Lent 2B

Lent 2B

March 4, 2012

The Rev. Marguerite Alley

  

“ For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Mark 8:33-34

For a few years Lent was a very troubling time for me personally. While it has always been one of my favorite seasons of the church year, it has not always been a time that I looked forward to because I am not very good about denying myself. When I was growing up I had many Catholic friends. Lent was a time when the entire family was engaged in a church “activity” if you will. Everyone openly discussed what they “were giving up” and helped remind each other to stick to their promise. There was a little competition sometimes amongst teens to give up something really important to them and therefore prove beyond doubt who was the most devoted. Of course chocolate was at the top of that list along with drinking soda, listening to the radio, and the all time favorite (especially of parents) swearing. The part that made me begin to dread Lent was the family part. My family was not “into” church like I was. So when I made a Lenten promise, I was pretty much on my own to keep it. My youth group friends tried to be supportive but they were little help on Wednesday when I was rummaging through my room looking for lost Halloween candy because I wanted chocolate more than life itself. I realized that it was hard to keep that promise alone and that I needed a support group to help me keep that promise. So, as Lent approached, I could feel myself begin to feel somewhat down, because I knew I would have to endure the 40 days, basically alone. That was back in the days when we Episcopalians kept our faith to ourselves and would never dream about talking about it with others!

Well, we Americans are nothing if not an ingenious lot. Sometime back a great church leader probably felt sorry for all of us who were feeling down in Lent; or maybe it was a teenage theologian who offered this as a way to take the sting out of what was intended to be a “learning experience”. I am not sure who it was, but somewhere along the line, it was suggested we didn’t need to give anything up. Maybe we could take on something instead. So, we started making promises like, “ I will read the Bible every day”, “I will spend 10 minutes thanking God for all my blessings”, “I will get up 30 minutes earlier and exercise each day” and so forth. So we went from being a little down about having given up our favorite thing, to being exhausted, sore, and confused about how to be thankful for cancer.

All of this nonsense is a scheme. It is a scheme created by some well- meaning church leader to help us understand this concept of denying ourselves.

Being Americans, it is easy for us to forget that the entire world does not see things the way that we do. We are after all the land of plenty, the land where the streets are paved with gold. We are not really very good with the whole “deny ourselves” idea, are we? And our current culture is certainly no help either. Everything is made out to be the absolute best, the biggest, the most economical. Every product is such that you must have it or risk being left behind, left out or left over. So when Jesus tells us to deny ourselves, within a nano second, we are bombarded with 52 ads about how that would be bad for our health, bad for our complexion, bad for your sex life, bad for your marriage, bad for your kids, bad for your dog, your yard, your house. Denial just isn’t in our make up. (Unless of course you are a politician, a public official or a loan officer). We have a hard time denying ourselves because unlike the ads we see on television we can find no immediate benefit to our family, our income, and ourselves. We cannot deny ourselves until we know “what is in it” for us.

Not knowing what we “get” out of this denial suggests that we are so self centered that we cannot even imagine ourselves doing something, just because it is the right thing to do, or the thing that Jesus suggests would be best for us. It smacks of some kind of deep- seated need to be the center of the universe and have the world revolve around us. I don’t like to see myself this way, yet there is plenty of evidence of this truth all around me. We can’t control our eating at times, I can’t seem to make myself get up 30 minutes earlier, we can’t slow down and stop feeling so impatient. We can’t imagine what life must be like for that person, because we already know she is homeless because she made bad choices in her life. I cannot remember what it was like to be told: “stop being a baby, you are too old to act this way” and “what were you thinking! You are not old enough to make that decision!” all in the same day. We cannot understand why young people can’t see that 15 years from now they will understand why we are holding them accountable now. We can’t make our kids get up and come to church, it is the only morning we have together as a family. Has it never occurred to us that getting up and coming to church together and then going out to share a meal together rather than everyone sleeping in, in their own room, doing their own thing, might be the most cherished time our family spends together? Have we not figured out that sometimes the pay-off is a little down the road? For goodness sake, we can’t leave our cell phones at home or even just turn them off during worship. My goodness,  I guess I  am the center of the universe! Let’s proclaim it loud and clear folks! We are the most important people on the planet! There now, don’t you feel better? It feels good to tell the truth, because that is what we think of ourselves. We may not say it out loud, but deep down, we act that way…and just as we teach our children, we know that actions do speak louder than words. We cannot deny ourselves anything. We aren’t wired for it.

There is a deeper and more disturbing truth here though. Having established that we cannot deny ourselves and looked at some of the ways in which we place ourselves above everyone and everything around us, let’s look at what is to me the single most important truth born from this lesson. In not denying ourselves any of the little things that we have come to cherish through familiarity and habit, we deny ourselves THE ONE THING WE ABSOLUTELY CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT. By denying ourselves the chance to let go  of some of the trappings of modern life, if only for 75 minutes once a week, we are denying ourselves the chance to actually engage in a relationship with the one who created us. We are denying ourselves the chance to know some measure of peace in our lives, to feel as though our lives have meaning and purpose, to set an example in word and deed for our children to find meaning in their lives as well. To deny ourselves the opportunity at a real relationship that comes from familiarity, faithfulness and discovery is to deny ourselves the greatest gift of all, the most expensive and priceless, the most beneficial to our health, the one that sets us apart from the others. Wow! We need to make that into a commercial!

So it is not that we are incapable of self-denial. We deny ourselves, our TRUE selves every day. We deny our true nature every day. It is our nature to be in community, not to be alone. We deny ourselves support when we cannot talk about our struggles, when we don’t share our wisdom and our experience with those who most need it. We deny ourselves the chance to hear God’s voice gently speaking to us, because God’s voice is softer than the ring tone on your cell phone.  We deny ourselves the chance to have a glimpse of the Christ because we cannot allow ourselves a single moment of discomfort, anxiety or fear.

So as it turns out, we are capable of denying ourselves after all.

Today more than ever in my lifetime, we need our community of faith. As our economy struggles to right itself, and our friends struggle to make ends meet, we see clearly that we cannot go this alone. We cannot turn our backs to those outside our doors; we cannot batten down the hatches and weather the storm. We need all hands on deck. We need to be encouraging one another and caring for each other. More importantly, we need to be willing to stop denying ourselves the greatest gift we have been offered.

So when we read, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” let us remember that to deny ourselves does not mean to live without our most important relationship. It is to live without some of the little things we have added along to way to make ourselves feel better about denying our relationship with God. To deny ourselves is to let go some of the things that we have used to try and fill the God space, and that have come up woefully lacking and have made us feel strangely more empty. To deny ourselves some little substitute is to make a home in our lives for God.