Lent and Three Journeys Through the Wilderness

Every year as a kid, there would be a few days in March when many of my classmates would start a new conversation:  what they were giving up for Lent. As an informally-traditional Methodist, it was a conversation that I couldn’t really participate in. About a week into Lent, though, very few people seemed to be talking about it anymore. Usually, it was because their attempts to give up watching TV or eating chocolate had proven unsuccessful. I don’t doubt the good intentions of my classmates; breaking engrained habits can be hard. They were human, after all, and being children of God doesn’t exempt us from struggling to do the right thing. The 40-year journey of the ancient Israelites is a case in point.

A desert in Egypt (which incidentally served as the locale
for my first sandboarding experience)

In spite of having seen the love and power of God through their crossing of the Red Sea, in the bestowing of manna and quails and water, they could have won the Olympic gold medal for grumbling against the Lord. They were guided in their journey by the presence of God Himself, in the pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night. But in their spiritual lives, they were utterly lost. They refused to accept the spiritual gifts God had to offer, instead choosing to rebel against Him and His servant Moses. They tempted the Lord and served other gods. None of that generation except Joshua and Caleb entered the promised land. In spite of being a people hand-picked by God for Himself, they had fallen on their faces. They were human, after all.

More than a thousand years later, another man wandered the Wilderness, but in Judea instead of Egypt. Like the Israelities, he had recently been declared as the Son of God. As the Israelites had learned, this vocation came with great responsibility, responsibility to listen to and obey the Lord. But where the Israelites had failed, the Jewish Messiah would pass with flying colors. Satan tried his best to tempt Jesus at the end of his 40-day fast, urging him to use his divinity to create bread out of thin air, have angels save him from death, and gain control over all the nations of the earth. Jesus’ response to each temptation showed his unflagging obedience to God and made the contrast between his Wilderness journey and that of the Israelites that much clearer. Because of Jesus’ victory over Satan in the Wilderness, he was able to go on to conduct his ministry, die for our sins, and be resurrected. Because of his obedience to the Father, we were able to become God’s adopted Children.

As Christians, our relationship with God carries with it its own responsibilities. We’re all in the midst of our own Wilderness journeys, having fled from the powers of sin and death and become God’s children through baptism. For now, we’re liable to make mistakes and sin, to hurt those we love and get things wrong again and again. During this journey, though, we’re led not by a pillar of smoke and fire, but by a man and the Spirit that his Father sent to comfort and guide us. For now, we have to trust with all our hearts that Jesus and the Holy Spirit will be able to get us to our own Promised Land, where God will truly be our god, and we will truly be His people.

Ash Wednesday: The Day of Dirty Foreheads or Affirmation of Creation?

I think I was ten or eleven. I had gotten to school a bit early that day, so I was one of the first kids in homeroom. When a classmate shuffled into the room, I resisted the urge to say, “You...umm...have a lil' something on your face.” After four or five more students came in with what looked like dirt on their foreheads, I figured it couldn't just be a coincidence. Those students were Catholic, and that was my first introduction to Ash Wednesday. I simply hadn't heard of the tradition until that morning, when some of my friends explained it to me. By the time they arrived at school, of course, most had inadvertently smudged it to the point of being completely unrecognizable as a cross. 

To be replaced with a picture of my own smudged forehead later 

Over the next several years, my opinion of the Day of Dirty Foreheads (as I called it then) didn't change much. I thought it was weird, silly even. It was a mostly-empty and superstitious ritual, one of the vestiges of medieval Catholicism. Part of me wondered if God cared at all whether my classmates had ashes on their forehead, or if He shared my own reaction to it. Today, I realize that my bias against the imposition of ashes was mostly a result of being raised as a low-church Methodist. We simply didn't “do that sort of thing.” 

My distaste for religious practices that involve a material aspect grew in high school, when I set up a dichotomy in my mind between the physical world and the spiritual one. I believed one of the main points of religion was to reject materiality, or at least to ignore it. Our bodies would die one day, our souls drifting up to heaven forever. The physical earth itself, as well as the universe, would be destroyed (hopefully in the far distant future). This was all part of God's plan. The sooner we realized that our bodies and earthly substance were irrelevant from God's perspective, the better. It's what's inside the head and heart that counts. What purpose did the imposition of ashes, baptism, and the Lord's Supper have other than as purely symbolic acts?

Skip forward in time several years. Later this evening, I'll be receiving ashes at my Lutheran church. Suffice it to say that my opinion on Ash Wednesday has evolved since I was a kid. So has my view of the material world. Those ashes won't secure my salvation. They won't effect forgiveness of sins, nor are they intended to. But to me, feeling those ashes on my forehead is a strong affirmation of the fact that God is the originator of the earth as much as He is of the heavens. He created this world, and He declared it to be good. He gave us custodianship over it and over our bodies, both of which we have abused and mistreated. In spite of this, and contrary to the popular idea that the Christian hope is to escape this rock before it falls to pieces, God hasn't given up on us or on any of His creation. To do so would have marked His greatest defeat at the hands of the powers of sin, death, and decay. 

Instead, we're promised that one day, Heaven and Earth will be fused together, and that He will then restore our bodies to us along with the ground on which we walk. For now, the ashes I receive are a reminder of my mortality and need for repentance. But if Jesus defeated death for all of us in his Resurrection, then our physical and moral frailty isn't a permanent condition. When he returns, we will become like him. With bodies no longer able to get sick or die, no one will be able to say of us, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I'll take that vision of eternity over playing a harp on a cloud any day.