Lent Devotional Series: Ash Wednesday and a Stomach in Knots

Ash Wednesday by Karl Spitzweg

Today marks the beginning of Lent.  Lent always seems like a new thing in my life because, although I was raised in the church, Lent was not part of my tradition growing up.  I knew Ash Wednesday was a day on the calendar and Palm Sunday was noted on the appropriate Sunday morning, but that was about as far as it went.  Truth be told, however, I was introduced to Lent about two decades ago by an Anglican friend and I began practicing it about 13 years ago, which is a bit more than a third of my life.  Looking at Lent always gives me a tiny knot in my stomach.  On one side, my Baptist upbringing still whispers in my ear that this sort of thing seems like outward religion, while the other side whispers that I need to step up my game and give up something really good this year.  The only way to remove the first knot is to replace it with the second and vice versa.  The Ash Wednesday readings gave me three alternative ways to eliminate the knots.  The knot is removed with a reminder of what the purpose of fasting actually is.  The knot is removed with a warning that fasting has a significant limitation.  The knot is removed with a blunt statement that I am in fact a sinner.  A sinner saved, most certainly, but a sinner nonetheless.         

Scripture Readings:
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17;Isaiah 58:1-12;Psalm 51:1-17;2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10;Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

The observance of Lent, as with any other form of fasting, is given a specific purpose by Joel.  According to the prophet Joel, fasting symbolizes turning back to God.  There is an implication here.  If I am returning to God, I must have at some point left him.  This sounds scary, like I am one of the backslidden Christians that I heard so much about as a child right up until my mid-twenties.  I always pictured something dramatic.  A man saying, “No more of this God nonsense.  I don’t believe in him any more.”  A woman saying, “God gets in the way of my fun.  I don’t want anything to do with him any more.”

Reality as I experienced it is much different than these imaginings, however.  My faith ebbs and flows.  During the ebbs I don’t need to dramatically turn away from God.  I gradually do it and don’t even realize it until my train is so far from the tracks that a course correction seems futile.  I hate these moments because I know that they are not sudden but they only feel that way.  This is why I am attracted to spiritual disciplines.  I don’t do them to make God love me.  I do them so I don’t forget that God loves me.  I value Ash Wednesday because it is a reminder that comes on every calendar I own that I need to examine myself and see if I am starting to veer off track now before I am completely off the rails.  The upcoming fast is a way to remind myself that I belong to God and that, in the words of Joel, he is gracious and merciful and wants me to return to him – even when I don’t know how I ended up being astray.

This is why I suggest that such a fast should be us giving up something good as a symbol of returning to God, rather than using this fast as an opportunity to give up a sin.  This is not to say that we should not give up something sinful that is in our lives.  In fact, I implore you and I hope you implore me to give up sin at any point we realize it is present.  This doesn’t seem to be fasting, however.  It looks like repentance and repentance is by design permanent (even if we have to try over and over again to see a permanent change).  Conversely, a fast is temporary by design.  I give up chocolate until Easter, for example, and can then enjoy chocolate again.  If I give up lying until Easter, as another example, I cannot then begin to enjoy lying again.  To do so would be to return to sin, rather than to return to God.  (Christianity Today published a list of the most popular things to give up for Lent according to what is trending on Twitter.  Some of these things are most certainly sins.  You can see the full list here: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/february/what-to-give-up-for-lent-2018-top-ideas-twitter-100.html)                                    

Even though it has a specific purpose, fasting does come with a limit.  Fasting, according to Isaiah is not simply an activity.  Instead, it is an activity with posture.  It seems that I can abstain from things – whether it is a specific abstention during Lent or something more generalized at other periods of time – but not really fast.  Some false fasts may be motivated by my own desire for personal pleasure or perhaps by the desire to pick a fight with someone.  They may be accompanied by me being unjust.  Isaiah then describes the characteristics of a true fast.  It is accompanied by humility and humility is characterized by defending people who are weak, by housing people who are homeless, and by feeding people who are hungry, among other similar things.  When such activities are present, true fasting occurs.

Isaiah 58 is a dangerous passage for me and, perhaps, for others who have similar vocations and ministries.  Homeless men have somewhere to sleep and hungry people have somewhere to eat because of the work the organization I work for does.  I can very easily read these verses and see a checklist of good deeds, check them off, and feel like God is happier with me than he is with those other religious people who can’t check off items from a list but who still observe Lent or fast at other periods.  It is very easy for me to drift into a place where I come up with a list of the good Christians and the bad Christians that I know, either personally or through different media sources.  Unsurprisingly and inevitably with such lists, the good Christians look quite a bit like me and the people with whom I agree.  

I should make two notes here.  First, I am not suggesting that Isaiah’s prophecy is causing me to sin. If it seems like scripture is leading me to sin – such as the pride I outlined above – the problem is with me and how I am using scripture, rather than scripture itself.  Second, when using these words from Isaiah in this inappropriate way, it is important to see how to avoid such a reaction.  My suggestion is to turn back to scripture, where we can look to see how to rightly read other portions.  In this case, Jesus’ warning in the first few verses of Matthew 6 is helpful.  For one thing, it tells me to make sure my motives are correct.  If I am keeping such lists, it is unlikely that I am coming at service with a pure motive.  Perhaps I am looking at my service as something more than it is.  Perhaps I am looking at another’s service as something less than it is.  Perhaps I am even judging another’s motive as less pure than my own.  In any case, it seems that my service for people in need is so someone knows how good a person I am, even if that someone is only me.  For another thing, it is quite possible that the people I am judging take Jesus’ words much more seriously than I do.  Maybe I am the left hand of these people, not having any idea what the right hand is doing.

The limitations of fasting seem to be inherent because of who is doing the fasting – me.  The effectiveness that fasting has as a symbol of my turning back to God is limited by whether I am actually returning to God with this discipline.  The limit is there because I am a sinner.  Knowing this is a strange relief as we begin to mark the season of Lent.  I know that I am in constant danger of using this season to boost my ego.  I also know that I am in constant danger of not making an actual sacrifice when I choose to give something up for Lent, but am instead giving up something I don’t really crave anyway.  I am a sinner, after all.  I can certainly take something that is good and distort it enough to make it bad.

The fact that I am a sinner is a key piece to Lent and the season to which it leads.  This should be obvious.  If I am going to return to God as Joel discusses, I must now be somewhere other than where God wants me to be.  The fact that I am a Christian and part of his Kingdom makes me no more immune to this than the Israelites of the Old Testament.  The New Testament, in fact, is full of Christians who have gotten themselves off-kilter, either slightly or otherwise.  If the Apostle Peter, the foundation of Jesus’ Church, has to be called to task by one of his Christian brothers, what hope do I have in avoiding such a moment?

The fact that I am a sinner is a key piece to Lent and the season to which it leads; it is not the central piece to Lent and Easter, however.  God’s gracious love is the central piece.  My sin makes Good Friday and Easter necessary for God to restore creation but they are not the natural consequence of my sin.  God could have been done with us.  Good Friday and Easter are the consequence of God’s love for us in spite of my sin.  Behind the beautiful lyrics of Psalm 51 is the understanding that God is the actor in forgiveness.  David, whose sin was great, can plead with God to “create a clean heart” in him or beg God to “renew a right spirit” in him, but it is God’s decision about whether that will actually occur.  Fortunately for David (and me too), God does create clean hearts and renew right spirits, even after horrendous sin.

Here we sit, on the first day of Lent – Ash Wednesday – and begin to contemplate our sin.  At this point, the knot in my stomach is greater than it was when I started to write.  In 44 days the knot will seem forever tangled.  In 46 it will be forever loosed.

Attribution for artwork: Spitzweg, Karl, 1808-1885. Ash Wednesday, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46722 [retrieved February 14, 2018]. Original source: http://www.yorckproject.de.

Scripture readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//lections.php?year=B&season=Lent 

Other Reading:
Unfolding of His Word: 1 Corinthians 13:3
A Change of Language