Readings:
AM Psalm 37:1-18; PM Psalm 37:19-42; Deuteronomy
7:6-11; Titus 1:1-16; John 1:29-34
For you are a
people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all
the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more
numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you
– for you were the fewest of all peoples.
It was because the Lord loved you.
Deuteronomy 7:6-8 (NRSV)
By this time of the new
year the gyms that had nary an open treadmill or elliptical machine in early
January now aren’t quite as crowded.
Early to mid-February usually finds many people having faltered in their
New Year’s resolutions to exercise more and so the gym regulars breathe a sigh
of relief as the wait to use equipment declines substantially.
Typically, we make New
Year’s resolutions to improve ourselves and our lives – to make us better and
more perfect people. The
advertisements that constantly bombard us in our culture encourage this as they
tell us we need to be more of this and less of that in order to achieve the “perfection”
that will then make us more popular and more loved by others.
Growing up, what I knew
and learned of the practice of giving up something for Lent came from my
Catholic friends since in my Lutheran household the practice of giving up
something for Lent was seen as “too Catholic” to take part in. And so, my early understanding of the
Lenten discipline of giving something up for Lent was that the practice was
much like a New Year’s resolution.
It was a practice meant to make you a better and more perfect person who
would, therefore, be more worthy of God’s love. Of course, as a good Lutheran, I rejected this as heresy
against my knowledge that I was saved by grace through faith and that there was
nothing I could do to make God love me more than God already did. :-)
However, as I got older
and went to seminary, my understanding of the practice evolved to more than the
understanding I had gained in elementary school from my Catholic friends. I came to see the practice of giving
something up for Lent as a way to draw closer to God. I began to understand that the practice of abstaining from
something in Lent is a way to for us to rid ourselves of the things that get in
the way of our relationship with the God who has chosen us as God’s own and who
loves us more than we can ever comprehend simply because we belong to God. Sure, giving that thing up might make
us a better person, but that isn’t the goal. The goal is to grow in relationship with God by turning away
from that which leads us away from God.
And that can be done by abstaining from something that prevents me from
fully living into my relationship with God or it can be done by adding
something to my life that will help me to grow deeper in that
relationship.
With this
new understanding under my belt, I feel comfortable in not being “too Catholic”
if I give something up for Lent today because I now get that it isn’t heretical
to who I am as a Lutheran Christian (or a Lutherpalian as I sometimes refer to
myself as a Lutheran pastor serving in an Episcopal congregation :-). I now understand that abstaining from something during Lent
isn’t about making God love me more as I become more perfect and, therefore, more
worthy of God’s love. It is about
growing in my relationship with the God who has chosen me as God’s treasured
possession. It is about growing in
the knowledge and trust that God chose each and every one of us as God’s own people,
not because we as a people were the best and most promising people out there – our Deuteronomy reading for the day tells us we
were far from that – but because God loves us simply for who we are. And so this Lent I will take part in a Lenten
discipline not to be more perfect, but to live more fully into the perfect love
of God who has chosen me as God’s own, imperfect as I may be.
Karen
Safstrom
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