It’s about at this time of year when we become disgusted with ourselves for not being able to maintain our New Years Resolution… again. It is so frustrating to continually go through the cycle of failure, hitting rock bottom, wallowing in it for a while, wondering if there is any hope for us to be something other than we are. We then get the courage to get back up and try to overcome ourselves, usually around New Years, only to slowly slide back down the slimy slope into the slop of our miserable lives. Well…that might be a bit of an exaggeration.
For some of us our lives can often times seem like a cycle of despair, ever turning on its axis, always repeating the same things, encountering the same things, and being the same thing. As the Godfather once remarked “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” Sometimes I wonder if it is easier to get out of the mafia than it is out of some of our sinful, despairing, and sometimes even destructive cycles of life.
It is the very cyclical nature of our lives that make us sometimes wonder how we can even hope for anything else. Hope is the belief that things can and will be different. But a cycle seems to doom us to turn around to the very thing we were going away from.
How often do we let the current of the world turn us in its direction? On a global scale, we are constantly reminded of the cycle of violence in which the nations perpetually spin. On personal level, our daily lives rub up against children, coworkers, and employers who turn out the hate that has been turned into them. Racism and oppression seemed to be passed down from generation to generation as if it were as established as DNA. The cycle of violence seems to turn under a flood of ignorance and hate. Love, forgiveness and peace seem only to be a mist that is lost in the tidal wave of coercion.
How can we turn the tide that turns the wheel? How can I stop one violent act in the Middle East? How can I stop the poor from being oppressed? How can I keep parents from abusing their children?
This is the cycle in which the world has always been.
This is the cycle in which many of us have always been.
This is how our lives turn. This is how the world turns…
…this is how the world turned.
As the world turned,
Jesus turned into it,
turning the world into something new.
The old cycle, that turns off of violence and hate, is loosing power and passing away. The new cycle is gaining momentum. We do not turn the world, nor do we turn our own lives. But we place ourselves in one these two cycles: either the one that is a cycle of death, destruction, and despair, or the one that is the cycle of birth, resurrection, and new life.
Lent is a time when we show the world that our lives turn by a different flow. And of all the Christian observances, lent is the one that goes against that flow the most.
In Lent, and in other traditions of our worship as Christians, we place ourselves within a different cycle. Every year we come to remember an aspect of Christ that has already happened. Today in particular, we use ashes to help our cycle of remembrance.
These aids to remembrance are already a part of our every day lives. We use all sorts of things to aid our remembrance, as well as to aid in making a past event a present reality: fireworks in remembering a countries birth, cake and singing and gifts to remember a person’s birth, a black arm band to remember the death of a loved one, a flag at half-mast to remember the death of a political leader, a yellow ribbon to remember soldiers on foreign soil.
We even remind ourselves of things that have not yet happened: a yellow sticky note to remember an appointment, wedding invitations to remember an upcoming day in the community’s life, all sorts of electronic gizmos that hold our future of where we are to be at what time and the things we are going to do.
And so the cycle of lent turns us around to remember Jesus’ call to repentance and discipleship; a call that leads through the cross. And the cycle also turns us forward towards the resurrection and the coming of our Lord, and the braking in of the kingdom of God. These remembrances of past and future events turn around our present reality.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. At first glance this seems bleak. Indeed, all of Lent seems to be depressing. The Lenten themes are usually things that most people would want to forget. So why do we go to such great lengths to remember it? Because buried under the ash on our forehead is the reality of the life of Christ. In celebrating our death and mortality, we set the contrast by which resurrection may be seen in our lives so that the world may know it is not us that live, but Christ who lives within us.
It is a reality of our faith that is with us all year, every year, but now is the time where we allow our lives to cycle through this aspect of Christ at a slower pace. This cycle, unlike the cycle of our lives, is a cycle full of hope because it is always turning towards resurrection. There can be no crippling despair when the wheel will always turn towards resurrection.
It is also important to note that we are not the axis on which everything turns. The texts that we read on Ash Wednesday makes sure that our lives are not only being turned in the right direction, but that the turning is doing something. Our acts of worship, and the symbols we use, from the waters of baptism, to the table of Christ, to the ashes on our foreheads, are acts and symbols that are to enable us to see the reality of the kingdom of God. If these acts aren’t turning within us the desire to serve the homeless, visit the lonely, speak out and stand up against oppression, then we had better think twice about doing them. Jesus disciplined himself, Jesus gave things up, Jesus fasted, all to enable him to faithfully live out the kingdom and administer justice.
During lent, many of us alter our lives in small way, so as to help bring a particular reality of Christ into our lives. These alterations, the things we may give up, or take on, are usually things that are not in themselves bad things. In fact they are everyday common things, sometimes mundane, things that are a part of our every day life cycle. But when we give these things up, or take these things on, the cycle of our lives hits a slight bump, jarring us out of cruse-control and making us think, reminding us of Jesus’ words, Remember me? Remember me.
Unlike New Years resolutions that seem to remind us that no force of our own will is able to transform our lives, Lent teaches us that only the Holy Spirit is able to bring about any substantial transformation in our lives. While major themes of lent are discipline, repentance, and confession, these are not acts that remind us of our cyclical failure. Rather, they remind us that all of our past and future failures are followed by God’s grace and Christ’s resurrection. Lent prepares us for Easter.
The Holy Spirit moved Jesus to fast for 40 days in the wilderness to prepare himself for acts of justice, mercy and power that ultimately led to the cross. As we give up and take on during lent, we remind ourselves not only of Christ’s giving up the goodness of heaven to take on the brokenness of humanity, but that Christ’s call to confession and repentance enables us to give up our brokenness in order to take on his divinity.
Christ gives new birth to our cyclical journey through our cyclical lives, so that, as T.S. Eliot wrote,
…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
May the symbol of the ashes bring about a better awareness that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
