When I was a kid, Lent was a very special time. This is the church season that lasts for forty days leading up to Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and ending in Easter. Back then, we did not practice Anointing with Ashes on Ash Wednesday, that was something Catholics did. But we had to go to church every Wednesday evening for six weeks. As I remember, it was a communal celebration of the story of Jesus. He was always at the center doing things like healing the sick, teaching, telling stories and getting into trouble. Around him were his disciples and lots of people who wanted to follow him, but kept doing the wrong things. Then there were people who did not like what Jesus was doing and last but not least there were Romans who were in charge with lots of soldiers. A great cast of characters.
So every Sunday and Wednesday my Dad, the preacher, would present some episode of Jesus interacting with one or more of these people. Some of them, like the disciples, seemed to want to follow him but could never get things straight and did the wrong things. James and John wanted to do the right thing, but then asked to rule over people and Jesus really scolded them. Late in the story Peter denied knowing Jesus and Judas betrayed Jesus, who was eventually arrested and crucified. As a congregation of listeners, we were asked to see ourselves in this story and learn something about good and bad, but especially see the contrast between Jesus and all these characters. So in one case we might learn about the selfish son who asked for his inheritance and went away only to lose it all and end up tending pigs. That’s quite graphic. Or, as already mentioned, James and John had trouble getting the message. When they thought Jesus might come to worldly power, they wanted authority to rule over others. And of course there were bright spots where Jesus taught us how to pray, or told us what we needed to do to be blessed; like the merciful, or the pure in heart, or the peacemakers. The challenges were great, as in the story about the guy who had lots of money but loved it more than following Jesus. Then Jesus surprises us by saying it will be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. As kids we were not sure what that meant, other than it sounded like our day-dreaming about being rich didn’t fit in with following Jesus. That became all the more clear as it became apparent that Jesus was faithful to God, even to the point of suffering and dying.
As communal theatre, we were brought into the story, identified with all sorts of characters, whether they were good or bad, loyal or disloyal. Each week we saw another form of virtue or human failing and we were put in the shoes of one of these figures. Sometimes it was about how things will work in the Kingdom of God. The parable of the laborers in the vineyard always provoked outrage. You may recall that this is the parable where workers start at different times of the day, but at day’s end, they all get the same pay. At Sunday dinner we argued about that because it wasn’t fair. I think Dad was glad we were arguing about something important but he had to tell us to stop fighting. Lost in all the yelling was the idea that in the Kingdom we are not treated as the world treats us according to very limited views of what a person deserves. What happened was that we learned by seeing ourselves in all the characters, wondering what we would have done and, if we were listening, what we would do now: will we be merciful, peacemakers and faithful.
I often think of those days—it wasn’t just the services but the time between them as well since the images were impressed on our minds. I think it all represented a different form of piety. As I mentioned, it was a very communal process. Being Christian meant being members of the congregation and that meant showing up for Lenten services. Faith meant being faithful to God in terms of following Jesus. Such faithfulness was always seen in the context of my family, consisting of a brother and sister, parents, grandmother and great aunt, structured around the life of a Protestant minister and the seasons of the church. But I also lived in another world which presented other kinds of challenges. Five days a week I went to a large grade school on the north side of Chicago, where the students were split between Catholics, Protestants and Jews. None of my friends at school or on the block where we lived belonged to our church. I walked the commercial streets and saw the bright lights of movie shows and commercial shops. When my friends and I walked past bars and looked through the open doors we wondered what it was like in there. I would take the L—the elevated train system—which ran through the backyards of very poor neighborhoods, I saw such crowded conditions which I could not comprehend. One summer I ventured farther from our neighborhood to a park on my bike, where I was knocked down by an older boy who then rode off with my bike. My Father was very upset and took me to the police station where it was duly recorded but I never saw the bike again. When he mentioned this at church I was surprised to find I was some kind of hero. The event heightened the difference between the larger world and our church life, especially the intense practice of Lent. There, portrayed for all to see, was the fidelity of Jesus suffering on the cross. It was fairly clear to an impressionable schoolboy that there was a difference between this message of the faithful Jesus and the messages received from the public world around me. At the time I had no idea how to resolve the tensions, but I knew they existed. Jesus made it clear that I was living in two worlds and that I could not serve two masters. What was not clear was how to resolve that and I guess I am still working on it
That world has changed in important ways. We all know about the decline of organized religion, the closing of churches and loss of members. But consider some major changes in the way we think about religion. One is that for many people, the practice of religion is an individual matter, involving a single person and God. Or as is often said: “I’m interested in spirituality.” What this can mean is that individuals use worship and the resources of organized religion to support and strengthen their personal life. It is not a matter of building up the church and its mission, even if one goes to church now and then. Religion is to support my personal journey and, as a result, one selects those things that will benefit my spiritual development. So I hear a lot of journey talk: we are all on a journey, seldom together, and church is there to help you make your way. Why is this a problem? Well, for one thing, when the focus shifts to the individual’s journey, then participating in a congregation struggling to exist in a crazy world becomes less important. For another, the person on the journey is in charge. He/she is no longer called to be a follower and take up the way of Jesus, but to select from a market place of religious practices what he or she needs and wants.
Images of being on a journey are very common and appear across the religious spectrum. Some of them are good: they allow us to connect with people by respecting differences between people and where they are at. People find themselves at different places along the journey of life. And of course the most famous devotional book in Protestantism is Pilgrim’s Progress, which conceives the life of faith as, guess what: a journey. My concern about the term is that it isolates believers from one another. You have your journey and I have mine. Most important, I fear it tends to view Jesus as the teacher/guide along the way who provides aid and points to the way. When this happens, it minimizes the broad affirmation that Jesus is more than a travel guide, but the one who transforms us and joins us into a new spiritual life that is best described as new life in him. This explains the preference for talking about rebirth and how Jesus is living water or the bread of life. If you want some backup for this, consider the work of E. P. Sanders, who concludes that the most distinctive theme in Paul’s writings in the New Testament is that of participation in Christ. In other words, Christian faith is about being part of the life of Christ and that means participating in the community of Christ. Another helpful reference would be William Evans’ study of the Reformed tradition (i.e., Protestants influenced by John Calvin rather than Martin Luther). He concludes that the distinctive thing about this tradition is being united with Christ, and that union involves the community of Christ. Now, I don’t want to overdo this. There is a place for each believer to ask about the state of his/her soul, to consider ways in which the gifts of Christ change, support and elevate the individual. In the gospels, Jesus does and says things that speak to that all the time. But it is always in the context of taking up one’s cross and following Jesus.
Let me put it this way: for several decades, books on purpose have been very popular in prompting people to bust out of confinement to narrow or negative goals. But whose purpose and what purpose are we talking about. Is purpose just a psychological concept to help people expand their vision or improve their lives according to our cultural standards—some of which are the source of our problems? Our culture associates happiness with acquiring more things, making more money and moving up the social ladder, with little regard for whether this leaves lots of people with little access to such goals. So when we talk about purposes or goals, which goals do we have in mind? Those of the Kingdom or those of a consumer driven world? By contrast, I understand the gospel to be a call to be transformed by the grace of God, not a self-help strategy.
In an article in the New York Times, David Brooks discussed how people use personal stories to define themselves. He then asked “Yet if the quality of our self-stories is so important, where do we go to learn the craft of self-narration? Shouldn’t there be some institution that teaches us to revise our stories through life, so we don’t have to suffer for years and wind up in therapy?” (3) Is not the answer to the question, for Jews and Christians, the synagogue and the church? Let’s unpack that. First, by this I mean that our self-stories reflect interests, values and commitments we inherit and create by ourselves. They may embody what is good about our culture and our lives, but they also embody some of the bias, self-interest and corruptions of a broken world. If this is so, the question then becomes: by what norms and standards are we going to evaluate our self-stories? What is needed is a new point of departure to enable us to move beyond our culture wars and social-political alignments. Unless this happens, the craft of evaluating our self-stories does not produce much change because we are confined to private bubbles, claiming innocence and repeating the same old stories without a new point of departure.
Lent offers something quite different. By hearing the story of Jesus we are confronted with the fact that we still have not resolved the tensions between the Rule of God and the ways of the world, with all its brokenness, violence and warfare. What Lent declares is that Christianity is not a three step program or a process we manage. It is a crisis. And it is created by Jesus when he tells us we can’t serve two masters. We must choose. The choice is between repentance and trust in God in contrast to some combination of our values and the powers of the world. Now here’s the hard part: Repentance as turning to God and trusting the Rule of God are not a work that earns us salvation. Salvation is a gift. That’s why the story of Jesus is a call to lose your old life and be born again, or to center your life not in the world’s ways but in Christ. In the end, the choice is to receive life by grace.
(1)Cf. E.P. Sanders, The Historial Figure of Jesus, (London: Penguin, 1993).
(2)Cf. William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology, (Eugene, OR., Wipf and Stock, 2008).
(3) Cf. David Brooks, “Self-Awareness May Be Just a Mirage,” New York Times, September 16, 2021, A23.