What are you giving up for Easter? A Lenten Reflection

Years ago I was very much struck by the idea that anything we give up for Lent should be something we will take back up with joy when our period of sorrow ends at Easter. I find a lot of value in that, particularly since the idea of "giving something up for Lent" has expanded into mainstream culture and often gotten mixed up with mainstream ideas that don't embrace loving ourselves as part of God's good creation. For instance, I regularly hear "giving up" suggestions that seem more rooted in diet culture than faith. And then intertwined with ideas about our not being acceptable human beings at our current weight or "good" and "bad" foods. I don't want to debate whether weight loss is helpful or possible, that's a question for doctors and researchers, but I absolutely stand on the fact that God loves us flaws and all and that God made the sugar cane just as much as the spinach leaf. That said, if we want to give up something for Lent, it needs to fall in the category of 'nice to have' not necessity and if we choose a food, for many of us that is treats like candy, soda, and alcohol. And, if it's a struggle for us to give those things up, there's usually at least minimal social support for the struggle to stick to what you gave up for Lent. Or at least less social pressure to take it up again - "I gave it up for Lent" is often a conversation ender for why you aren't having a drink or dessert in a way "I don't feel like it" should be bit often isn't.

But I don't think Lent is actually the ideal time, liturgically, if we want to give up something bad for us or take up something good for us (individually or communally) permanently for our faith. Of course, if you feel ready now or feel called now, whenever now is, now is the right time. But, I think there is a value in providing communal support for long-term changes (or trying on changes to see if they improve our lives and help us better care for God's creation) and encouraging us to consider long term changes. We have two celebrations of new life annually in the liturgical calendar, Christmas when we celebrate the birth of Jesus and Easter when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and the continuation of the world-changing movement he started despite his death at the hands of the authorities. Easter seems like a good fit for encouraging long-term changes both on the secular and liturgical calendar. It allows those who find it helpful to use Lent for that purpose to get continued support, extra support for those who find that their life improved when they gave up some extra for Lent and want to do it permanently, and a reminder and encouragement for all of us to look at how we can better live our faith (and ACT on it) whether by making a change for our collective good or to treat ourselves with the care we deserve as a child of God.

So what are you giving up for Easter?

Staying in My Lane

One thing I strongly believe but have struggled to fully express is my belief that while other faiths likely have just as important and valuable lessons about God and the nature of the holy as Christianity, we should stay in one lane amd not mix and match. We can learn from other people of faith but piecemeal attempting to determine where those holy lessons are is likely to result in losing more than we gain. Today, I was reading a blog post from Bob Rossi where he expressed this very well. From his post Some cautious notes about my universalism:

On the other hand, a test for my universalism is in believing that other religions---most notably Islam in this case---have something good to say about the attributes or qualities of God. ... The main difficulties that we have here are that grafting religions or divergent expressions of faith on to one another rarely works well, many cultural and religious appropriations can and should be offensive

2 Wonderful Prayers for "Inward Peace"

Prayers for Inward Peace

26. Grant us grace to rest from sinful deeds and thoughts, to surrender ourselves wholly unto thee, and to keep our souls still before thee like a still lake, so that the beams of thy grace may be mirrored therein, and may kindle in our hearts the glow of faith, and love, and prayer. May we, through such stillness and hope, find strength and gladness in thee, O God, now and forevermore. Amen.

27. O God, who art the source of all true peace and joy, grant us so perfectly to do thy will that we may find both that inward peace which the world can neither give nor take away, and that pure joy which shall make radiant all our duty and our toil. Amen.

These are from the UU "Red Hymnal" Additional Prayers and Collects section p. 140. The "Red Hymnal" is also known as Hymns of the Spirit With Services and has 2 title pages, Services of Religion for use in the Churches of The Free Spirit and Hymns of the Spirit for use in the Free Churches of America. It is copyright 1937 by The Beacon Press and was a combined hymnal for the pre-consolidation Unitarian and Universalist churches in the US. It remained in print until sometime in the last 10 years when the 1981 press run sold out.

Climate Change

This is the first of two week six discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education. (The second discussion doesn't fit this format well.)

Apply the elements of critical thinking from Chapter 8: description, analysis, framing a view, judgment, and response, to propose a denominational policy for addressing the tension between climate change science and the needs of people from traditional coal producing areas.

This example is really about two seperate, but related issues. One issue is that human activities are producing climate change and if we want to keep the earth livable, we need to make changes, particularly in how we produce and consume energy. The other issue is about how we as a country treat the people in traditional coal producing areas. I lived on the edge of coal country when I was a kid and even in the 1970's the supply of high quality, reasonably accessible coal to mine in the US was running out. The industry was having to switch to mining in more dangerous mines (and mining has never been anything but very dangerous), mining lower quality coal that didn't work for some things (particularly industrial use), and mining in ways that are more expensive and more destructive to the environment. All of these factors were already leading to a reduction in coal mining and a search for alternatives. The news about climate change has only sped up something that was already happening. The concern Don Perdue expresses in the New York Times - "There is widespread bitterness about the country taking our coal for all these years when it needed us, and then simply saying goodbye." - is not just about climate change. We asked generations of Americans to sacrifice their bodies and lives in coal mines to run the industry and utilities of this country so others could profit and now are leaving those people and those areas with less than they started with. We need to be realistic that the era of King Coal is over, while also treating the people left behind with equity and compassion. 

As far as a denominational policy, since there are two issues, there are two paths that need to be taken, but they can be related. We as a denomination can determine that we will prioritize using renewable energy - whether that means putting in our own solar panels, buying renewable, encouraging our municipal systems to invest in solar, wind, and water power, or providing loans for community members to put in solar. We should also focus on reducing our energy needs, and helping our communities reduce energy needs. As far as supporting people in coal producing areas, we can provide scholarships and particularly practical assistance to people from those areas to train to do other work. Practical assistance is an area where even the poorest congregations can help - for example, helping people who are first generation college students know what to do to apply and thrive in college (this could be done remotely) and welcoming and supporting individuals and families who may be in the area to study or complete internships. We can also prioritize purchasing needed items from new industries in coal producing areas - this might include things like solar panels, meeting both goals at once. 

Church

This is the first of two week five discussion questions from my Spring 2022 courseMaking Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What role has the church played in your life? How would you respond to the young person who asks, “Do I have to belong to a church to be a Christian?”

One of my early memories is my dedication. It was Christmas Eve and I was 5 or 6. In our church at the time, part of dedication is the adult members of the church pledging to be there for the child growing up and I remember being impressed that all these adults cared for me. My family weren't always regular church goers, but whenever we went, I still felt part of the community. As an adult, I worked weekends and started attending my denominations church by mail and joined a then 'experimental' mailing list, which became a very active small group for almost 20 years, and several of us are still in contact. Even when I started getting weekends off, I found such satisfaction in my small group that I continued with that church. More recently I joined an online church start and we have an amazing community via Discord, with an almost daily . I am also part of my mom's regional small group from the denomination I grew up in, at 52, I'm the baby. They meet once a month and that's the weekend I usually visit her. I love hearing from my elders and I'm trying to get one of my mom's friends to write her autobiography, because she has had some amazing experiences, particularly around the UU denomination, her father was a groundbreaking minister and as a result she got to meet all sorts of people who came to visit him, she also went to Europe after World War 2 with the Universalist Service Committee to work in a refugee camp. I love my church families and they have helped me and my family through a lot of rough times.

However, as valuable as my church community has been to me, if asked whether you have to belong to a church to be a Christian, my response would be no. While my church experience has been almost uniformly good, I know not everyone is that lucky. In fact, I know many people for whom church has been a source of pain or even spiritual abuse. It's easy to say, well, those are just bad churches, but I think it's important that we as Christians take more responsibility for such things and acknowledge that church is not always a healthy experience and that every church has the possibility of being a bad experience for someone. All it takes is one leader behaving badly or even looking away when members treat others badly to do damage. As I said, my church experiences have been good, but I refused to attend youth group in high school and if I went to church, went to the regular services after being bullied in Sunday School as a middle schooler and not feeling like I had any other options to avoid it. In the UUA, youth group is actually older than our denomination, because the two main denominations that consolidated had a combined youth group for decades. While attending church as a teen and college student opened opportunities for me (I was co-director of social concerns for our church and teaching adult Religious Education at 19 or 20), not attending youth group also closed some. If I had just quit participating at all, it would have closed more. (Ironically, I'm the only person from my middle-school Sunday School class who still has ties to the UU church.) For people whose experiences are mostly bad, finding a better church may be too painful or they may need to heal first. However, Brown is right, the community that we participate in does influence who we are. I think it is necessary to have a spiritual community to be a Christian, but what that community is can vary. It might be a church, it might be a small group, it might be a Bible study. It may be in person, by phone, on Zoom or Google Meet or in some sort of social media. It might be extremely interactive or only slightly (in her later years, my grandmother's main spiritual community was being part, with some of her in-person friends of a large group of listeners to a radio Bible study.) What the community is is unimportant, that it is community is what matters.

Brown on Sin and Salvation

This is the first of two week four discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What insights from this week’s readings (Stone and Duke, Ch 6, "The Human Condition" and Brown, Chs 6, "Sin" and 7 "Salvation") were most helpful or inspiring for you? What aspects, if any, where troubling or challenging for you?

I found Brown's discussion of sin to be very useful and on target with my experiences. He points out pride is "excessive self-regard in relation to others" and taking more than your fair share. "Sensuality" is not about taking excessive joy in things of the body, but rather thinking less of yourself than yourself than you should. Traditional definitions of sensuality mean that you have to do some fancy footwork somewhere to draw a line between appreciating God's good creation with our bodies and senses and viewing sensuality as a sin, the fact that this avoids that problem is a mark in its favor that doesn't depend on the fact that defining sin in this way might make me personally less of a sinner. (One of my Bible school professors taught than when you read something and it feels difficult and you just want to dismiss it, you should sit with that idea for a while and think about whether it's wrong or you're wrong; but I think it's just as or more important to sit with things that just sound good and align with our prejudices for a while too.) While it is easy to come up with examples of people who harm others because they think they deserve more, I was also reminded of kids I saw in the 90's who had been taught that their self-esteem was so important they had trouble doing any self-reflection that wasn't positive because they hadn't had that experience. This isn't to say that they'd never been told they were bad or wrong, but they had only been taught to look at what in their life they were doing well, never what they could improve or were unhappy with. (That's also setting kids up for failure.) And I certainly know plenty of people who never ask for what they need and always give to others. As I think about this, I'm having trouble thinking of examples of things that don't fit this framework, which I think is a good sign. Most of us, of course, fall in the middle, sometimes taking too much, sometimes not taking enough. I have previously heard the definition that sin is "falling short" and I like that definition, but I think this one has more depth.

I wanted to write about the discussion in Brown about the problem of our not doing what we should, which is similar to "falling short", but mostly, I've sat with the fact that I need to think about that more for almost a week now and don't actually have anything to verbalize. I've finally settled on putting a note on my calendar to read it again in month, because I feel like there is more there for me.

I also have some concern with Brown's discussion of salvation. I very much like it. I tend to want to agree with it, but I have reservations because it is very rational and I think we lose something important about Christianity when we ignore the transcendent too much. (This definitely goes the other way too, we lose something important when we forget the practical parts of Christianity.)

 

Salvation

This is the second of two week four discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

Compare and contrast the Trimble's experience (Stone and Duke, Chapter 5) of “re-finding” themselves to that of Zacchaeus’ experience of salvation? How do these experiences relate or not relate to your life?

So, I'm not sure we are comparing apples to apples here. If you read the story of Zacchaeus' interaction with Jesus in the CEB translation (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2019%3A1-10&version=CEB), the verbs use the present tense when Zacchaeus talks about giving to the poor and paying back those he wrongs four-fold. So the story perhaps is not that of Zacchaeus' salvation, but Jesus's public acknowledgement that he already is. (And the notes in The Jewish Annotated New Testament point this way as well.) Read this way, the story goes like this:

Jesus is coming to town, and Zacchaeus is excited about the opportunity to see him. (And this excitement itself may be a sign of the fact that Zacchaeus is already saved.) Because he is short and the crowds are large, Zacchaeus finds a tree to climb for a good view. Jesus sees Zacchaeus in the crowd, recognizes him and speaks to him. (Again, Jesus recognizing Zacchaeus may also be a sign that Zacchaeus is already saved.) The crowd, not Jesus, identifies Zacchaeus as a sinner. Zacchaeus defends himself, explaining why he believes he is not a sinner. Jesus acknowledges this and tells the crowd that he (Salvation) is there because Zacchaeus is already a member of the community. In this reading, Zacchaeus was only lost because the community wasn't including him.

The Trimble story, on the other hand, is fairly straight forward. People find something that helps them and isn't (obviously) in conflict with their faith and they attribute it to being a necessary or important tool for faith for everyone. Sometimes, whatever it is that is actually a helpful tool for some people. (I'm reminded of the planner fad - a planner can help me do my daily prayer and bible reading along with my other daily tasks, one of my friends finds it essential for staying on track with that, other people may find it useful for their secular life only, or not useful at all.) Sometimes, it's pretty much unrelated - I've seen this happen with diets, workout plans, even business opportunities, but self-help books and programs are super common sources of this type of confusion.  I think we even do this with things we would all agree are part of Christian life. I think we'd agree that things like church attendance, Bible reading and study, and prayer are all tools for being Christian, but we can get caught up in the details of doing those things instead of loving our neighbor, loving God, forgiving, ...

I think the main difference between these two situations, regardless of whether we interpret Zacchaeus' experience as salvation in that moment or acknowledgement of existing salvation, is that Zacchaeus' salvation involves action. He does more than the average person to make sure he sees Jesus. He gives generously to charity. He makes amends in a concrete way. The Trimbles' renewal is about attitude. The only actions they mention are holding hands and giving thanks. Zacchaeus' salvation moves him to do differently. The Trimbles are only thinking differently.

I think this lines up with my own life. When I really change my mind about something, it almost always somehow results in changed behavior. It might not be as drastic or impressive as Zacchaeus' behavior, but there is a difference over time. For beliefs I'm serious about, I can point at behaviors I do as a result (and sometimes, honestly, places I know I fall short in changing behavior to line up with new beliefs - behavioral changes are hard sometimes, you can't just believe them into being or we wouldn't have problems like addiction.)