga-ga over authoritarian types like Putin, who loves to strip off his shirt to show off his hairless, manly chest.
There are 260 Orthodox Christians in the world, perhaps 100 million of them Russian Orthodox. Ukraine has about 30 million Orthodox believers of various stripes, including an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church that Krill considers apostate.
But Ukraine is central to Russian nationalist mythology and now Russian Orthodox religious mythology, too, so it appears Putin and Krill are intent on destroying Ukraine in order to save it.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has called for the Russian Orthodox Church to be expelled from the World Council of Churches. That seems no more likely than Russia being expelled from the United Nations Security Council, which exists mostly to keep the world’s biggest nations from blowing us all up.
It is sickening to see a major Christian figure drop all pretense of “just war” theology and not only defend but encourage a clearly unjust war. Such is our world today, as it always has been and will be until Christ returns again. This is what happens – always – when church and state become intertwined. State wins. Church turns idolatrous. Witness for Christ is forever stained.
Vlad the Impaler Reborn
The real Count Dracula was a far cry from the campy figure we know from the movies.
Vladimir Dracula was a vicious ruler of Romania in the 15th century. He was known as Vlad the Impaler.
The latest reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler is Vlad Putin. He seeks to restore Russia to its former “glory” by crushing all opposition to his dreams of empire, especially people who have shown an appreciation of democracy.
Ukraine is in his sights because it seeks to be independent of his despotic rule. The democratic impulse there must be ruthlessly crushed, lest others think they can get away with even thinking about self rule.
Ukrainians are putting up a valiant fight against overwhelming odds. Their heroism is inspiring. The targeting of civilian populations and other war crimes committed by Russian forces are sickening.
Also sickening is the support Putin is getting from Trump the Traitor and his mindless minions.
If it is true that democracy is on the ropes today, it is because of Trump’s relentless assaults on truth and lawful rule, and the support he gets from most quarters in the GOP.
Trump is one of Putin’s boldest enablers. You wonder whether Putin has something really damaging to hold over him, or whether Trump is so totally self-absorbed that he cares nothing at all about others, or whether he is simply dumber than a brick.
Or maybe all of the above.
Trump the Traitor and Vlad the Impaler are evil twins. Pray that neither achieve their dreams of domination.
Reconstructing Your Faith
Deconstruction is a hot topic these days. So-called evangelicals are hotly against it, of course, because what people are deconstructing is the phony-baloney pop religion evangelicals pass off as genuine Christianity.
Deconstruction is the process of examining your faith critically to determine if it still makes sense to you, and if it doesn’t to wonder why, and to seek something better to replace it.
To those who have been attending churches where you are expected to check your brain at the door and blindly follow whatever the local cult leader tells you, this process almost inevitably leads to destruction. That’s why so many evangelical leaders are so solidly against it. They have nothing to gain by it, and a lot to lose.
So much for Anselm’s notion that Christianity is “faith seeking understanding.” To so many evangelicals, it’s more like “faith avoiding understanding.”
And, having been nourished so long on watery skim milk of evangelicalism rather than the nourishing solid food of the genuine gospel, many who follow the process of deconstruction end up in destruction.
That is, they renounce Christianity entirely, or they retire to a languid “spiritual but not religious” passivity.
However, true deconstruction should lead to reconstruction. It should lead to reformation.
It’s often been described as a three-step process: orientation, disorientation, reorientation. Other terms are sometimes used, but the process is the same.
Orientation is where you start. You know where you are. You know what you believe. Until one day, you realize that you don’t. You don’t recognize your faith anymore. You don’t recognize yourself anymore.
You are now officially in disorientation. It’s a tough place to be in, but it still holds promise. It’s time to start examining things. Time to see where you really stand. Time to discern what you really believe. Time to learn whom you really trust.
And if the one you trust is not Jesus, you may be stuck in disorientation more or less forever. If you discover that you really don’t trust wholly in Jesus, you may end up in destruction, or what 1 Timothy 1:19 describes as spiritual shipwreck.
But if you can discover that you really do trust wholly in Jesus, and not in some cobbled-together fundamentalist construct of him, then you are on the road to reorientation. You are on the Way to learning how to follow Jesus and live the exciting life he promises.
Some have described this as a “second naivete.” You trust in Jesus more than ever before, but now you have a firm foundation for your trust. You trust the person, not some doctrine. You have worked your way through all the complications of discerning the truth about God and life, and you have landed on the other shore with a simple but unshakable trust in God through Christ.
That’s what deconstruction should be all about. Evangelicals oppose it for the same reason that they oppose any form of doubt. Doubt properly pursued leads to understanding. Deconstruction properly pursued leads to understanding, to profound trust in God, to the eternal life that Jesus promised we could enjoy starting right now if only we trust in him.
Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Jesus said the truth will set you free. You’ll find the truth in Jesus, but you may have to examine your life to find him.
Apartheid is Coming
Republican cancel culture (the original and only real kind) now targets books – specifically books that might be read by impressionable young readers, specifically any book that in any way challenges the rule of white supremacy and hints that people of color may have any legitimate role in society above that of servant or slave.
Maus, which concerns the Holocaust, is one of the latest targets. It concerns Jews, whom Republicans are more careful to delegitimize lest they lose votes in key elections.
But, as the recent episode with Whoopi Goldberg shows, race is a societal construct. It is only as real as the ruling society requires that it be. Just as the Nazis created the notion of a Jewish “race,” and set out to exterminate it, now Republicans are working to construct another “race,” and to make sure members of this group are never allowed in any position of power.
The key piece of this strategy is denying members of that “race” access to the ballot box. In Republican-led state after state, laws have been passed to make sure that fewer and fewer Black voters are allowed to vote, either through ballot restrictions or gerrymandering.
Some observers connect this to Trump’s lies about losing the 2020 election. Republicans are obsessed with “election security.” But in the Republican playbook, a “secure election” is one in which certain people cannot vote.
Trump is just the smokescreen. This is a strategy planned long ago. And its goal is apartheid.
It has long been known that “white” people soon will be in a minority in this country, compared with people of color. What will happen to whites when they are in the minority rather than the majority?
Nothing will happen – if laws can be passed now to make sure that the new majority cannot have any influence on public policy. Nothing will happen to whites if they make sure that no matter how small a minority they become, they are always still in power because of laws they passed now, while they are still a narrow majority.
So in the next five to ten years, we will see more and more attempts by Republicans to restrict Black voters especially, but also Hispanic voters and others deemed unacceptable – Democrats, say.
Republicans will never be so brazen (that is, honest) as to pass a law that says Democrats cannot vote. But they will gerrymander and otherwise rig all future elections so that Democrats can never be in the majority anywhere, and therefore that the Republican program of erecting an apartheid society can be enacted.
You scoff. Scoff now, while scoffing is still legal. Read Maus now, while it’s still legal. A day of reckoning is coming, unless Americans of integrity arise and stop the GOP plan to make a new Amerika, an apartheid state.
It’s already been rejected by Abingdon Press, the United Methodist publishing house. It says it has other similar works already in process. I’ve always given Abingdon the right of first refusal on all my book proposals, and I’ve always been rejected. I think it’s time to put some other publisher at the top of my query list.
* * * * *
Three KU profs are under fire for allegedly faking their Native American ancestry. Kansas City Star columnist Yvette Walker confesses that her family also had unconfirmed stories about a Blackfoot ancestor.
“For as long as I can remember, I believed I had Native ethnicity,” she writes. “I even thought I knew which tribe I supposedly belonged to because it was a part of my family’s oral history.” To test the family memory, she took a Family DNA test. Turns out family oral history was wrong.
My family also has an oral tradition that a woman several generations back was Native American. Not exactly the classic “Cherokee princess” story, but close enough.
I’m about all who’s left to carry on family oral tradition, and my searches on Ancestry.com have found nothing to corroborate this story. I once assumed that it was because racists in my family conveniently “forgot” about the Indian ancestor until it became more socially acceptable to claim her, but by then all details were lost in time. Maybe it was a myth all along.
I did have an uncle who was Native. He married into the family. Sadly, he died relatively young as an alcoholic.
Whether I have any “Indian blood” in me matters less than how I view and treat Native Americans. Since childhood I have been fascinated by various Indian cultures. The more I learn about the genocide campaign against Native tribes, the more I am appalled by the tragedy of racism.
If you’re interested in learning more, I suggest reading The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. Actually, I wasn’t capable of reading all of it. I had to skim parts. It’s well written, but many parts will simply break your heart.
* * * * *
Back to school time nears already. Where did the summer go? Weren’t summers longer back in the “good old days”? Granted, summer child care can be a chore for busy parents. Maybe advancing age fools me on the passage of time, but I wonder if today’s kids suspect they’re being cheated of days in the sun.
Linda and I just bought school supplies for a Spring Hill 9th grader. We deliberately did not keep track of how much it cost. I can’t imagine the expense of having two kids in high school right now, let alone one. Tell me: Why does any high schooler need five two-inch three-ring binders?