Hosea: The Weakness of God

Who Is This, So Weak and Helpless
by William Walsham How, 1823-1897

Who is this, so weak and helpless,
child of lowly Hebrew maid,
rudely in a stable shelter
coldly in a manger laid?
‘Tis the Lord of all creation,
who this wondrous path has trod;
he is Lord from everlasting
and to everlasting, God.

Who is this, a Man of Sorrows,
walking sadly life’s hard way,
homeless, weary, sighing, weeping,
over sin and Satan’s sway?
‘Tis our God, our glorious Savior,
who above the starry sky
is for us a place preparing,
where no tear can di the eye.

Who is this? Behold him shedding
drops of blood upon the ground!
Who is this, despised, rejected,
mocked, insulted, beaten, bound?
‘Tis our God, who gifts and graces
on his church is pouring down;
who shall smite in holy vengeance
all his foes beneath his throne.

Who is this that hangs there dying
while the rude world scoffs and scorns,
numbered with the malefactors,
torn with nails and crowned with thorns?
‘Ts our God who lives forever
mid the shining ones on high,
in the glorious golden city,
reigning everlastingly.

We were sitting in Bible study, talking about the passion of Jesus. What must it have been like for Jesus to be going toward Jerusalem, knowing he was going to die? We talked about the fear he must have experienced, when, as Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase puts it, Jesus said, I am storm-tossed. Some of the guys, though, weren’t sure. “I mean, Jesus was God, he must have known how this was going to turn out,” said one.

I don’t know. There is an old idea called Docetism, which comes from a Greek work meaning like. Jesus, in this story line, only seemed to be human, so he only seemed to suffer. He only seemed to die. He was divine, so how could he really feel pain? It’s only logical.

But the Scriptures come from the Hebrew culture, whose tool kit contained more than logic. They also used emotion and revelation and stories and questions to get the job done. The Scripture both the First Testament and the New, reflect that Hebrew sense of the world. They give systematic theologians fits. Anyone looking for complete consistency or total agreement among parts of the Bible, even those parts written by the same person, will go away very sad. Those writings show us a God who gets angry, sad, and even afraid. The entire book of Hosea is written from the perspective of the husband of an unfaithful wife. God’s anguish is almost palpable. It runs the gamut from remorse to anger to desire and back to anger.

In his book, Night, Eli Weisel, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, tells a tragic story from his time in the death camps. After several escape attempts, a number of prisoners from the men and boys side of the camp were selected at random to be hanged as an example. One of the victims was a young boy who was too light to die immediately – the rope merely strangled him slowly. It took him half an hour to die. As the rest of the prisoners stood watching in horror, a man behind Eli whispered, “Where’s God?” Eli says that he heard a voice inside himself say, “God is there, on the gallows.”

Here’s where the Jewish sensibility comes into play. The story is at once a story of lost faith – the death of God, as it were. But it also suggests, ever so mildly, and quite apart from the author’s intention, hope. The story is almost biblical. It is at once hopeless and sown with the seeds of hope. It offers a glimpse into human suffering, but also into the nature of a God who suffers with, in, and for his creation. Thomas Cahill noted that while the Old Testament book of Job is about the question, “Why?”, the New Testament records the only answer God gives the earth, “I will suffer with you.” It’s not a satisfying answer, at least not in a purely intellectual sense, but it replaces the question marks with quotation marks.

The death of Jesus, the core of the renewal of all creation, is the suffering of God in and for what he has made.

If God did not suffer for us, God would not love us, let alone be love, as I John so boldly asserts. Love is in part the willingness to be open to pain. God loves us, but that’s more than a mere bumper sticker sentiment. If God didn’t love us, God could simply walk away, leave us to our own ruin and destruction. But God is not that kind of being. God suffers because of us, and, in Jesus, God suffers with us.

During the strange time right before the release of “Passion of the Christ” I read an article that said, in effect, “So what if Jesus suffered? Lots of people have suffered more and longer.” The author cited several cases – AIDS patients, battered women, Palestinians hit by mortar fire.

What the writer missed, though, was not the quantitative nature of Jesus’s suffering, but the qualitative nature. Atonement theology is a debated topic in many corners of the Church, but if we could begin to see Jesus as the ultimate victim – of sin, of human frailty, of the injustice of the world – then we could get in touch with how his suffering redeems us. By suffering for us, with us, as us, Jesus took our pain onto himself. He became the AIDS patient, the battered woman, the wounded Palestinian, as well as their attackers. In his own being, Jesus unwound suffering.

Sure, we still suffer, we still experience deep pain and sorrow, but it’s been shattered by the shattering of Jesus.

What Jesus Meant: A Book Review: Something I Swore I'd Never Do

I love book reviews, but I never imagined writing one. I'm not sure why. Just didn't seem like how I get down. I like my ideas, and telling the world how clever I am, not other people's wisdom. Figure that out on your own.

But, for whatever it's worth, here's a Review of Gary Wills' What Jesus Meant.


I picked up the book in curious trepidation. I was pleasantly surprised. Everyone, it seems, from John Piper to Marcus Borg, wants to tell me what Jesus did and didn’t mean. Gary Wills is no exception. But his little book, generous in its orthodoxy and challenging in its presentation, did not disappoint.
In What Jesus Meant Wills is completely unapologetic of who Jesus is and what he was/is about. But even though he does not mince words, those words, while not evangelistic in the classic twentieth century sense of the word, give the good news of Jesus, bracing and refreshing. He doesn’t try to crush Jesus into smaller pieces and hide him in political or cultural rant for easier consumption. Instead, he allows Jesus to come through, naked and unashamed.
Wills writes as an insider who is so far inside he doesn’t worry about offending. He’s in so deep that he begins by questioning the whole What Would Jesus Do movement; Jesus would do a lot of things we can’t do, since he was/is God. Wills writes, “He is not just like one of us, . . . he has higher rights and powers, . . . he has an authority as arbitrary as God’s in the Book of Job. He is a divine mystery walking among men” (p. xvi-xvii). The other side of the traditional equation, that Jesus is also fully human, is not lost to Wills. In detailing the Passion of Jesus, what he calls “Descent Into Hell”, he insists on the humanity of Jesus: “Jesus did not wear merely the outer shell or facial mask of a man (as the Docetists taught). He had to enter into the full tragedy of humanity, its bewildered helplessness, its shame, its sense of inadequacy and despair.” (p. 106). I must add, that’s about as much as anyone looking for affirmation of the tradition is going to get. After these two key agreements, Wills and the tradition find little common ground.
The book is worth reading just for Wills’ notes on his own translations, wherein he details the awkwardness of the koine Greek of the New Testament. It’s both shocking and humorous for anyone who has spent semesters poring over individual Greek words, trying to wrest meaning from terms which might have been just the closest at hand for an unskilled first century writer. The translations are fresh and catch the reader by surprise with their implications. For instance, “apostle” is rendered, as it should be, as “emissary”, stripping away some of the religious undertones we unconsciously bring to the texts. On the way to Lazarus’ graveside, where they are likely to be killed, Thomas remarks, “Go we along, then, we too shall die with him.” Wills’ radical Jesus, had no time for religion or politics, the two things polite people do not discuss. But Jesus was anything but polite. He mounted an attack on both. And both, ironically, are the human devices that conspired to kill him. If, as Jesus said, we are to, “Leave Caesar’s matters to Caesar,” (Mk. 12:17) we must wonder how to establish “a Christian politics”. “The answer,” says Wills, “is that Jesus did not come to bring any form of politics” (p. 55). Later, he calls Jesus’ reign is a “systematic antipolitics”, and quotes the Sermon on the Plain, wherein Jesus called his followers to love their foes and to lend without calculating returns and to be lenient as God the Father is lenient, excessive in love. “Anyone claiming to practice a ‘Christian politics’ other that this is a usurper” (p. 89).
Drawing attention to the political connections, Wills calls the torture of Jesus a “burlesque coronation” (p. 110) and describes its legacy. The show, in which Jesus was dressed in faux robes and a cruel crown and given mocking obeisance, says Wills, has been replayed throughout the centuries by Christian emperors, popes, divine-right kings, and, now, certain brands of evangelicals. “All have dressed Jesus in borrowed political robes” (p. 110). It made me think of the Dark Mass of medieval legend, a kind of shadow Eucharist haunting the true remembrance of the humility and sacrifice of Jesus.
Religion is also an enemy of Jesus. In fact, Wills says, “all religious formalists have reason to fear Jesus” (p. 67). While it’s easy to think of other offenders, those of us in paid ministry positions might spend a little time trembling. “Jesus did not come to replace the Temple with other buildings, whether huts or rich cathedrals, but to instill a religion of the heart, with only himself as the place where we encounter the Father. At first one might think that Jesus would not recognize most of what calls itself religion today. But, on second thought, it would probably look all too familiar” (p. 76).
Jesus comes out clearly in Wills’ portrayal: the woman-loving, Sabbath-breaking, sinners’-friend, wine-guzzling itinerant who claimed authority over such things. In other words, the Jesus we’re all a little embarrassed of. He’s the Jesus who flaunts convention for the sake of justice, and has little time for religious observance. He cleanses the Temple, not to restore it, but to replace it. His reaction, thinks Wills, would be the same were he to walk physically into St. Peter’s Basilica or the Mormon Tabernacle or the Crystal Cathedral. I wondered what other edifices might have made the list.
What’s most surprising in Wills’ Jesus centered critique of religion is his insistence that St. Peter was not the first bishop of Rome (he calls apostolic succession “a fiction” – p. 91), that Jesus did not intend to establish a hierarchy and that the presence of Jesus, not words of any kind, establishes a gathering of the true Church. This from the man whose Why I Am a Catholic rode the New York Times best seller list.
Religion and politics killed Jesus, but why did he die, in a metaphysical sense? After exploring a few “classic” theories of the atonement, most of which involve a pissed off God, Wills speaks of Jesus “mission as lifting humankind up into his own intimacy with the Father” (p. 117). He tells a touching story of his son waking in the night, terrified by nuns who told him he’d go to hell if he sinned. “There is not an ounce of heroism in my nature, but I instantly answered what any father would, ‘All I can say is that if you’re going there, I’m going with you’” (p. 117). That, he realized, is an imperfect picture of God’s love – a love willing to descend into hell for our sakes. God’s love rescues us not from God’s anger, but from “the forces at work against God – all the accumulated sins that cripple human freedom” (p. 119-120).
So, if it’s not religion or politics, what was Jesus all about? Wills’ translation of Jesus’ opening salvo reminds us, “God’s reign impends” (Mk. 1:15; p. 84). Citing the parables of emergence (like seeds and yeast and weeds growing with wheat and debt forgiveness and extravagant wages), Wills leaves behind the tired discussion of the kingdom as now and/or later or broken in pieces or fully realized. He says, “The reign is a dynamic process . . . It is not two things, one present and one to come. It is one process unfolding” (p. 85).
Jesus is the way into this reign, the way, the truth, and the life. In fact, Jesus is the reign himself. To illustrate this holy mystery, this divine conundrum, Wills quotes Augustine, whom he has biographied: “Where should we go but to him? And how should we go, but by way of him? So he goes to himself through himself, and we go to him by way of him, and both of us – he and we – arrive at the Father” (p. 91).
Interestingly, Wills answers what seems to me a very evangelical question, “How do I get in [not to heaven, but God’s reign]?” He calls it “the test”. “Love is the test . . .Did you treat everyone, high and low, as if dealing with Jesus himself, with his own inclusive and gratuitous love, the revelation of the Father’s love, whose sunshine is shed on all? . . . It is radical love, exigent, searing, terrifying” (p. 56-57).
There’s more. Wills treats homosexuality, the Body of Christ, Judas, and the harrowing of hell with brevity and depth. He’s a good read for the quotes alone, From Denise Levertov to G. K. Chesterton to Flannery O’Connor to Shusaku Endo and a dozen others. What Jesus Meant has a home on my shelf between Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

The Sky Tonight

The sky tonight is a cracked vase
shards of purple, orange, and red
shine among dark lines of clouded underbellies.

There is a Japanese term
-wabi sabi-
which means delight in imperfection,
like the asymmetry of every face,
like the splintered sky and vase.

To mother and father
my mind rolls,
they who, in a moment I know not,
-in passion, need, fear, love, or spite-
in a moment I know not,
cast me as a fish without sight
into a shrinking sea,
who later bound me over
to the living world,
whose love shines wabi sabi
across my sky.

Day in Dakota

And the wind never stops,
and the water never looks like glass
but rather like a ploughed field,
and the few trees strain
in a losing battle to remain straight,
or else give up and grow low and squat
thick fingered limbs splayed.
And car becomes carp,
flitting across the road.
The wheel is a living thing in my hands.


Corn and soybeans where the ocean roared.
No more buffalo roaming
through eight foot prarie grass:
wide open spaces cut into square mile sections,
defied by spontaneous lakes,
arising out of dimples in the land
shallow havens for slimy weeds, fish,
and waterfowl tourists.

Spiritual Awareness: The Sermon on the Mount

I was visiting with Evan Howard, the married evangelical monk/scholar from Montrose, CO, and he challenged me to ask my children, “What did you notice today?” instead of “What did you do today?” or, “What did you learn today?” Doing and learning are caught up in noticing. It reminded me of one of my favorite phrases from Philip Yancey, who said that spirituality is paying attention. Spirituality is all about noticing, seeing "God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – clearly seen, being understood from what has been made".

Spiritual space is carved out by intentional disciplines or practices. Spiritual practices do not make God love us more – he cannot; but spiritual practices help us to love God more. An element of love is paying attention to what you love. Stopping and listening, living intentionally, and carefully considering God’s way in the world will teach us to love God. Here, I’d like to suggest seven practices, since there are seven days in this week.

The Sermon on the Mount, so called because Jesus is said to have delivered it from a mountain, is recorded in Matthew 5-7. There's a similar bit of sermonizing in Luke; interestingly, it's remembered as spoken on a plain. It was in the sermon that Jesus laid out his path for living in the world. The Sermon is hard stuff. This is not "7 Highly Effective Habits For Triumphant Christians Living Their Best Life Now". There is no guarantee that life will be easier if you follow Jesus in the way of the Sermon. It might get harder.

There is no word, though, that these are optional practices for special Christians. It’s how we live into the Kingdom of God, which is just another way of saying “God’s way in the world”.

I've delineated six or seven observations from the Sermon which seem most significant to me. There's no magic to the seven; they are not "The Seven Principles For Christian Living", or even very astute. You'll have an easier time following my thinking if you read the Sermon first. I'd suggest www.biblecrosswalk.com. It's pretty easy to use.

1) The kingdom of God is to be lived.
What does it look like when people live as though God is real? Jesus’s hearers must have laughed at his insistence that the meek (humble, landless, poor) would inherit the earth. They’d have been more skeptical that the peacemakers (makers is an active noun) are to be called sons of God. Here’s the full list of blessed realities: the poor in spirit, sorrow-bearers, the humble, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure-hearted, peacemakers, the persecuted.

I’ve been becoming more sure that the list of characteristics are not separate attributes, but contours of the skin of Jesus living.

2) Fasting is not for others to see and marvel over.
Fasting can make us more aware of our dependence on God’s mercy. Hunger serves as a reminder that we do not feed ourselves, and gives guts to the plea, Give us this day our daily bread. It’s also a kind of sacrifice. We surrender to God, not to win God’s affection, but so God can win ours.

Remember this, though, fasting is not a means of mastering the evil body in favor of the spirit. We are created as physical beings. Fasting is self-control, always in the interest of learning to taste again the joys of physical existence, which is God’s gift to us.

Some Christians, notably the Eastern Orthodox, have a really nuanced take on this discipline. Some scholars believe that their understanding of fasting is closely related to the general fasting practices of the ancient Near East and more specifically to biblical fasting. Various kinds of fasts require abstinence from meat or cheese, or wine. Some fasts are more stringent, avoiding all foods except bread, water, juices, honey, and nuts. Some people notice that this diet is the same as that of John the Baptizer, and wonder if maybe this is the kind of fast Jesus observed during his forty days.

If you have never fasted before, consider a fast from specific things, or fast for one or two meals. Then begin to fast longer. It’s important to remember, though, that fasting is not an endurance contest, nor is it a weight loss program. Allow the strangeness of forgoing the experience of eating, along with the hunger, to remind you of your need for God’s provision.

3) Giving to the poor is giving to Jesus.
Someone told me once that a person must be specifically called to serve the poor, otherwise, they might be disobeying God. That person was wrong. Jesus called. He said to serve the poor. We cannot live the Jesus life apart from serving. More than that, in serving others, we serve Jesus: whatever you’ve done for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you’ve done for me. Giving money, food, and clothing, visiting the elderly, the imprisoned, and the sick, and providing shelter for the homeless are real and concrete means of connecting with God.

Today we have very clean and neat means of giving like offering baskets and tax-deductible charitable donations. But there was a time when giving was much more direct. A Lenten practice could include recapturing this older way, and actually helping a destitute person.

How can we, as a diminishing faith community, directly serve the poor near us and away from us?

4) Prayer is essential to the Christian life.
But what does prayer look like? Most prayer seminars leave me feeling inadequate to the task. I get the sense that if I don’t pray like the leader, at his or her set times, I’m not doing it right.

Jesus himself prayed early in the morning and late at might. He prayed with others, and he prayed alone. He took time away to pray, but was willing to be interrupted by the needs of the day.

Jesus’s teaching involved the Lord’s Prayer. Such a prayer takes our entire lives to master, yet most of us can breeze through it without thinking, mouthing archaic words which have lost any immediacy for us. One of the most profound insights into the Lord’s Prayer I’ve ever heard was my grandmother’s comment that she didn’t much like it; she wanted to be forgiven better than she was able to forgive. Then she winked, but I knew she meant that the Prayer is much harder than most of us realize. I suggest re-reading the prayer in several translations, in order to grasp the meaning of each request. Read it in Matthew and in Luke. Note the differences. What could that mean?

Prayer is talking. And singing. But it’s also about listening. And being comfortable with silence. And showing, not saying.

Try memorizing the Lord’s Prayer in another translation. Memorize other prayers. Make prayer beads. Learn to dance your prayers. Listen.

5) Lectio divina is a term that means, “sacred reading”.
It’s a practice of reading the Scriptures for depth. This is one of those areas that makes me laugh at the overlap between high church and low church Christians. I learned from high church people the words and “methods” of lectio divina. One needs to open one’s mind and spirit to the Holy Spirit using one or two words, perhaps a sentence, to draw one into God’s presence. I learned from low church people to think of the fingers of a hand when it comes to approaching Scripture. Beginning with the pinkie, think hear, read, study, memorize, memorize, and meditate. With that kind of approach, one might come before another, but all five parts are necessary.

In the Sermon Jesus taught his followers something of how to read Scripture. He went through a number of texts, saying, You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times . . . But I say to you . . . His instructions are midrash, commentary on the older Scriptures. And the rule he used to interpret was love. In fact, later in the Sermon he called doing to others as you’d have done to you the narrow gate that leads to life.

Lectio divina requires deep concentration, but you can concentrate in ways other than sitting on a mat, staring at your belly (although that might work for you). Read a passage of Scripture, then go for a walk, a ski, or a bike ride. Hold the words in yourself, in your mouth and your head and your chest. Let the meaning swish around in you, and swirl about you. Read the thoughts of others, study the context of your passage. Become intimate with it, so you recognize its contours and geography like you do the terrain around your house. Ask God to draw you through this passage into the divine presence. Then rest there.

6) Simplicity isn't complicated.
We sometimes overlook it, in part because we live in a greed saturated culture. 2,000 years ago, Jesus told the rich to drop their wealth for the sake of following him. Don’t worry about treasures on earth. Gather instead treasures in heaven. Don’t worry about food and clothes. God feeds and dresses birds and flowers; surely he’ll meet your needs. Today, even the lower middle class live in ways kings and queens of past centuries could only dream of. Leaving all for the sake of Jesus seems more and more impractical to us, forgetting so easily that leaving all, no matter how little “all” might be, is impractical in every age.

Promoting simplicity in an age of abundance seems sketchy, at best. It’s sometimes perceived as unrealistic, hyper-spiritual, or sadly misguided. Couple that with a strain of Christian religion that believes wealth to be a sign of God’s favor, and the recipe for greed is almost unstoppable. But the discipline of simplicity does just that. It seeks to curb our appetites for the sake of God’s way in the world.

Simplicity is not frugality, which is just another way of hoarding possessions. Simplicity gives to others. I hesitate to say that simplicity is as much an attitude as anything, not because it isn’t true, but because it becomes an easy excuse for inaction. It is simple enough to claim we are not materialistic when our possessions are secure. It’s different to willingly divest oneself of things for the sake of God’s way in the world. In Mark, a rich young man went away very sad, because he had many things.

The simple person has enough. St. Paul said, I have learned to be content with much and with little.

Sabbath is a little habit of simplicity that sometimes gets left behind. It should be #7, but instead of doing, it’s for being. A friend once pointed out that all the Ten Commandments are reiterated in the New Testament save one: Sabbath keeping. Therefore, my friend said, Sabbath isn’t important. But rest and refreshment are key for our enjoyment of God’s goodness, which is one reason for all these disciplines in the first place.

For Jews, Sabbath began (and begins) on sundown Friday and lasts until sundown Saturday. Celtic Christians retained this way, eating the bread and wine on Sunday morning and then going about the work of the day. However we observe it, Sabbath matters. Sabbath, the cessation of money making and other activities for an entire day, says to God, “You are enough.” Taking time off forces us to be more disciplined and structured in the other six days.

Land of Ash

This is the introduction of a booklet I put together for my congregation to use throughout Lent. It contains prayers, Saint Foci, and songs. It’s not exhaustive. Its inadequacies are evident from a quick glance. Some is outdated and some of it just anticipates the future. Some landmarks are mislabeled. My directions will always point in the general direction, but sometimes you’ll have to do some investigating, and scramble around unmarked barriers. It is the very incomplete nature of this book that I think will add to its usefulness. Hopefully, you’ll find yourself saying, “There’s too much about . . .” or, “Why not say something about . . .?” or, better still, “I knew that.” As you travel Lent, becoming aware of how woefully inadequate my guide is, you’ll become more dependent on God and less dependent on your place in the kingdom of this world.

This bit, I hope, stands on its own:



The other day I saw a static sticker in a car window that said, Greed Girl. I guess I was supposed to be shocked by that defiant statement against our culture’s assumed values. Maybe it’s a sad reflection, but Greed Girl disappointed me for all the wrong reasons. She thought she was standing up to the system, flipping the bird to the man. We all know the mantra: greed bad, temperance good right? We hold generosity and charity dearly. Greed Girl stands opposed to all that is good in us.

But Greed Girl was just saying what we’re really all about. Instead of being counter-cultural, she’s camped out in the center of our most basic, unspoken values. Unless she’s being ironic – something I highly doubt -- she’s more a part of the system than she’d ever want to admit.

I think if I had to pick things to represent late 20th and early 21st century living, MTV would be near the top of my list. I know -- Music Television is an easy target when we’re lamenting the demise of Western civilization. MTV is about hedonism, sexism, and the degeneration of music mere image. Beyond that, by taking rock and roll from the rebel fringe and making it mainstream, MTV has effectively killed it. MTV has meant the death of cool.

Beneath the hype, behind the pretense, and between the silicone, MTV is about consumption – over-consumption, actually. A long time ago, back when they played music videos on that channel, they ran an ad campaign whose tag line was, “Too much is never enough.” In a lot of ways, that phrase is part of modernism’s out-wash into postmodernism. Get yours. Get more. You deserve it. And on and on.

We live in a world dominated by consumption -- more and more, and more and more, the primary metaphor through which we interact with each other and with the world is that of buyer-seller. I’ve written commentary on Social Security, and argued that the part of the short-sightedness of that debate is that we see ourselves as customers of governmental goods and services, not citizens of a democracy. But it's more that Social Security. Students think of themselves as customers of universities. Evangelists are purveyors of salvation. I even read once a proposal by a pastor who wanted to have a brochure of pastoral products he could provide to his congregation (from visits to baptisms to funerals) and prices. No longer a spiritual leader, he wants to be a purveyor of fine religious products and services.

It’s not going too far to say we Westerners worship the ancient god Mammon. Jesus mentioned Mammon, saying it’s impossible to worship it and God at once. Mammon isn’t simply money; Mammon is more insidious. And we don’t call it Mammon any more. Consumption its new name. Its temple is the nebulous “Market Forces”, which dictate our every move and crush the weak. To a world sacrificing at that altar, “too much is never enough” and to say otherwise is blasphemy. In our world, there’s no such thing as enough. A punk rock song said, “We choke on our fill/ we live in excess/ but we lie, die and kill/ in pursuit of happiness.” In the end, unchecked Consumption will consume us.

So that brings me to this strange season in the Church year called Lent. Lent is a gift from the early Church to the postmodern Church. It’s like finding a time capsule from your great grandparents from the old country, filled with treasures that you can still use, even in this age of wireless communication. In the face of Consumption, Lent says, “Enough really is enough.” Lent understands that just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Lent reminds us that looking to ourselves or our systems for answers or reality or sustainability is a futile hunt. Far from a museum piece or an esoteric practice for “other kinds of Christians”, or a pleasant exercise for the holy huddle, Lent is an in-your-face-here-and-now prophetic voice against the kingdoms of this world and for the kingdom of God.

There is a radical disconnect between what the world tells us about living and what the God revealed by Jesus wishes for us. The world tells us to survive, to get ahead at any price. God in Jesus tells us that life comes through death, and love is the highest good.

Because it involves fasting and other disciplines, Lent is sometimes seen as mournful and drab. I’ve begun to think of Lent as a reminder of the true beauty of life in the image of God. In releasing certain pleasures, we tame them and bring them back into relationship with us.

Isaiah said, O Taste and see that YHWH is good! To encounter Jesus sets everything in its proper place. Our hearts are given words by Kahlil Gibran in his reflection on the woman taken in adultery in John 8. Having been released by Jesus, she says,

And after that all the tasteless fruit of life turned sweet
to my mouth, and the scentless blossoms breathed fragrance into
my nostrils. I became a woman without a tainted memory, and I
was free, and my head was no longer bowed down.