2021.02.17 | Not Giving Up in the Time of Covid | Ash Wednesday
Not Giving Up in the Time of Covid
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Ash Wednesday
Feb 17, 2021
A colleague of mine noted recently that this year’s Lent seems like just a really, really long extension of last year’s Lent.
Isn’t that the truth!?!
If you come into Eden Church today, you would notice that the main bulletin board in the Inner Narthex still has last year’s Global Prayer Wheel up, under a headline that normally would have been taken down last April in favor of Easter Eggs and Bunnies.
The headline reads: What on Earth are You Praying For?
We had started praying about COVID-19 and for the people of Wuhan, China in mid-January, but our praying for the whole world began in earnest in mid-March during Lent when our shelter in place began and it hasn’t truly stopped yet. Other Lenten practices have continued and/or grown mightily throughout this long year as well, particularly the giving of alms, which are offerings to help other people in need, and fasting, which many interpret as “giving up” something for Lent. In addition to in-person worship, we have given up a million little joys that make life pleasurable, from the simple coffee at a cafe to a walk with a friend to seeing our elderly parents in person. While we joke about those activities that have increased, like drinking and zooming and the endless wearing of sweatpants, the truth is what we have gained in no way compensates for what we have given up, except in undefinable spiritual terms.
In fact, as our 2020 Lenten season has gone on, serious concerns are being raised about the mental health impact of deprivation on virtually every age group. Elders suffer from lack of family contact, children suffer from lack of in-person schooling, youth suffer from lack of a social life, and almost everyone is suffering from a general sense of hopelessness and depression, which is sometimes profoundly compounded by the desperate search for food, work, housing, medical care, and now vaccines. The real question this Ash Wednesday, the official start of Lent 2021, is not what to give up, but how to not give up.
Today’s Bible reading, read so beautifully by Jan, Jessie, Sandy, and Suzie, offers us an alternative Lenten practice for 2021 that potentially holds a treatment for the side-effects of our extended Lent of 2020. I am not going to oversell this because the events of Jan 6 and Feb 13 have already pretty much crushed our hopes that 2021 would be a better year than 2020. Instead, I humbly offer you the advice that lies beneath each of the verses in today’s reading: Be Authentic.
Today’s reading comes from the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has already taught his disciples who is blessed, ask them to be both salt and light, and spoken against murder, adultery, abandoning wives, oaths, revenge, and loving enemies. Then he turns to offering, prayer, fasting, and wealth, stressing the importance for each of acting in secret or in private, not in a public or overt fashion and definitely not in a way intended to draw public acclamation.
In general, Bible scholars believe that Jesus stressed secrecy in these practices for a couple of reasons. The first was the emphasis on piety and public confession and atonement in religion and the second was the Greco-Roman value that emphasized socio-economic status and advancement through patronage. We don’t have to struggle too hard to understand either, since our culture is equally dominated by those who seek status either by acting holy, making oh so public donations, or seeking status or celebrity. The very fact that we all know what a social media influencer is may indicate that our culture has taken the art of living our lives in public for public favor to the extreme.
To counter these practices, Jesus repeatedly asked his disciples not only to do their activities in private or secret in the Sermon on the Mount, he also got righteously angry with them when they asked questions about their status, like when James and John asked if they could sit next to him in heaven, or their behavior at social functions, where he specifically asked them to avoid the head table where the elite sat.
In essence, Jesus was asking, is asking, that we give up status-seeking behaviors in favor of doing our prayers, giving, and other religious activities in private or in secret. His concern was intent. Those who pray and give to be seen are motivated not by their desire to be in a relationship with God but in a favorable relationship with those who see them. As he says in verse 24, which follows today’s reading: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one, and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
Authenticity enters when you give up the necessity of being seen or admired by others for what you do. We understand this intuitively when we find ourselves smiling when we are sad or being nice when we are angry or pretending we are okay when we really aren’t. Every pretense for the sake of another adds up.
The same is true for our spiritual practices: we lose a little something when we can’t speak honestly to God or give something other than what is in our hearts to give or give up something when it perhaps seems mundane or purposeless to us.
Yet, when we stop doing our spiritual practices for the approval of others, we not only lose the possibility of resentment, phoniness, or desperation, we gain an honest assessment of who we really are and where we are at in our spiritual journey and what we need to do next. In other words, privacy in spiritual practices means being honest with God about what you can and can’t do...yet. Faith is a journey and the road to improvement is not paved with Facebook likes but a commitment to becoming a better Christian than you currently are.
There is an added bonus to being authentic when it comes to spiritual practices. I truly believe each authentic act of prayer or service inspires ten-fold in response to those that act touches. Consider the young man and his friend who decided to clean snow off the car windows of front-line hospital workers as they finished their shifts so they could head for home without further delay. Snow removal is not a Biblical mandate — it was just something he wanted to do to honor their work. True authenticity — giving what you are called to give -- inspire others to think and act authentically and creatively.
With the exception of the slow roll out of vaccines and the dipping of case numbers since their winter peak, Lent 2021 shows no sign of being any less arduous than Lent 2020. We may be tempted to give up this Lent, to give up our safety precautions, to give up our hope, to give up our happiness, or to give up our faith.
I pray that you won’t give up any of these conditions that are so vital to your wellbeing or hide your negative feelings away. I hope you will embrace the practices of Lent — be it prayer, or offerings, or fasting — but in new and different ways, ways that feel authentic and personal to you and faithful to the One we follow to Easter and beyond. Amen.