Weeding Turnips

21 February 2010 ~ Umstead Park UCC ~ Janice Odom
The First Sunday in Lent
Readings: Luke 8: 4 – 15, Galatians 5: 22- 23

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I was a bit conflicted when I realized that preaching today for Doug’s last week of sabbatical meant preaching on the first Sunday of Lent. Of all the seasons of the church year, Lent brings the least amount of rejoicing. This is fitting but also not a little depressing. No other liturgical time needs its own send-off, Lent gets Shrove Tuesday when you can eat your weight in pancakes and Mardi Gras for heaven’s sake, a period of more or less wild abandonment which some Christians traditionally use as a needed opportunity to engage in the kind of pursuits that could truly give them something for which to do penance.

I grew up Southern Baptist so I never heard of Lent until I was in college. In the world of my childhood, we really didn’t need a particular season for reflecting on our sin and being penitential; that’s what we did every Sunday. I was rather enamored when first encountering Lent, as Baptists also don’t go in much for ritual and the whole Ash Wednesday thing and the ashes on the forehead was waaaay out there with some drama and ritual. My introduction to Lent also meant meeting people who practiced ‘giving up something’ for Lent. Seems like the giving up was usually some pleasure that the giver-upper could, with all air of sanctimony, say, “Oh, I’ve given that up for Lent” when the said meat, chocolate, or dessert in general was being offered. One friend confessed, it was really a pretty good way to lose some needed pounds and get religious points at the same time.

Clearly, these first impressions of Lent were not particularly weighty with substance and my reticence to preach on the first Sunday of Lent was about my ambivalence on where and how Lent now fits in my own life. Preaching is like teaching, if you really want to know a subject, try to teach it, if you really want to wrestle with an idea, try to preach it. Where it has taken me is to a re-framing of Lent.

I realize that given the wide expanse of backgrounds in this congregation, that you may fall anywhere across a spectrum of having Lent as a rich part of the history of your own life, or having shown up today unaware and pretty unconcerned that today is the first Sunday of Lent. Wherever you are is OK, of course. What I hope for is to simply have us examine some assumptions and beliefs about this season.

I heard the story this week of a Catholic archbishop who went for a walk. He was in a place where in the first days of the first week of Lent, it was very chilly…which has been most everywhere lately…He had already spent a long day at work, and hadn’t taken time to change out of his work clothes because of yet another meeting in the evening. He was deep in contemplation and the welcome solitude of his walk when a man suddenly stepped into the path in front him. Moving quickly, the man hooked an arm around the archbishop’s neck and brandished a knife menacingly in his face. "Your money or your life,” he demanded. The Archbishop’s heart raced. His billfold was at home, and he feared the man doubting him and being angry at a fruitless robbery attempt. “I have no money,” he pleaded. The assailant kept insisting. Frightened out of his wits, the archbishop pleaded with the man, check my pockets, really, I have no money. Suddenly he remembered the snack he’d stuck into this overcoat pocket and excitedly told the assailant, Look in my left pocket! There’s a chocolate bar! Please. Take it!!” At this point the assailant dropped his grip on the Archbishop and took an insulted step back, looking at his victim in indignation. “No way, Father! I gave up chocolate for Lent!” I love what this story says about the potential incongruity of unreflective Lenten practices: not eating candy, fasting to lose weight, giving up coffee, liquor or TV designed primarily to render the one who weathers the season, a proud sense of satisfaction at Easter for such valiance in self-discipline.

Among the members of the worship committee this week, there was some lively email exchange in pondering what images we wanted at Umstead Park for the Lenten season and we shared stories about beliefs and images for Lent that the institutional church has practiced to convey the idea of a dark and somber season. Some other churches follow the tradition of eliminating any flowers in the worship space for the Lenten season, Some churches incorporate an elaborate ritual to ‘dress down’ the altar, taking away not just flowers but all decoration save a cross and a purple, the color of Lent, altar cloth. some cease using the word ‘Alleluia’ until Easter morning. In many churches, the Catholic church in particular, there is more ritual during Lent than at any other time of the ecclesiastical year, images and smells with a power that is truly awe-inspiring. But if spirituality is complicated for us, if Lent is difficult for us to embrace, perhaps the church bears some considerable responsibility. The awe-generating air of formalized religion inclines us to see the world as categorical. It raises a mighty high bar of expectation. God needs a staff of well-versed and well-robed professionals, preferably with rich and seasoned voices to speak to us, we need stained glass and altars and perfectly delivered ‘sacred’ music to access God. It all feeds the notion of the spiritual as separate from the physical, the sacred in contrast to the ‘profane;’ spiritual practice as something that is outside and counter to our daily living rather than infused in every moment.

C.S. Lewis wrote about the idea of the spiritual as accessible in every moment of our day as the ‘spirituality of ordinariness.'  “The man who is weeding a field of turnips”, he said, “is also serving God.”

I’m a pretty big junkie for ritual and drama; I think it has true power to help us tap into awe and wonder, but it is detrimental when we allow it to dull us to the awe and wonder in our own backyards. So the drama of Lent can make it seem like an impossible feat that we might participate in any meaningful way. The defining of Lent only as season of denial, darkness, and suffering is equally narrow and off-putting.

We do need spiritual awakening. Like our physical bodies our spiritual selves also need a workout. Our state of consciousness gets blurred by the incredible pace of life as we hurry through days with packed schedules and pressures of our own or others’ expectations. “Open my eyes to what is really important, all those delicate movements of your presence that go unnoticed by me,” writes the mystic Evelyn Underhill. In other words, help me recover kindness, generosity, forgiveness, patience, understanding - those qualities, those fruits of the spirit, that get buried in constant family and work responsibilities. “Guide me in sorting through the debris of self-preoccupation and cultural duplicity.”

So if we can reimage Lent in this way, what we pursue for Lent ideally depends on what needs to be addressed in our own lives. That spiritual need is unique to each of us and requires our willingness to look hard at what we are missing. Rumi expressed it this way:
   I've said before that every craftsman
    searches for what's not there
    to practice his craft.
    A builder looks for the rotten hole
    where the roof caved in. A water carrier
    picks the empty pot. A carpenter
    stops at the house with no door.
    Workers rush toward some hint
    of emptiness, which they then
    start to fill. Their hope, though,
    is for emptiness, so don't think
    you must avoid it! It contains
    what you need!

So the season of Lent encourages us to look deeply at ourselves and see what is in the way, or what is missing. Discipline and disciple have the same Latin root, discipulus, meaning “a learner.” Webster’s Dictionary defines discipline as “training that develops self-control, character, or orderliness and efficiency.” Discipline for the sake of discipline creates disciplinarians but doesn’t do much for changing one’s heart. Worthy Lenten restraint is practiced for the purpose of learning, of discovering what attitudes and behavior are to be changed in order to develop the attitudes and disposition of Christ, what the writer of Galatians called, ‘the Fruits of the Spirit’ (Oh, and in one of the great amusements that is ours only in the glorious age of Google, I discovered this week that “The Fruit of the Spirit is [also] a one-of-a-kind Marvelous Wellness anti-oxidant Puree of fruits, ingredients from God’s Creation” You can buy some on-line…)

We are the craftsmen, the artists, of our own life. We are the gardeners of our own souls. The passage from the gospel that Andy read, the parable of the sower, reminds us that seed doesn’t thrive in all conditions. It may have a spurt of life in shallow soil or among the rocks, but the best chances are to pluck those seeks in soil that is tilled and ready. If it is fruits of the spirit we wish to produce, this is cultivation season.

What we need in our Lenten practice may be a ‘giving up’ and it may be a ‘taking on.’

If my inclination is to be excessive…with my commitments, my ‘things’, my food, my complaints, my self-doubts, my worries, my need to control…what I may need is a season of ‘giving up’ what most encumbers me. I may give up some commitments in order to open space for solitude; I may practice yielding to others, disciplining myself to keep quiet instead of having to be right.

If my inclination is to be frugal…with sharing my possessions, frugal with my affection and praise, my time shared with others, my time for beauty and rest…what I may need is a season for taking on. I may take on intentional time with others and the simply joy of company, I may take on regular walks in the woods or sitting quietly in my own yard, taking daily note of the birds and the emerging buds, the patterns of the moon and the stars.

In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

The fruits of cultivated souls are beautiful qualities: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Judgment and self-righteousness and are not on the list, just in case Pat Robertson or the school board are listening.. .)

And beautiful qualities will not grow from guilt and self-reproachment. Its like the paradox of arguing that we can wage war in order to bring peace in the world. If you want peace, if you want love, and joy…get yourself some of that seed. And that seed is beauty. If it is beautiful qualities we want our souls to emanate, then it is beauty we must feed our souls. You can’t plant dourness and get joy, or condemnation and get gentleness.

True religion is first and foremost the pursuit of beauty. Again, some words from Rumi:
    Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
    and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
    and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
    Let the beauty we love be what we do.
    There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Whatever we choose to take on or let go of for Len…it’s for a considerable amount of time.

It got me to wondering how long it takes to grow a tomato plant from seed, so I did a little research: “Tomato seed should germinate in five to seven days at the proper soil temperature. It will take eight to ten weeks before the tomatoes are big enough to transplant--usually when seedlings have 4 to 6 true leaves.”

C.S. Lewis seemed to be partial to turnips, of course he wasn’t a southerner . . . but turnips also take 8 to 10 weeks to mature. Lent is 6 weeks long. It’s a good thing it is at least that long, long enough to really give something time to take ground in us. It may not be long enough to root a tomato plant in your soul ready to put out in the garden by Easter, but you can get a considerable start on things. Lent needn’t be some packing off into the wilderness for 40 days. Not to say there may not be a time in our lives for this, but as far as we know Jesus only did it once. The rest of the time, he kept trying to get his folks to just pay attention--to learn from what was all around them. I think to this community of hard working idealists, Jesus’ directive would sound much like what he said to those fervently following him in his own day: Consider the lilies. Stop and observe. Pay attention. See the beauty all around you. He had some different things to say to the Pharisees . . . just as I imagine he would to the folks who should be getting over some partisan childishness and get on with some health care reform already.

I don’t think in his call to ‘Consider the Lilies’ Jesus means for us just to do the 60s thing and relinquish all in the name of ‘flower power’ and love-ins; the justice he calls us to be making in the world needs our devotion, our intellect and our will. But we need spirits well-cultivated with the gifts of patience, peace, love and joy, goodness, gentleness, and self-control to take on and maintain that challenging and much-needed work.

So, it is Lent. Sit and enjoy the lilies, if that may be the path you most need to pursue this season. Or maybe there is some work than that you need to do, like the soil-under-your- finger-nails job, the back-bending but glorious work of weeding turnips…

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Acknowledgements to the National Catholic Reporter, Feb. 17, 2010 for some insights within the sermon and to Eleanor Smith for the Rumi verses.