Lenten Lessons

Lenten Lessons

Christian Scientists don’t celebrate Lent. It focuses on the materialistic “things” that people give up in memory of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness.  I remember as a teenager the girls gave up such things as milkshakes and went to church every Sunday. Probably gave five minutes ‘thought to Jesus’ sacrifice, and perhaps 45 seconds to what God is.  These were the ’50;s, that post war decade when everyone was glad to be done with the war and able to have gasoline and meat once again.  No point in thinking much, we had to get on with our lives and back into production.  Time for the girls to put on their white gloves again,  guys to get crew cuts, for moms and dads to become Ward and June Cleaver instead of war heroes and Rosie the Riveter  We found refuge in the conventional, the ordinary, and our happy countenances were never clouded by the unwelcome intrusion of a new idea.  Unless some authority told us it was OK!  Then came the 60’s, and we didn’t know how to handle protests, hippies, flag-burning.  Some joined, most decried, and a few were on the fence. We were a little old for Vietnam, and fed as we had been while children on patriotism and censorship, we couldn’t understand draft-dodging, pot smoking, promiscuity.  The ‘70’s emphasis shifted to the environment,  bu we had been used to dealing with pollution by closing the windows and couldn’t understand why we shouldn’t continue taking the bounty of smokestack industry for granted.  And there was much more: civil rights, the Red scare and McCarthy,  the Bomb.  In short, my complacent generation didn’t really feel we had anything to give up, and so Lent was irrelevant or at least not quite real.

Thus we don’t celebrate Lent, or anything else for that matter, in a ritualistic way.  Yet it is in the public consciousness—an ever-diminishing portion of it, but significant nonetheless. So I suggest that we join the rest of Christendom and think about this. MBE does say: “A great sacrifice of material things must precede this advanced spiritual understanding.”

(16:1-2),  “This understanding” is the kind of prayer described on pa. 15 and before. “Such prayer heals sickness, and must destroy sin and death.” (16:5-6) So Lenten sacrifice is not so much forgoing hot fudge sundaes as it is letting false, and deleterious beliefs fall away.

I’d like to go further into this idea during the next six weeks.  It is not clear to me what each of the readings will be: I can’t give them titles yet, nor have explicit themes leapt out.  For Wednesday 17 February, however, my title is “Lie not against the truth”: giving up anger and lying.  It will be based on James 3.

I welcome your feedback onbased on your observations f specific false beliefs you individually and we as a congregation might burn on the altar of spiritual sense. Please let me know, either by replying to this email or commenting on my blog, which is now receiving a kickstart again. 




Text of email sent Wednesday afternoon, February 17.