Going Big with Gratitude (Reflections on Lent 5, Year C 2022)

“You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:8) 

I’ll be the first to admit that the Bible can be frustrating at times. Take the gospel reading for Lent 4, Year C (John 12:1-8). It’s the story of Jesus getting anointed with expensive fragrance by Mary of Bethany when he comes to dinner with her and her siblings. Judas Iscariot looks askance at this anointing because Mary is spilling some really expensive product on the Lord’s feet. Judas thinks the cash she’s shelled out for this high-end stuff might be put to better use in feeding starving people. 

Frustrating? Yup. For two reasons. First, Judas—that arch “bad guy”—is actually making a pretty valid point. It’s kind of like the way I would feel if Donald Trump ever said anything intelligent. Some people you just hate to side with! But one of the really frustrating things we encounter in scripture is the inability of the gospel writers to get their story straight. The anointing of Jesus with costly fragrance appears in all four gospels, but the details morph with each gospel writer. What the evangelists all agree on is that some chick anointed Jesus shortly before his crucifixion, she spent a boatload of cash on the ointment, and some onlookers gave her a hard time because this act was so extravagant and—to their pea-brained minds—wasteful. We don’t know—and it’s not really important—what actually happened. Stories were told and re-told in the ancient world, and each teller put his own spin on them according to the audience he was speaking to or the point he wanted to make. Matthew and Mark say the anointing was done by “a woman,” but they don’t identify her even though, ironically, Jesus comments that she will always be remembered. Luke says the perfume lady was “a woman of the city, who was a sinner,” presumably a prostitute.[i] In our version from the gospel of John, the woman is identified as Mary of Bethany. 

These divergences can mess you up if you’re hung up on accuracy, so I’d advise taking each story on its own face value. Personally, I like the Luke and John versions of the story because these guys give the woman a good reason for doing what she’s doing—which, in the world of the text, is a pretty outlandish thing. If, as in Luke’s version, you’re just a skank ho and everybody looks down on you, you’d likely be pretty darn thankful that the rabbi from Nazareth saw you as a human being and forgave you your sins. If you’re Mary of Bethany, you might have an even better reason to be uber grateful to Jesus. 

In John 11 we have the story of the raising of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and her sister Martha. Because John mentions that Martha was serving at table when Jesus came to dinner (v.2), I’m guessing this family wasn’t wealthy enough to afford a servant. They were probably pretty middle class folks, just trying to get by. The sisters are living with their brother, which says to me that they were unmarried. Unattached ladies, in this patriarchal world, were kind of dependent on the men in their families to get along. Lazarus’ death meant that his sisters would be out their source of support. They’d have to beg or find other relatives or marry someone they didn’t like just to have a roof over their heads. Additionally, as they bawled their eyes out at the funeral in chapter 11, they probably really loved their brother and were devastated when he died. 

I always say the worst loss we can suffer is the loss of our own children. Our kids are supposed to bury us, not the other way around. But when we hit a certain age, the loss of a brother or sister can really tear us apart. Think about it: is there anyone in your life who really knows you like the ones who grew up under the same roof you did? Your siblings know all the skeletons in all the closets. They know your high school nickname and all about your first crush and the dumb thing you did when you were ten. Unless you have a childhood pal you’re still close with, there’s nobody in your life who knows your story like your sibling does. Not your spouse and certainly not your kids. When a sibling dies, a piece of your story dies too. 

If you’re Mary of Bethany, how joyful and thankful would you be to get your dead brother back alive again? How could you ever repay the guy who shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” and gave you back your brother, your friend, and your protector? You really can’t blame Mary for wanting to show her appreciation to Jesus. Her joy must’ve been ineffable, beyond words. So? If words won’t do, she makes a gesture. It was customary to greet visitors to your home by anointing their sunburned heads or washing their dirty feet. Mary not only anoints Jesus’ feet but dries them with her hair. It’s her expression of devotion and extreme gratitude. When have you ever felt that sense of thankfulness and devotion? When a thank-you card isn’t enough, you may have wanted to make a more substantial gesture. 

Lent is a good time to reflect on just how good God has been to each of us. If you’ve ever experienced rescue, relief, or any surpassing blessing—especially at a time when you thought you were really going to be screwed—a gesture of thanks might be in order. Jesus defends Mary’s expensive[ii] outpouring of love because he knows it comes from her heart. It also comes at just the right moment. There’s been some nasty talk about Jesus at the end of chapter 11 (vv.45-57), and it’s possible he might be in some real trouble. By 12:20, when some foreign guys[iii] come looking for Jesus, he knows he’s famous enough to be on the Pharisees’ hit list. 

Expensive scented oil could’ve been used as part of the burial rites of the day. Folks would anoint a swaddled corpse with this stuff to disguise the stench of rotting flesh until there was nothing left but bones which would be placed in a box called an ossuary. Of course, by the time they poured the perfume on you, you were in no position to appreciate the smell. Mary doesn’t lose any time and doesn’t want to regret not having expressed her love to Jesus in person. 

The poor will always be with us, year in and year out, and it’s always our duty to love, assist, and uplift them. But gratitude is also always in season, and it’s not a bad idea to express it to God and to others while there’s still time.

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[i] In the 6^th century Pope Gregory I preached a sermon in which he identified this floozy as Mary Magdalene, even though no straight reading of Luke’s gospel would make you think the two women were one and the same. The pope managed to ruin poor Mary’s reputation for centuries to come!

[ii] BTW, have you tried buying perfume (or parfum as the fancy stores call it) lately? The price of the jug of nard Mary used would run over $11 grand at today’s prices! Nard came from the valerian plant so it had to be imported. That’s what made it so expensive. Its pleasing aroma was often used in the ancient Hellenistic world as a sleep aid. It’s still used today.

[iii] They’re referred to as “some Greeks.” This basically meant they weren’t Jewish. They could’ve come from anywhere as the universal language at that time was Greek and whatever your native tongue was, you could get along if you also spoke Greek.

Rewarding the Nincompoop (reflectons on Lent 4, Year C 2022)

 

Great Depression bread line c. 1932 National Archives

“Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” (Luke 15:31) 

My dad grew up during the Great Depression. His dad had died in the 1918 pandemic, and my grandmother struggled with nothing but an eighth grade education to make ends meet as a single mother with two young children. By the time my dad reached his fifth birthday, Americans were experiencing an unemployment rate of 25%. Frankly, I can’t begin to imagine how rough life must have been for folks in that day. 

In 1932, America elected a new president who told them the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. My father thought this new president was the Antichrist. 

My dad’s been gone for a long time now, so I can’t really have a frank discussion with him about his political views. I joke now that he was somewhere to the right of Archie Bunker (whom he vaguely resembled), and I suspect that his experience in World War II and the Occupation may have had a great deal to do with the way he viewed government control of the economy—the Soviet Union being, after all, a socialist country. But I now have a slightly different theory. 

I think my Old Man, like many rural Americans who fought and struggled their way through some of the toughest, leanest economic times in our history, absolutely hated the idea that the government would provide a free handout to anyone. Social Security, unemployment insurance, welfare, federal savings insurance—these were all ways in which a government used the tax dollars of hard-working folks to take care of lazy or stupid people who should’ve pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and taken care of themselves. Maybe my dad thought, “If we could go without and still make it through, so can everyone else!” 

I think this is the attitude of the elder son in the famous parable of the “Prodigal Son” Jesus preaches in our gospel lesson for Lent 4 (Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32). If you stop and think about it, what does this guy have to gripe about? As the eldest son, he stands to inherit all of his father’s property when the Old Man kicks off. He has food to eat and a roof over his head. He also has the honor of being helpful and supportive of his father. 

I’ll grant that all the fatted calves and other party victuals will one day belong to Honorable Number One Son. At the moment, however, everything still belongs to his father. This lad isn’t out a nickel because his dad is throwing a party to celebrate his idiot little brother’s return. Nor is he deprived of his father’s love. Why is it that we think the rescue of another somehow wrongs us? 

Yet somehow we have a culture—both economic and political—which values selfishness and makes us covetous, judgmental, and very short-sighted. The elder brother is missing so much of the big picture. We might agree with him that his little brother has been a nincompoop. The kid blew his inheritance and his bankruptcy is his own fault. But what the elder son is missing—and is so apparent in the way Jesus tells this tale—is how the boy’s absence wounds his father. Think about it: if your kid left home, ran off, and you never heard from them and didn’t know if they were living or dead, how would you feel? Big Bro is also missing the fact that his brother really is repentant and has “come to himself.” He can’t seem to wrap his brain around the concept that he himself may one day stand in need of rescue, or that he himself might one day have to ask for forgiveness. 

One good bet you’re on the path to sin is when you start making everything about yourself. It doesn’t hurt any of us to remember that everything we have is a gift from our heavenly Father. We don’t bring anything into this world ourselves, and God certainly doesn’t owe us anything. Some of us will use our resources better than others. Some will be wise, and some foolish. I grant that there will always be rich people and less rich people. I don’t grant, however, that it will ever be pleasing to God that there are rich people and starving people. 

I’ve known people who absolutely hate this parable. I guess we get hung up on an idea of fairness and equality. The truth is, although we’re all equally loved in the sight of God, we aren’t all equal in judgment, power, situation, health, opportunity, or a million other different ways. If we have struggled, let’s hope our struggle hasn’t made us indifferent to the struggles of others.

There's Stuff We Can't Explain (Reflections on Lent 3, Year C 2022)

 

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Isaiah 55:6-7) 

I can’t imagine a more poignant gospel lesson for today than the one appointed for Lent 3, Year C in the RCL (Luke 13:1-9). While Jesus is preaching some of his listeners inquire about a recent atrocity. It seems some Galileans were just brutally—albeit officially—murdered under the direction of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate. I say “brutally” because the questioners say the victims’ blood was “mingled with their sacrifice.” Obviously, these Galileans were in the middle of performing some religious ritual when the governor’s goon squad came upon them and killed them on the spot. That would be like someone getting gunned down inside a church service. Even in a sacred space where you’d think you were safe violence can occur. 

We know from sources contemporary with the New Testament that Pontius Pilate was pretty much a thug.[i] He was in charge of keeping the peace and collecting taxes and he wasn’t particularly gentle about how he dealt with the conquered population. Today we’d consider him a war criminal just as we consider Vladimir Putin. Human life, at least the lives of other (non-Roman) humans, didn’t seem to be that important to him. Reading this account of an oppressive regime’s barbaric, indiscriminate slaughter has to make us think of the horror currently raging in Ukraine. It also may bring us, just as it brought Jesus’ audience, back to that most basic and vexing of religious questions: If God is so loving and desires so much good for us, why does God permit senseless evil to exist? Why does God let the Pilates and the Putins of the world get away with doing what they do?

 For the folks in Jesus’ day, the only answer had to be because God wanted this to happen. They all fully believed that rotten, tragic things happened to people because God was punishing them. They might’ve referred back to the passage in Deuteronomy 28:20, ^“The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.” I’ll bet these guys approached Jesus about the massacre because Jesus was also Galilean. I’m sure they wanted to know his take on the subject, and they figured he’d know what awful crime the Galileans had committed that made God so mad at them they deserved to have Pilate’s henchmen cut their throats. 

But Jesus doesn’t give them a simple answer. It might’ve made these guys feel a little better, a little smugly safe, to know that the Galileans got what they deserved, but the honest truth is God doesn’t work like that. Sometimes bad things happen because bad people make them happen. There’s lots of unpredictable things happening on this crazy rock, and we’ve all got to die from something. Jesus challenges his audience to get their act together in the here and now. Rather than trying to make themselves feel better by coming up with answers where there are no answers, they’d be much better off considering their own lives and their own relationships with God.

 I have to point out, however, that the RCL readings don’t let us get off with a simple c’est la vie attitude. Sometimes, as the scripture says, bad stuff happens because we brought it on ourselves. This gospel lesson is paired with St. Paul’s message to the Corinthian congregation (1 Corinthians 10:1-13), a pretty messed-up and dysfunctional bunch of early Christians. Paul warns them with the example of the Hebrew nation in the wilderness. This is part of the first major macro-story of scripture, the Exodus story. It’s a great victory story if you just consider the part where Moses rescues the Hebrew slaves and leads them triumphantly through the Red Sea while Pharoah’s army gets drowned. But the story goes on for another forty years—forty years which could’ve been a whole lot shorter if the people involved hadn’t been such a whiney bunch of pusillanimous babies. God kept God’s promise and brought these folks right back to the land promised to Abraham, but they were too wussy to try to go in and take it.[ii] To use Jesus’ horticultural analogy, they just weren’t bearing any fruit—fruit like faith, gratitude, and commitment. Therefore, it was their own darn fault they wandered around in the desert for four decades until the lukewarm, self-involved complainers all died out and their kids grew up to be a nation worthy of God’s promise.

 Our First Lesson for Lent 3 (Isaiah 55:1-9) is actually part of the conclusion of the second macro-story in scripture, the Exile story. Here’s a case where a disobedient people were punished by being captives in Babylon even longer than their ancestors had wandered in the wilderness. The people of Judah suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Babylonians because they had become a corrupt, unjust, and spiritually weak nation. The Exile lasted 70 years, but God’s faithfulness eventually allowed the descendants to return to their ancestral homeland.

So what are the take-aways here? First, we can’t try to get into God’s head. Isaiah says, ^“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Stuff happens. There’s a lot we don’t control. But we can control our own relationship with God, and we can be obedient to the Word we’ve been given and the love we’ve seen in Jesus. Second, we haven’t been put here just for our own enjoyment. God expects us to be loving and committed, to work for justice and equity, and to be here for each other. We’re not here to explain another’s misfortune, but to love them through it. Finally, even when we have screwed up and suffer for it, we have a faithful God who is patient and willing to repair us, restore us, and make us new.

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[i] A Jewish Roman named Flavius Josephus mentions Pilate in his book The Jewish War written around the end of the first century off the Common Era.

[ii] See the story in Numbers 13:1-33

Ever Feel Like This..? (Reflections on Lent 2, Year C 2022)

 

^“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34) 

Do you ever just feel hopeless? 

I’ll bet you do. Or at least, you have. You know what I mean. It’s that sad, almost nostalgic feeling that mixes love and longing with an utter sense of dread. You’d feel angry but you haven’t got the strength. You want to blame someone, but there’s no one to blame. It’s the emotionally raw moment when you look up at God and say, “So just what the freak am I supposed to do about this?” 

That heart-breaking dread is, for me, the thread which connects the Hebrew scripture passage (Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18) with the gospel passage (Luke 13:31-35) in the RCL for Lent 2, Year C. In both stories we see guys who look at their situation and recognize that it really sucks. 

Look at poor Abram. He’s done everything God’s asked him to do, but God hasn’t come through with his part of the deal. Abram wants a male heir so bad he can almost smell the Johnson and Johnson baby powder, but his missus, Saria, hasn’t popped one out. What really seems to bug Abram is not only won’t he have a biological child, but under the weird customs of his time, everything he’s got will go to his slave Eliezer. Like a lot of folks, it really bothers Abram to see a marginalized person getting a privilege (Of course, Abram doesn’t know that the entire nation he founds will one day become a marginalized slave population in Egypt!). Abram just wants a little tyke he can love and teach and to whom he can pass on his wealth and his culture. But it doesn’t look like that’s ever going to happen. 

In the gospel reading Jesus is also looking at a pretty crappy picture. He’s just doing his job—healing and casting out demons—and some lunatic despot wants to kill him for doing it (He kind of makes me think of Volodymyr Zelensky!). It has to be hard to care for others, to try to be righteous, and to be a conduit for good news when some power beyond your control comes along and messes everything up. But Jesus (like Zelensky) isn’t afraid. He’s determined to do what he came to do in spite of all the threats to his own safety. 

Jesus isn’t affected by the threat of Herod’s wrath. What seems to bother him most is the hard-heartedness of the people he’s come to rescue. There are those who are so into their own stubborn nature not even the Messiah can reach them. And that has to hurt. This is one time when I really feel for Jesus. He goes from the frying pan of Herod’s jurisdiction into the fire of Jerusalem. At least in Galilee he could do something positive. But what about when you feel for people and you can’t reach them? What about when you just know things are going to get a lot worse before they get better? 

This is what it means to be human. The beauty of our scriptures, I think, is that we can see in Jesus and Abram our own longing anxiety. In the Genesis story God mollifies Abram with a weird covenant ritual. They—quite literally—cut a deal. The torch and smoking pot, images of God’s brilliant glory, pass through the gooey entrails of the vivisected animals as a sign that God will be similarly destroyed if he doesn’t come through with his promise to provide Abram with an heir. Yet Abram still questions and doubts, and still has to wait until God is good and ready. For Jesus, there are no questions or doubts. He knows he’ll be rejected and crucified. There is in this story love, heartache and dread all rolled together. Have you ever felt that yourself? 

Here we are. Just as COVID cases are going down, gas prices—and the price of everything else—is going up. We watch in horror the war in Ukraine, feeling deeply for those living in that insanity, yet knowing any intervention on the part of the US or NATO could slingshot us all right into nuclear holocaust. We’re also watching as the Christian Church keeps getting elbowed further to the margins of our cultural life, our pews get emptier, and our kids and grandkids can’t be bothered with the spiritual inheritance we, like old Abram, want to give them. 

Where’s the good news here? We know even after Abram gets his son his family won’t live happily ever after. We know that Jesus will escape Herod just to be killed by Pilate. 

I think it might be good for us to admit to this confusing feeling of love and longing and dread. We should sit with it a while and not try to ignore or anesthetize it. If nothing else, it turns us back to our need for God. It turns us back to prayer. Perhaps it turns us out of ourselves and towards each other and the needs of the world. It certainly must turn us towards hope—hope that God will come through in the end. 

And this is not the end. 

God’s peace and blessings to you.

Getting Through It (Reflections on Lent One, Year C, 2022)

 

"Crossing the Red Sea" Nicholas Poussin, French, 1634

“The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…” (Deuteronomy 26:8) 

Boy, I sure hope the folks at ABC-TV keep to their tradition and run Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments on Easter Sunday again this year. Every year I catch a little bit of that 1950’s era epic, and every year I get a kick out of how outrageously corny it is. But, in all seriousness, the story of the parting of the Red Sea and the deliverance from oppression of God’s chosen ones always goes hand-in-hand with our observance of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. It was, after all, at the time of the Passover that Jesus suffered and rose. The early church even called the Easter celebration Pascha, which, if you want to get technical[i], is the Aramaic corruption of the Hebrew word Pesach which means Passover. 

It makes perfect sense that our Revised Common Lectionary should start the Sundays in Lent with this wonderful passage from Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 26:1-11) which synopsizes the Passover story. A smart Bible scholar guy named Marcus Borg referred to the Exodus narrative as one of the three “macro-stories” which shape our Christian scriptures—the other two being the Exile story and the story of Jesus which Borg calls the “Priestly Story.”[ii] The Exodus story, as you can tell from our First Reading for Lent One, goes like this: God’s people were slaves in Egypt, and that sucked. God didn’t like that this sucked because God is righteous and hates oppression. God delivered the people from bondage, brought them through the Red Sea, provided for their journey in the wilderness, brought them home to a land flowing with milk and honey (metaphorically speaking, at least), and suggested they might want to show a little gratitude by way of praise to God and generosity to others. 

This story is typical of what my old boss, the Rev. Dr. Tim Kennedy, reverently called a myth. That is, it’s the tale of something which possibly never was (or at least never was in the form in which we know it), but always is. The Exodus story, the story of how God freed people from bondage and brought them through a desolate and empty time, is not just a celebration of a past event. It’s an allegory of all human experience. Slavery isn’t just one human claiming to own another. We can be slaves to all kinds of things—bad relationships, drugs and alcohol, financial insecurity, really stupid ideas, or a devastating world-wide pandemic. The bottom line is the same: God doesn’t want us to be trapped in this way, God provides a way out, God cares for us during the liminal period of confusion we’re bound to suffer after our “exodus,” and God brings us to a place where we can look back and say, “Dang. I survived. I’m actually really blessed, and I have God to thank for this. Maybe I’d better up my game and be less of a jerk than I’ve been.” 

Alas, this always brings us to the place where we get to make a decision about our lives, and this explains why the guys who cooked up the RCL chose to marry the Exodus story with the gospel lesson about Jesus and the devil (Luke 4:1-13). Whenever we think we’ve rowed the boat to the shore and have the whole world by the Fruit of the Looms, that’s invariably the moment of temptation. And the biggest temptation is the temptation to doubt. 

The first temptation the devil uses in our gospel story is the temptation about provisions. He turns to a hungry Jesus and says “You’re hungry. You don’t look so good. Okay, you haven’t starved, but you better turn some stones into bread just to be on the safe side.” And that’s always the way. God has provided for us, but we’re never sure it will be enough. Forget faith and screw generosity, we better look after ourselves first. 

Then there’s this temptation to doubt our own worthiness. The devil offers Jesus the chance to be the biggest and most powerful force in the world—as if he wouldn’t become that anyway! He’s saying in effect, “You’re not getting the credit you deserve. God wants more for you. You don’t seem to be living up to your potential. You’re just not enough the way you are.” 

And, last but not least, the devil gives this gleeful invitation to test the whole “faith” thing out. He’s asking, “Are you really sure God protects you? Maybe you’ve survived because you have great internal grit and fortitude? Do you really need all this God crap? Why not test it out? Just jump to what will probably be your death and see if God saves you. Oh, you won’t? Are you chicken..? Or, are you really too smart to believe all this Sunday School nonsense and you know you’re the captain of your own destiny—you big stud, you!” 

I’ll confess: the devil, for want of any better expression, gets into my head at times[iii]. I worry about getting past the time of COVID, about the uncertainty of what lies ahead for my congregation, about the lack of a Music Director and traditional choir, what will happen to our Sunday School, etcetera, etcetera, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then I watched the Facebook Live video of our Ash Wednesday’s mass, and I concluded in spite of what wasn’t there, we still had church. I thought how unique Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia is as a house of worship, and I realized that this is a beautiful place because the people of God—though few in number—are still here. 

We always begin Lent with contrition, but Sundays are never counted as part of the 40 days. Instead, every Sunday is a little Easter. Every Sunday is a reminder that God knows our situation, provides for us in the frustration of our confusion, and promises to bring us safely home.

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[i] And why wouldn’t you?  

[ii] See Borg, Marcus: Meeting Jesus Again for the First time; The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. Harper San Francisco, 1994.

[iii] Of course, he got into Martin Luther’s head too, so I figure I’m in good company.

Fast, Pray, Love (Reflections on Ash Wednesday, 2022)

 

“But when you give alms, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…” (Matthew6:3) 

I saw a young woman on TV last night being interviewed by a reporter. She might’ve been in her late teens or early twenties. I really couldn’t tell. She had two-tone hair like they have these days and was wearing a puffy winter coat. She spoke flawless English with a North American accent and, if I met her on the streets of Philadelphia, I’d swear she was a regular American girl. But she was in Ukraine, and she and others were busy knotting a camouflage net to hide weapons from the advancing Russian army. 

For the last week our collective hearts have been aching for this fledgling democracy. Granted, the horrors suffered in Ukraine may be no less horrific than those suffered in other parts of the world. It’s just been easier for Americans to ignore the suffering of South Sudan, Yemen, or Syria. These places seem more exotic and the threats they face more distant. But Ukrainians are now at the mercy of a brutal megalomaniac whose finger hovers over the atomic button. Any escalation of this crisis can, with a blinding flash of light, reduce us all to ashes. 

The ashes we wear on our foreheads seem, in a way, superfluous on this Ash Wednesday. We need not be reminded of our mortality when we witness death and senseless destruction on our TV or computer screens. Perhaps our angst increases with a sense of déjà vu. Like the appearance of a variant of the virus we thought we’d conquered, the threat from Russia reminds us that the Cold War never ended. It only became dormant, and now a new and dangerous strain has emerged to plunge us into a world of uncertainty. 

We enter this holy season confused and shaken, yet leaning on the words of Jesus from our gospel—instructions on how we are to observe the historic disciplines of this time. We don’t need to make a show of what we do. We need to do what we do—pray, fast, and give alms. 

We might chuckle this year at the idea of a Lenten fast. After all, COVID-19 has put us on an enforced fast for the last two years. We’ve abstained from gatherings, we’ve lost things which were familiar and comfortable, and we’ve postponed weddings and travel. We’ve sheltered in our homes and now, as we cautiously emerge from our exile, praying the risk of viral infection has subsided, we find so many things are no longer the same. 

Yet God has not changed, and our fast has not weakened us. Rather than concentrating on what we’ve done without, we may wish to be thankful for the abundance of God’s faithfulness. Rather than emerging from mask mandates with gleeful self-indulgence, we may want to take a step back, see our common humanity, and ask what our responsibilities are to one another. Rather than lamenting inflation, we may challenge ourselves to see how moderate living will enable our generosity. 

We are called to be generous. The need of hundreds of thousands of our fellow creatures is being paraded in front of us by our news outlets. Our right hand need not inform our left of what it is doing. We don’t need to stop and ask if we can afford to stretch our own resources. We simply do what the discipline of the season requires, secure in the knowledge of God’s faithfulness. 

I don’t wish to beat any drums, but today I’ve made a donation to Lutheran World Relief’s Eastern Europe Crisis Response. I believe this is an act of faith, and a better witness than any sermon I could preach. When we give, we give in the assurance that our Father who sees in secret knows our needs. 

As for prayer, it is never just a Lenten discipline. It is a part of us—what we do every day, at all times, without ceasing. Let us continually pray for peace in this world.