Scriptures: Matthew 4:1-11; Matthew 5:33-37
I’ve been thinking about Lent recently. Ash Wednesday service to prepare for. Something for the newsletter. Some sermons coming up over the weeks ahead, definitely a sermon to think about for today, the first Sunday in Lent. So I was looking through various things I have stored in my computer that relate to Lent, and I came across some ideas I had written down one year back when we were worshiping at JABA. We must not have been able to use the room at JABA on Ash Wednesday that year, because we were observing Ash Wednesday in various homes, or maybe we just decided that’s what we wanted to do that year. In any case, I think I was asked to provide some resources for the people who would be leading the worship in the homes, an outline for worship or at least some guidelines or ideas.
One of the things I discovered I had said in the message I sent out to the worship leaders—I didn’t remember I had said this—was about the scripture we heard this morning about Jesus’ time in the wilderness, the story of his temptation by Satan. It’s a typical reading for the beginning of Lent—the lectionary always assigns it for the first Sunday in Lent— but we were using it for Ash Wednesday that year. And what I had written to people was that this was a story in which Jesus said no to various things the devil put in front of him, and that maybe the people in the various groups, could spend some time sharing their thoughts about the question, “What do we need to say no to?” “What do I need to say no to?
I don’t know as anyone thought that was a good idea. I don’t think any of the groups actually discussed that, at least no one told me they did. But when I read it going through my saved Lenten files this year, I thought it was a good idea. To be honest I’ve always had some trouble relating to the story of Jesus’ temptations. They are after all his temptations, not mine. Twice the devil begins by asking Jesus to prove his divine status saying, “If you are the Son of God…” If you are the Son of God prove it by turning stones into bread, prove it by jumping from the top of the temple and having angels rescue you. The third time Jesus is offered all the kingdoms of the world if he will worship Satan.
None of this bears any obvious relation to the kinds of things that I would immediately recognize as a temptation in my own life, like for instance that bowl of ice cream before bedtime. I don’t mean to be trivial about it, but I just mean to say there’s a lot of distance between the temptations of Jesus and anything I would easily identify with in my own life. With some work maybe we can make that connection, but it takes some work, and the results have never been too convincing to me. I feel like there’s this great distance between me and the scripture.
But maybe one way to overcome that distance is not to try to make that direct connection between Jesus’ temptations and our own but just to let the scripture ask us what our own temptations are. OK so they are not the same as Jesus’. But what are they? And another way to ask that question might be to ask ourselves what it is that we need to say no to. And that question actually resonates with me on several levels.
For one thing it resonates with what I was trying to say Wednesday night at the Ash Wednesday service, and let me quickly try to summarize that in different words. We are all aware of the human cost of the ailing economy. For some people it is a matter of having their financial portfolios not looking nearly as good as they did just a short time ago and of being a little anxious maybe but also of being patient until the economy recovers. For other people the economic downturn has meant disaster and economic recovery is a much more urgent matter. For all of us then, not to treat economic recovery as an urgent matter would be to have a callous disregard for those who the economy is treating most harshly.
Economic recovery is obviously needed. But what Lent has caused me to think is that economic recovery should not mean just assuming that what we are aiming at is a return to the way things were.
We need to say no to the idea that since prosperity is good the more of it you have, the better off you are.
We need to say no to the idea that the whole idea of the economy is to maximize wealth and profits and celebrate constant and frequent new highs in the stock market. We need some new measures of what economic health consists of, like whether our energy consumption is being reduced. Like whether the gap between the most wealthy and the least wealthy people is going down. Like how available and affordable health care is.
We need to say no to the idea of an economy that, if it is healthy, is supposed to get always bigger and bigger, faster and faster.
We need to say no to the idea of an economic recovery that imagines nothing different than recovering the state of affairs we had before.
We need to say no to out-of-control growth not just in Charlottesville but everywhere. I know it’s not so easy to make that happen, but Lent tells me this year that thoughts such as these need to be thought, and spoken. They are thoughts in the spirit of Lent, I believe, although you may think it’s a long way from Jesus refusing to turn stones into bread to what I have been saying here. I agree that’s a big jump, but I do think there’s a connection here.
In quite a different mindset, a growing number of religious writers in recent years have been urging us to recover the idea of Sabbath. At first blush that might seem sort of a strange thing to be advocating. No one really observes a Sabbath any more, except a few people whose religion is either old fashioned, very strict, or ultra serious. I actually lived and served a church just before I came here in a south suburban area of Chicago that had been settled by people who practiced a version of Christianity known as Dutch Reformed, now it’s called Christian Reformed. There was a village actually called South Holland which still retains much of the original Dutch Reformed culture, and part of that culture was Sabbath observance. In the late twentieth century South Holland still shut down its commercial establishments and most public places on Sunday. But then the Christian Reformed churches were backward—I guess behind the times would be a nicer expression—in many ways. They had still not decided, for instance, whether it was ok for women to vote in church meetings, mind you the issue was not whether women should serve as pastors, which would have been bad enough, but whether women could vote. Our UCC church, which I assure you was not a cutting edge kind of church, was considered a bunch of flaming liberals in that context. In any case, South Holland’s attempt to hold on to Sabbath observance seemed to be part of their effort to hold on to a whole religious approach which was very strict and seriously outdated. About the best I could think of to say about Sabbath observance in that context was that it was “quaint”.
And maybe raising the question of Sabbath observance to some people will have something of that connotation of being quaint, or out-dated, or strict, or joyless. On the other hand, with a moment’s thought I can easily understand why some thoughtful people think we ought to recover the idea of Sabbath and even if we aren’t ready to actually observe a Sabbath to at least give the idea some thought.
I don’t know how many times I have had someone say to me that one of their biggest problems is that they have not learned how to say “no”, or something to that effect, the gist of it being that many people feel they say yes too often to too many people and end up feeling stressed and stretched in way too many directions, too many things on your mind, too many things to do and places to go, too much to get done in too little time, too little time to yourself, too little time to be rather than do, too little time for pure delight, as opposed to being productive.
Various studies have confirmed this impression. They show that enormous percentages of people take work home with them evenings, and on weekends, and take it with them on vacation. They show that people have computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices with them just about all the time so that one is never really disconnected from work. This may not be your story, but what we know from personal impressions and the official studies is that some version of this story is true for a great many people.
Leaving the ten commandments out of it for the time being (keeping the Sabbath is number 4), leaving aside the approach that sets out a bunch of rules about what you can’t do on the Sabbath, leaving not only religion out of it but leaving God out of it for the time being, I am not surprised that some people have taken it upon themselves to urge the rest of us to declare a Sabbath for ourselves. Mostly society won’t do it for us. Mostly churches won’t do it for us. So, these people are saying, you need to do it yourself. Set some boundaries between your work life (whether it’s paid work or volunteer) set some boundaries between your work life and your non-work life, or differently put, make sure you have a real non-work life. Put a stop to the relentless demands put upon you, including those you put on yourself. Learn to say no to at least some of the claims being made upon you. If you’re not quite ready to observe a whole day of Sabbath, at least find some way to create some non-productive, non-useful, non goal-oriented space in your life. It will be good for your soul.
That’s what I hear a small but, as I say, increasing number of people saying these days, talking about, writing about. There are some ironies here though. For one thing there really is a certain enticement about a busy, even an overly busy lifestyle. Apart from the fact that sometimes the demands made on us are not really in our control if we want to keep our job, there is a certain appeal to having lots to do and lots of requests being made of us. It means we are in demand, that we are needed, that what we have to offer is useful, all those good types of things.
It really is a temptation to say yes to too many people too many times. It’s not so much a matter of feeding the ego—well it is a matter of feeding the ego, but not in an egotistical sense. Just ask anyone who has stopped having things expected of them, has stopped being asked to do things, who no longer is consulted on things that matter, who no longer feels very necessary or productive. We should be careful what we ask for and careful what we complain about. It is not always so clear what really is or will be good for our souls. There is a significant amount of ambiguity involved in deciding whether and when to say no, more ambiguity in this than some of the Sabbath advocates recognize I think.
And one such advocate I read recently was very intense in her opinion that people needed to say no more often, and very forceful in putting forth her opinion that people were often stretched too thin and spent their time in too many relatively trivial pursuits and needed to make more time in their lives for prayer and more space in their lives for God. I said before that we should leave God out of it for the time being, but this writer wasn’t leaving God out of it. In any case she was so serious that we needed to be more intentional about keeping Sabbath times that she set up a time every day when she would pray and she joined a group where people held each other accountable for the ways they were spending their time, and she suggested that other people take steps like this or they would find their lives slipping away and getting lost in work or other kinds of activities. I could see her point. But in the end I put down the book that included this chapter and I thought that this woman has a very stressful approach to reducing the stress in her life. She’s not really declaring her freedom from all the things she has to do. She added some additional things she has to do. More irony, or ambiguity.
Nevertheless, there is a word to be heard here. The idea of Sabbath times is at least worth thinking about, for those of us who may feel over committed and for those of us who do not. And if we are able to say no to the encroachment of our worldly pursuits long enough to make some sacred space in our lives, it may well be good for our souls. It may even be that it will make a little more space for God to find a dwelling place in us. I’m not so sure we need to be intentional about that, just allow for the possibility. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 1, 2009