As, from outside, I endure the extreme misery of my friends, sometimes it gets too much. This week it did. I turned to Victor Hugo’s mythic novel Les Miserables, which I’ve never read, I don’t know, maybe as a way to transfigure the suffering I’ve gotten so close to it burns like arctic iron.
I’m not good at keeping other people’s suffering separate from my own, a flaw which doomed my career as a pastoral counselor, but may in the end save me as a human being.
So, rather than writing a post on the beginning of Lent as part of our CCBlogs community exercise, I’ve engulfed myself in 19th century France and the trials of Jean Valjean.
I’m also preparing my income taxes, and in two Bible study groups leading a close reading of the book of Revelation.
The last is my response to the huge interest in the Left Behind series. (I didn’t want to be left out!) A friend’s faith was awakened when she read the books and began looking up the biblical prophecies.
I’ve taught Revelation four or five times over the past thirty years, usually in response to something like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great, for instance.
My mind is not systematic, but intuitive-poetic, so it’s hard for me to snip verses from here and there and paste up an end times chronology. So many have been wrong! I’m sure I’d be, as well, if I tried.
I prefer to take the whole book—Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation—study its message as a whole, and leave systematics to others.
So what’s all this got to do with Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent?
First, to get my view, you have to know I’ve had to undo a layer of anti-Catholic prejudice that I took in with mother’s milk. Ironic that my dad’s family had been Catholic before converting to Baptist, though Mom told me Dad, a Baptist preacher, was never baptized. I guess he wanted to play it safe, and keep his infant baptism credentials.
I never got any of his affection for the Church, only his objections to it. So I’ve had to unlearn a lot of stuff.
The value of Lent, for example.
Lent, from the Old English “lencten” or as we spell it today “lengthen,” a reference to the lengthening daylight of spring. In Lent the hours of light lengthen!
That’s a symbol I love. A whole lot better than Jeremiah’s sixth century lament,
Woe to us, for the day declines,
the shadows of evening lengthen! Jer 6:4 (NRSV)
A time of reckoning had come. The enemies of Judah were massing, and soon would descend upon Jerusalem and Judah like a horde of destroying angels.
How about us? For our culture, which are lengthening: hours of darkness or hours of light?
Some Left Behind folks believe the doomsday clock is about to or has already begun to strike midnight. A submerged ice mountain has rent the hull, the ocean liner is going down.
Abandon ship! Our job as Christians is to get everybody into the lifeboats.
Lent, however, has a different meaning. It’s the light that is lengthening toward the full force of day. Life on this earth, by the breath of the Creator, is renewing. The voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
There comes a moment in the second Lord of the Rings films. Sam, Frodo and Gollum stand on the edge of the Great City, which lies in ruins from the juggernaut of the flying Nazgul.
”What are we fighting for?” Frodo asks, exhausted from wrestling with his addiction to the ring.
Gollum looks up. It is the question, the only one that matters.
Sam says, “There’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
That’s the question we Christ followers also must answer. Is the message of Lent that all is dust and ashes? Or is the message this: that we need to examine our lives, recommit to our vows, and get on with the struggle to walk in newness of life, not just as individuals, but as a planet, not just for the world to come but for the good earth here and now?
I believe it’s the second that’s true. Apologies to Tim LaHaye, but I’m not ready to jump ship just yet.
In the 19th century Victor Hugo wrote:
Society must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
His words are as true today as when he penned them.
One of Isaiah’s disciples wrote the people of his time, those who had returned to Palestine from exile, only to wake up to a very hardscrabble morning after. Were their hopes a foamy draft of deception? Would they have been better off to stay in exile?
Some turned to ritual, the rules of their fathers: just recite the prayers right, offer the right animal on the right altar exactly as God requires.
No, Isaiah said, ritual has its place. But what God wants now and here is something else:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Isaiah 58.6-8 NRSV
Whether it’s evening or morning that’s lengthening may be up to us.
The fastnesses of extremism far from here have demonstrated how deep the roots of hatred and terror grow in the rocky soil of poverty, ignorance, and neglect. It’s not Islam vs. Christianity at issue here, but light vs. darkness in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism and in all other religions.
But, the arms of love are stronger. The reach of Light is infinite. John wrote, “God is light, God is love,” (1John 1.5; 4.16).
Lent is God’s calling us, for the sake of this world, come what may, to live in love and in the light.
So let’s get a move on. As John Wayne (or was it Shakespeare) said, “We”re burning daylight.”
Photo by Msry Fran