One of my favorite ways that I have heard sin talked about is less about things you’ve done, thoughts you’ve had, that made us good or bad people. Rather, the idea of sin as a way of distancing oneself from God. We make choices about where to put our attention, our time, our money, our hopes. Where we find satisfaction, or comfort, or hope, or rest. During the season of Lent, the question then becomes, do those choices draw us closer or nearer to God. It is far less about is this chocolate going to be a healthy choice, as if Lent were like a second New Year’s resolution, and more about how are the ways that I am living my life make space for my humanity, and God’s divinity.
We hear on Ash Wednesday, You are dust and to dust, you shall return. You were created from the earth, and in your time, you will go back to the earth. We are faced with both the grief and the joy to be found in the idea that our mortal life is limited.
Debie Thomas writes about the Gospel passage we hear today, that we see Jesus—just after being baptized and being thrust into the wilderness for 40 days by the Spirit—tempted by three specific things:
Temptations that targets his hunger, his ego, and his vulnerability. These are not just temptations that Jesus faces. We still interact with them to this day. I want to offer a brief reflection on them before we move to receive the imposition of ashes that we did not get to do on Wednesday.
Temptation targeting our hunger.
· how does having our hunger, our desires, our hopes met immediately, perhaps superficially, mean for our distance from God? What needs are we seeking to meet or have met outside of God? For what we say we believe God can accomplish in God’s time?
· “To sit patiently with desire — to become its student — and still embrace my identity as God’s beloved, is hard. But this is the invitation of Lent. To learn that we can be loved and hungry at the same time. That we can hope and hurt at the same time.”
Temptation targeting our ego.
· how do fame, power, attention, praise, and notoriety, distance us from the God that would tell us that we are enough? that our significance comes in our inherent worthiness to God? that God desires for us to learn to live lives of service and grace for one another, reflecting the service and grace we receive from God?
· “The uncomfortable truth about authentic Christian power is that it resides in weakness. Jesus is lifted up — but he's lifted up on a cross. His power is the power of self-surrender for the sake of love.”
Temptation targeting vulnerability.
· how does our belief that God only shows love to us by guaranteeing us a lifetime of immunity , distance us from a God who accompanies us in our sufferings?
· “If the cross teaches us anything, it teaches us that God’s precious ones still bleed, still ache, still die. We are loved in our vulnerability. Not out of it…there is no suffering that God will not redeem”
This vulnerability, this mortality, is what we will now be reminded of for Ash Wednesday take two…
We tend to mark or impose the ashes, (the ashes of the celebration of Palm Sunday last year) on our forehead, the same place where when we are baptized we receive a cross of holy oil. These are the markings of our invitation to eternal life, on our mortal, time particular, fleshy, bodies.
May we hold these questions of sin, of distance from God, curiosities of the true satiation of our hungers, the true longing of our egos, the true comfort of our vulnerabilities throughout this season of Lent, and allow ourselves to be brought nearer to God, our true parent, creator and comforter. Amen.
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