Lent: Mindfulness and Self-Denial

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

February 19, 2012

First Reading: Gospel of Luke 4:1-13

4:1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, ² where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. ³ The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” ⁴ Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone. ’”

⁵ Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. ⁶ And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. ⁷ If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”

⁸ Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him. ’”

⁹ Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, ¹⁰ for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ ¹¹ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. ’”

¹² Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

¹³ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Second Reading: “Lent,” from Blessing the Bread, Lynn Ungar, Boston: Skinner House, 1996, p. 32.

What will you give up for this season,

to help life along

in its curious reversals?

As if we had a choice.

As if the world were not

constantly shedding us

like feathers off a duck's back—

the ground is always

littered with our longings.

You can't help but wonder

about all the heroes,

the lives and limbs sacrificed

in their compulsion toward the good.

All those who dropped themselves

upon the earth's hard surface,

weren't they caught in pure astonishment

in the breath before they shattered?

Forget sacrifice. Nothing

is tied so firmly that the wind

won't tear it from us at last.

The question is how to remain faithful

to all the impossible,

necessary resurrections.

Sermon: “Lent – Mindfulness and Self-Denial” -Rev. Paul Sprecher

The Seventeenth Century poet George Herbert (1593-1633) offers this tribute to the Lenten season (The Temple):

Welcome, dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,

He loves not Temperance, or Authority,

But is composed of passion.

The scriptures bid us fast; the Church says Now:

Give to thy Mother what thou wouldst allow

To every Corporation

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, which falls this coming week. By tradition the season is a time of fasting, so the day before is a feast in which anything but fasting occurs. Mardi Gras – literally “fat Tuesday” – is celebrated with the eating of fat, a reversal of social roles, and wild celebration. The most prominent celebration is held in New Orleans, where the revels the day are observed by most celebrants with far greater devotion than the season of Lent to which it is the prelude.

The season of Lent can seem alien to religious liberals, but our tradition in fact provides ample room for understanding and observing this time of mindfulness, though it does require some interpretation to become real in our own lives. Misunderstandings are certainly possible: the notion of giving something up appealed to a certain Unitarian Universalist man, so one year he gave up going to church. Unfortunately, he forgot to return when the forty days of Lent had passed. Or maybe we might prefer to understand Lent from the perspective of the film “Forty Days and Forty Nights” made ten years ago, in which a young man, recovering from the loss of a wonderful relationship, decides to give up sex for Lent in an effort to erase the memory of his girlfriend – whom he still loves and for whom he still pines. It being a Hollywood movie, of course he meets his true soul mate the day after Ash Wednesday and numerous complications ensue.

Barbara Rohde, Unitarian Universalist poet and writer, speaks of the holiday this way:

I did not observe Lent until I became a Unitarian Universalist because I had never understood its purpose. In elementary school, when one of my more pious friends asked me what I was giving up for Lent, I responded with the cliches of schoolgirl humor. "Liver, Brussels sprouts, and spelling tests." Much later, I was able to see that giving something up is an attempt to move out of self-concern through a ritual of self-denial.[i]

Lent does not call for extreme asceticism of this sort exemplified by a St. Francis of Assisi. Rather, it calls for giving up some specific but significant pleasure or indulgence to remind us to pay attention, to be mindful. The point is not in fact the giving up but the opportunity to notice what we don’t need – for a limited period – and thus to remind us of what we truly do need. It is an opportunity to pull back from the busyness of our lives and to consider our highest commitments.

The forty days of Lent serve as a reminder of the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness eating nothing just before his ministry began. The number forty reminds us of a number of other occasions in the Bible and in other traditions. Thus while Noah was in the ark with his family and all the animals, it rained for forty days and forty nights. Moses spent forty days on Mt. Sinai communing with God and receiving the commandments including. Mohammed fasted and prayed for forty days before he started receiving the Qur’an. The Children of Israel wandered for forty years in the wilderness before they could enter the Promised Land. And so Lent is also a season of forty days.

At the end of his time of fasting, Jesus was thoroughly famished. It was then that Satan approached him and offered three temptations – bread to ease his hunger, power over all of the kingdoms of the earth, and proof of his greatness by tempting death and being saved from death by God. These three offer clues to temptations we also encounter in our living.

First, Satan offers bread. The temptation for Jesus to accept bread even from the hand of the evil one must have been extreme. After forty days of fasting it would be perfectly reasonable to sustain one’s body with nourishment. But Jesus rejected the temptation, quoting the Jewish Bible, where it says, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. ” [Matt. 4:4 & Deut. 8:3] We may understand this temptation as offering more than just a single loaf of bread. It represents a desire for material goods, for having everything we want even though it is far more than anything we need. We live in a time of material excess in which the wealthy accumulate much and still feel deprived even when they have more than others. We are all bombarded by commercials that urge us to solve the perceived problems of our living by buying more and more, by getting what we “deserve,” deluding us into believing that really living requires us to buy things and more things. The conditioning to “want” in this way starts early in our children’s lives as they are targeted to stimulate their desire for certain foods or toys or clothes. We can do a real service for our children by shielding them from such influences as far as we can, and by helping them to learn what it means to value love over possessions; Lent provides a special opportunity for such learning. Perhaps it would be a time for giving to others who need more, for serving in a soup kitchen or for giving away a toy that would give joy to a child who had less. We are taught not to live by things alone, but by true values of love and caring. We are reminded of this each week in the Prayer of Jesus, where we say “give us this day our daily bread;” that is, enough for our needs, but not for all of our wants.

Next, Satan offers Jesus the opportunity to become a great ruler, to have power over all of the kingdoms of the earth. Power, too, is a temptation for us. We want to have control over others so that we can be secure, so that we can make others do what we want regardless of what they want. We need to struggle to avoid treating other people as objects to be used, rather than as persons. When we recognize the inherent worth and dignity of each person, as our first Unitarian Universalist principle puts it, we realize that we must not treat others as things but as beings having the same worth as ourselves, that we must love our neighbors as ourselves. Trying to rule over others – children, members of our families, fellow employees who are subordinate to us, those who provide services to us in many other ways – ruling over is a temptation for us as well. All we have to do is to “worship Satan,” as the story of the temptations of Jesus puts it. To apply it more directly to ourselves, we might understand this as a temptation to focus on power and control – which will fade away – rather than on love, which never fails.

Finally, Satan proposes that Jesus prove how great he is by throwing himself off the highest part of the great temple, counting on a miraculous rescue because his importance – his greatness – will ensure that he will be miraculously saved. Sometimes we are tempted to prove our own importance by showing off, counting on being rescued because of our own importance or invulnerability. Sometimes the dare pays off, but eventually failure comes and we realize that we are not in fact so important, that we can’t count on being invincible, that miracles we need to rescue us from our own foolishness aren’t always forthcoming. Jesus turned this temptation aside, too, saying that it is written, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

The temptations of Jesus suggest ways of living our lives during the season of Lent that bring us back to our own deepest commitment to having a life worth living, to honoring the things of the highest worth in our own lives rather than those that will fade away. By denying ourselves something we value but don’t need, we become open to giving ourselves the gift of mindfulness, of paying attention to the real sources of meaning and purpose in our living.

Thich Nhat Hanh offers a few suggestions of things of true worth that we can become more open to by denying ourselves something small but significant that we have come to take for granted, by reminding us each day to pay attention.

First, reverence for life. He offers this summary by Brother David Steindl-Rast:

More and more people are beginning to realize that the survival of our planet depends on our sense of belonging – to all other humans, to dolphins caught in dragnets, to chickens and pigs and calves raised in animal concentration camps, to redwoods and rainforest, to kelp beds in our oceans, and to the ozone layer. More and more people are becoming aware that every act that affirms this belonging is a moral act of worship, the fulfillment of a precept written in every human heart.[ii]

As our seventh Unitarian Universalist principle puts it, we commit ourselves to promote and affirm respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part – and indeed only a small part.

Another aspect of mindfulness we might choose to focus on is generosity. Thich Nhat Hanh expresses such a commitment it this way:

Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I am committed to cultivating loving kindness and learning ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants and minerals. I will practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent other from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on earth.[iii]

This is a hard commitment to carry through, but it reminds us that we will always fall short of doing everything we might wish to do; the challenge is to return again and again to our vow, renewing it over and over even as we recognize that we are not and never will be perfect. This too is a gift we can give ourselves for Lent.

One more opportunity to practice mindfulness is by remembering each day to practice deep listening and loving speech. Perhaps we might carry it out with a vow like this:

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and deep listening in order to bring joy and happiness to others and relieve others of their suffering…. I will refrain from uttering words that can cause division or discord, or that can cause the family or the community to break. I am determined to make all efforts to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.[iv]

This, too, is impossible to carry out at each moment, but by a choosing a small but significant change in our accustomed routine – a small sacrifice each day – we can be reminded of this and the other commitments we might choose to focus on during this Lenten season of mindfulness.

Barbara Rohde, who came to understand the purpose of Lent when she became a Unitarian Universalist, offers her own unfolding understanding of the meaning and purpose of Lent:

Experience teaches us repeatedly that we forget our own egos most quickly when we fully attend to something beyond ourselves. [The poet] W.H. Auden defines prayer in this way. "To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself." As he goes on to say, whenever we so concentrate our attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that we completely forget our own ego and desires, we are praying.

Lent is a time for reflection and prayer, a time not to deny our own needs but to attend to, "to stretch toward," those who are in need of us.[v]

So, then, Lent is a season for mindfulness, for reaching beyond ourselves and our immediate wants and desires, for opening ourselves yet again to what is of true value, to what will last, to love. The poet Robert Herrick offers his understanding of a true Lent:

To Keep a True Lent…

It is to fast from strife,

From old debate,

And hate;

To circumcise thy life.

To show a heart grief-rent;

To starve thy sin,

Not bin;

And that’s to keep thy Lent.

What will you choose to give up for Lent? What small, everyday thing could you deny yourself for just these forty days to bring you back to mindfulness each day? What can you do to remember to attend to that which will last, to what really matters, what thing of worth you want to cultivate? Find that thing and your life will be richer, fuller, and more meaningful. And that’s to keep thy Lent.

Amen, and Blessed Be