“I have one! Let’s put a sign in every church that says, ‘Beatings will continue until morale improves.’”

“No, Spain already tried that. It didn’t work so well.”

“How about we fine people for not showing up at church. And if they can’t pay the fine, we’ll throw them in jail until they make enough money to pay up.”

“No. England did that already. Come on, something original.”

“I’ve got one! Let’s do Lent!”

“What’s a Lent?”

“It’s forty days of prayer and fasting in preparation for Easter. Extra church services, no meat, and we’ll tell everyone to give something up so they can focus on God. Count back from Easter 40 days. Don’t count Sundays. That means we’ll kick off on Wednesday with a ceremony of ashes, symbolizing repentance.”

“Sounds great. Let’s do it!”

You all know how it turned out, right? The preachers told their congregations to prepare for 40 days of prayer and fasting starting Ash Wednesday. So the people did the only reasonable thing. They crammed 40 days worth of partying into Tuesday. Great plan, guys. Way to honor Jesus with beer, babes, and beads.

And can somebody please explain the logic behind Fish Fries on Friday? “No meat? No problem. We’ll eat fish instead.” Whoever came up with that little loophole deserves to work for Goldman Sachs.

Try explaining Lent to your neighbors.  “Well, it works like this. Think of something you really love to do, something you do a lot. And you make a promise never to do that at all for forty days.  Sound like fun?”

And yet, we still do it. I sat in my office this week, thinking about what I should give up for Lent. And you know the first thing that sprang to my mind? Hot dogs. Every Wednesday night, I have hot dogs, and not just regular hot dogs. I get two steaming hot 1/3 lb. all-beef franks, piled high with Chicago-style fixings, on bed of crispy golden french fries. I love my wife’s cooking, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I look forward to Wednesday night.

So I’m thinking about Lent and the first thing that pops in my mind is hot dogs. You know what the second thing was?

“No way!”

I love hot dogs! I wrote this sermon on hot dogs! Forty days? You gotta be kidding me. And then I think, “What? Jesus died for me, and I can’t give up hot dogs?” So now I’m stuck either way. Either I lose my hot dogs, or I feel guilty for forty days! Who’s dumb idea was this?

As a marketing ploy, Lent makes New Coke look like a good idea. But as a discipline, it’s gold. We talked last week about what Charlie Sheen and Jesus Christ have in common. Namely, that they’re both human. The way we lift up celebrities is a twisted shadow of the way we put Jesus on a pedestal. We miss the fact that he had fears and doubts, just like us. He was fully human. He identified with us completely, so that we could identify with him. We are to be little Christ’s. As he was for us, we are to be for others. Which is fully true, but it’s not the whole story.

Many scholars believe that the word Christian was first used by our enemies as a way to mock us. “Oh look at them. They think they’re little Christs, mini messiahs running around saving the world.” In fact, that “ianos” ending that they stuck on the end of Christ, Christ-ianos can have another connotation, slave of Christ. As in, “Look at them. They don’t think for themselves. They’re just little slaves of Christ. ‘Yes, master. Whatever you say, master.’” And the Christians said, “Thank you. That’s perfect.”

There’s online web-comic that I really enjoy. It’s called The Order of the Stick. The main characters are little stick figures who know they’re in a Dungeons and Dragons roll-playing game. One of the characters is a very devout follower of Thor, whose is name is Durkon. In one of my very favorite scenes, Durkon gets in over his head. He’s incapacitated in a dungeon full of monsters that want to eat him for supper. So he looks down at his little necklace that says WWTD, and thinks to himself, “What would Thor do?”

And in his little thought bubble, Thor steps down from the sky and says, “With my ultimate power of the thunders, I, Thor, smash this entire dungeon to shattered ruins, each piece no larger than a man’s fist. Then, I return to Asgard to woo goddesses and drink an ocean’s worth of beer. Huzzah!” And Durkon says, “Somehow, that “W.W.T.D” thing is never really as applicable to my situation as it’s supposed to be.”

Try as we might, there are things Jesus did that we can’t do. Jesus healed the sick. He touched the outcast. He fed the hungry. He humbled the mighty, and died on the cross an innocent man. I can’t even give up hot dogs!

People complain about hypocrisy in the church, but that’s not the real reason people reject Christianity. Hypocrisy is everywhere. If you’re waiting for a perfect club to join, you’re going to be looking a long time. And when you find it, they’re not going to let you in. Hypocrisy is just the convenient excuse. Who’s in favor of hypocrisy?

No, the real reason is that we hate coming to the table as anything less than equals. Jesus is the great physician, the good shepherd. He’s here for the lost and the hurting. Grace implies a benefactor. Forgiveness implies a wrong. The graffiti on the wall says, “Jesus Saves.” And in our hearts we reply, “From what?”

That’s where our Psalmist is. He tries to keep silent, doesn’t want to ask forgiveness. But he says that in his silence it’s as if his bones are on fire. He’s sapped of strength, as if God were pressing him down. So he changes his mind, and the song becomes a prayer.

“You are my hiding place. You always fill my heart with songs of deliverance. Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in you. I will trust in you. Let the weak say, ‘I am strong in the strength of the Lord.’ I will trust in you.”

And God responds. He says, “I will instruct you and teach you. I will lead you with my eye.” How do you lead someone with your eye? The second half of the couplet explains, “Don’t be like a mule that needs a bit and bridle.” God does not use force to control us. We are children of the king, not beasts of burden. We are co-heirs with Christ, citizens of the Kingdom of God, and it’s high time we acted like it.

There’s a lot of argument over Genesis. Is it a literal 7 days, or is it metaphorical? Frankly, I don’t care, because for preaching purposes, it doesn’t matter which way you read it. The point of the story is the same. Adam and Eve don’t want to be disobedient. They want to be like God, knowing good and evil.

And what’s the immediate result? 1. They feel shame at their own bodies. 2. They hide from God. 3. Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the snake. 4. An animal has to die so they can have skins for clothes. The point of the story is that sin breaks our relationship with ourselves, with each other, with God, and with nature. Sin is a tangling vine that starts as a seed, grows into a prison, and ends in death. If you eat this fruit, you will surely die, not immediately die, but surely.

Lent may be horrible marketing, but it’s great discipline, because it all comes from here. As your pastor, I don’t get to choose what habit you give up, or what new one you start. What am I going to do, check up on you? It all happens here.

We give something up, or start something new, and in the process we learn something about ourselves, about how we treat other people, about our relationship with God, about the hold that mere things have over us, and the carelessness with which we treat the world we’ve been given. It’s a great discipline, because it only takes 40 days to realize we don’t have it all together. We really could use a good shepherd, or a great physician. It’s a great discipline, because the only way God can lead you with his eye is if you keep your eyes on God.

Lent: Let’s get miserable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Link to revsmilez.com.

Note: Sorry, no audio or video for this one.

God is nuts about you, crazy in love with you.  If God were a 13 year old girl, she would write your name all over her notebook, and write sappy poems about you in her journal.  She would blush every time you looked at her, and if you didn’t look at her, she would go home a soak her pillow with tears.  If God were a 26 year old man, he would shower you with gifts, bring you your favorite flowers, leave his home and his family and follow you to the ends of the earth.  He would propose to you from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium so that the who world could see how much he loved you, or maybe he would propose to you all alone, on the spot you first met so that you would know that he loves you and you alone.  If God were a person, his love would outshine Romeo and Juliet like the sun outshines a 60 watt lightbulb.

So put yourself in God’s shoes.  You love someone with your whole heart, and every day they find a way to break it.  Your true love cheats on you.  Your one and only is a junky, addicted to so much garbage that you’re certain their death will be painful, and it will be soon.  How do you feel?  Sad?  Angry?  Lonely?  Welcome to the Old Testament, where God tries every trick in the book to win his true love back.  He pleads.  He cajoles.  He argues.  He coddles.  He threatens.  He cries.  And for something like 6000 years, he doesn’t go away.  He picks a people, and lives with them until they learn what it is to worship a God who actually exists.  Not some heavenly gumball machine, insert prayer – receive rain.  A living God, who makes demands, who wants you to change, who won’t go away.  God lived with them, annd over the course of 6000 years they began to learn.

They learned that God cares about outcasts.  The people everyone else ignores or abuses, those are the people God had them defend.  They learned sometimes good things happened to bad people, and sometimes bad things happened to good people, and they couldn’t understand why.   They learned that religious perfection is a mirage.  No one keeps the rules perfectly.  And even if you could, God desires mercy more than sacrifice.  The sacrifice that is pleasing to God is a changed heart and a renewed mind. But the harder they tried to change their hearts and renew their minds, the more clear it became that something was wrong.

Our love is not the sun.  Our love is not even a light bulb.  It’s a candle, flickering fitfully, bending to every breath, guttering at the slightest wind.  Our love is fickle.  It’s as if we don’t know how to be faithful.  We give ourselves to whatever attracts our fancy: money, sex, power.  We give ourselves to habits that enslave and degrade us.  If God’s love were gold, we’d trade it for dirt.  We are broken. Humanity is fundamentally, inescapably flawed.

They learned one other thing too, perhaps the most important thing of all.  They learned how to repent.  Today, we say sorry and all is supposed to be forgiven, but we know it’s really not.  Because we know we’re not really sorry.   Mostly we’re sorry we got caught. But it was alot harder to cut someone out of your life back then because the villages were smaller and sooner or later you would need their help, so you had to repent.  The Hebrews had a special tool for this, called sackcloth and ashes.

Suppose you did something really horrible to your best friend and you wanted to make it right.  You would a find a big sack, cut some holes in it, take off your clothes and put the itchy, dirty sack on instead.  Then you go to your fireplace grab a big pile of ashes and throw it over your head.  Why ashes?  Because when Adam sinned for the first time, God said, “You’ll work every day of your life, and then you’ll die.  You were made from dust and to dust you will return.”  Ashes are a reminder of our common brokenness, of the common end that waits for us all.  Dumping ashes on your head is a public admission of guilt and a silent plea for forgiveness.  Now you’re ready to go sit in front of your friend’s house and wait, and wait, and wait.  However long it takes  Eventually, your friend is going to take pity on you sitting there all miserable and humiliated.  Eventually, your friend is going to come out of the house, bend down and help you up, maybe give you some food or some water to wash your face, and send you home.

Think about that for a second.  No one has to say a word the entire time, but how much is said in the silence!  You admit to yourself, to your friend, to the whole neighborhood that you did wrong.  You must be sincere or you wouldn’t endure the pain and the humiliation. You could get up at any time, decide this isn’t worth it, and go home.  And your friend must really have forgiven you, because vengeance loves nothing more than humiliation and suffering.  The Hebrews lived with God, and they learned how to repent.

John the Baptist came, preaching hellfire and brimstone, and people turned out in droves.  Because they thought the day had finally come.  God was finally coming to put things right.  The oppressed would finally see their vindication, and the evildoers would finally get what they deserved.  So what did they do?  They came out in droves… to repent.  They had finally learned that all their righteousness was rags, and their only hope was to recommit themselves, again, to God.

Perhaps they learned a little to well.  Religious types turned sackcloth and ashes into a show.  They would claim to have sinned against God, so they would find the dirtiest nastiest sack they could find, and they wouldn’t just throw ash on their head, they’d smear it all over their face, then they would go sit in the center of town and wail and weep so that the ash and dirt would streak down their faces.  And everyone would walk by and say, “My that person is really holy.  They must really love God.  Why can’t I love God that way?”

Jesus said forget all that.  When you pray, don’t pray like the hypocrites do, standing on a street corner, go pray in secret.  When you fast, don’t mar your face so that everyone feels sorry for you.  Wash your hair and put on your work clothes and go about your business.  When you give money, don’t ask them to name the new Children’s wing of the hospital after you.  Do your good deeds in secret, so that the only person you have to talk to about it is the one person who matters.  Notice that he doesn’t say “If you fast…”  “If you pray…”  “If you give to the poor…” He says “when”.  It’s a given.  After 6000 years they finally learned that if you want to love God, you have to love the people he loves, and that’s everybody, especially the outsiders, the oppressed, and the unworthy. Even yourself.

What has your faith cost you? The early church understood this far better than we do. Listen to the words of Paul “We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed;sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

They endured everything and had nothing, and behaved as angels.  We endure nothing, have everything and behave like spoiled children.  Or we endure much and claim the world owes us.  Or we have nothing and use it as an excuse to take.  If you believe that you live and you die and that’s it , and you happen to be selfish, then take what you can and enjoy the ride. If you’re noble, leave something for your kids.  If you’re really noble, leave something for everyone’s kids.  But if you believe that you live and you die, and you see God’s face, then repent.  Live like Paul did.

Ditch the talk – look at reality.  Physically do something different.  Give something up, or add something in, but do something different.  We can externalize blame, we can rationalize failure, but our actions speak louder than our words.  Pick absolutely anything that appears frequently in your life.  You could even pick it randomly, and give it up, just to prove to yourself that it doesn’t own you, or maybe to find out that it does.  Think of one small thing, that if you did it, would drastically improve your life.  One small, simple thing – and do it.  Prove to yourself that you can actually make things better, or maybe find out that you really do need help.

This is not a show.  If you choose to receive ashes, do not go visit your friends or go out to eat.  Do not wear them as a badge.  Go straight home, look at yourself in the mirror, and then wash it off.  Remember your baptism, and look yourself in the eye again.  Am I doing this because I love God or because I love applause?  There’s a simple way to know.  Do it in secret.  What matters is who you are when no one is looking. Because that is when you discover your true self, that is when your relationship with God grows or dies.  So give something up, or take something on, and share it only with God.  Because God is crazy in love with you, and would love nothing more than to spend the next 40 days by your side.

Lent is a great time to talk about death. We’re walking week-by-week closer to the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Many of us have been struggling throughout lent to give something up, which is a small kind of death, a death to self. It’s good that lent only comes once a year because it’s hard to talk about death. It is also good that lent comes each year whether we like it or not, because death is something we need to talk about.

We live in a culture that minimizes death and idolizes youth. Death to self? We’d much rather talk about self-esteem, self-awareness, and self-actualization than self-denial. We distract ourselves from the world’s suffering with fancy toys. We distract ourselves from our own brokenness with frenetic activity. We need to stop at least once a year and try to see things as they really are.

We have a church without martyrs, a world without justice, and wars without end. These are easy to get excited about, obvious. Preachers stand up and say, “It’s a sin and a shame. We sit here in luxury while others starve.” And everyone nods their heads and agrees that it’s a horrible shame and a tragedy and we should all feel rotten for enjoying the privilege of being born American.

That’s the goal right? To make people feel ashamed? If everyone feels guilty, they’ll want to be forgiven, they’ll seek out a priest. This is the trap we call religion. Religions set themselves up as mediators between God and humanity. They claim a monopoly on forgiveness. So, it’s in their best interest to make you feel guilty. That’s what keeps you coming back.

You feel good while you’re here and then you walk out the door and it’s not five minutes but you’ve done something wrong again. And the wrongs just keep piling up until you can get back to church again on Sunday and get forgiven.

That’s the easy way. You just make people feel vaguely guilty and you offer them vague forgiveness, and send them on their way. Or you could go with the even easier way. You make people feel really guilty once and then promise them forgiveness forever.

Just pray the prayer written on the back of this tract and you’ll go to heaven. If you’ve ever committed the tiniest of sins, ever stretched the truth, ever had a sexual thought about someone who is not currently your spouse, ever failed to do something good when it was in your power to do it, then you’re a sinner worthy of the flames of hell. Better pray that prayer quick because you might die at any moment. You might die while you’re sitting right there in that pew, and if you haven’t prayed the prayer then you’re going to experience eternal conscious torment. All you have to do is pray the prayer.

See how easy that is? But there’s still a catch. What if you didn’t pray well enough? What if you prayed, but then you forgot? What it you prayed it and you meant it, but then you changed your mind. Do you have to pray again? Once you claim your get out of hell free card, is it possible to lose it? Uh oh. I’d better go to church. It’s the religion trap all over again, only I don’t have to make you feel guilty every week; you feel guilty constantly all by yourself!

I’m not here to make you feel guilty. I’m not here to offer forgiveness. Forgiveness is already offered, without limit, without price tag. I’m in no position to barter between you and God. God has come to earth and eliminated the middle man. I’m here to say that this is the place where it’s ok to tell the truth… about what’s going on in the world, about what’s going on in our lives.

So let’s tell the truth for a minute. Half the world really does live on two dollars a day or less. But asking God’s forgiveness for children starving in Africa is like political campaigners spouting vague platitudes. “I’m a candidate for change. I want children to get a good education.” Wow. What a revelation. Just once I’d like to see a campaign ad that said, “Reading. Who needs it?” “A vote for me is a vote for stupidity.”

I hope we all agree that’s just a little bit ludicrous. So just for a few moments, lets stop beating ourselves up over the fact that we happened to be born American and some other folks weren’t. If we’re going to look for problems to solve, then lets look closer to home.

What’s the most common problem in our church? People are too busy. I didn’t say it’s our worst problem. We’ve got our share of baggage, just like everyone else. But our most common, most visible problem is we are horribly overbooked. We are running ourselves ragged. We feel disconnected from our friends and families, especially our families.

Can I bring you a message from your kids? If you gave them a choice between increasing your net worth by ten thousand dollars and having you home more, they would pick you. Unless you’re a jerk of course, then they’d take the money.

Too many of us are disconnected, stretched thin, dried out, scattered around like a bunch of dry bones. We’ve all got places in our lives that feel dead. And sooner or later, we’re all going to be dead.

But we don’t talk about it. Wouldn’t be polite. We just pretend everything is ok. Which is why so many of our young people cut themselves. They know the world is messed up, they know that they are at least in some way complicit, and they know they’re not supposed to talk about it. Especially if that brokenness extends into their own home. They’re job is to smile and get good grades so they can get a good job and afford the kind of life they’ve become accustomed to. So they take all those negative feelings and they stuff them until they go numb, until pain feels better than feeling nothing at all.

Death is the inescapable truth of the world we know, the world we live in every day. But our readings claim that death is no longer the supreme constant. It has been overthrown. Ezekiel and John both watch, jaws agape, as God reverses the flow of human events, repeals the second law of thermodynamics, and returns life to that which had lapsed into nothingness.

That’s the Bible in a nutshell: God created the world, but it became broken and began to fade, and now God is restoring it. God is pulling the scattered bones together, building connections, adding muscle, uniting us into a body. God breathes new life into us. At least that’s the plan. We still have a choice. We can collaborate in this work, or we can fight it.

Jesus stands at the tomb of Lazarus, orders them to roll the stone away, and calls out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” Then silence as everyone holds their breath, wanting to believe, hoping it could be true. The silence stretches on for what seems like an eternity. And so Jesus calls again, “Lazarus, come forth!” Again silence. And a tiny voice calls out, “No thank you. Nobody here but us dead people. Nothing to see here. Move along. Don’t forget to roll the stone back on the way out.”

The church is not a building. The church is not an institution. The church is you and me being transformed into light and life and love. It’s not enough that we come together. It’s not enough that we move with purpose. God breathes the Spirit into us. And if we will only allow it, that Spirit will transform our lives from the inside out.

If we can accept that we are already forgiven, already loved, already alive, then we can stop hiding in tombs and join the celebration. We can watch as God changes our lives and our priorities. Perhaps we can learn to slow down, enjoy our lives, enjoy the young people. Perhaps we will see less war and less poverty. But changes like that only begin here, between hearts brave enough to be honest, and humble enough to be healed. May God make it so in us today.