Ash Wednesday
February 13 2013, St.
John’s, Sharon
Dismantling Our Own Plans for Happiness and Letting God In
Today again we begin our Lenten journey. The Church calls us to a holy Lent, a time of
prayer, fasting, and good works. We
examine our lives and repent of our sins, turning anew to the fullness of life
in God.
Too often, though, we overlook the deep possibility that God
offers us in Lent. We can stay focused
on the marginal details at the fringes of life, instead of opening ourselves up
to the unquenchable love of God. Instead
of getting to the root of our problems and beginning a Holy-Spirit aided struggle
against them, we frequently decide to obsess about the number of our desserts,
the expletives we use when frustrated, or the clutter level of our dining room
table. God, however, invites us to rich
banquets, has filled his Holy Writ with some of the most appalling curses
you’ll ever hear, and is perfectly
capable of blowing in a storm to clear your house of clutter and leave it
somewhere near Jackson Center.
Instead, Lent is a gift to call us to the work of
dismantling the lies and the fears that we let control our lives instead of
living in the peace, love and joy God wants us to know. The Lenten work of repentance is about
turning away from the all the plans for our own happiness that we have devised,
which will never be able to satisfy us, and turning toward a deeper
relationship with God and all that such a relationship means.
Our basic problem, which can be called original sin, is that
at some point in our very young lives, we did not get what we needed. The world is broken, and bad things happen to
us before we can understand why, even as early as in utero. Maybe we were in pain, and no one could
figure out why. Maybe we were sick and
it took a while to get well. Maybe we
were hungry but had to wait to eat longer than we were able to manage. Maybe we needed to be held and looked at
lovingly, but our parents were dealing with illness, or depression, or working
three jobs to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. These events can be traumatic to a little
person with no control over their body or their situations, but who are setting
in place their personality and emotions.
And these events occur in the best situations, with the best parents,
and the most love possible.
As we experience difficulties when we can feel them but can’t
understand them, we begin to set in place emotional drives to avoid similar
situations in the future. The three main
categories are a desire for security, a desire for affection or esteem, and a
desire for comfort. Some call these our
plans for happiness, because we can live under the mistaken but compelling
belief that if we only can obtain this thing we feel we need, then we will be
happy and our lives complete. Yet, these
human plans for happiness can never work because they are grounded in fears and
built on lies. The fears are the
irrational but powerful desire to avoid ever being in the situations that
caused us so much past pain. The lies
are that we can ever actually receive enough of something like security or
affection or comfort to finally make us happy.
As soon as we reach a certain level of the goods we want, our desires
expand and we need more. We understand
this. Someone whose life is directed
toward physical comfort is always concerned about where the next meal is coming
from and what it is. But as soon as that
next meal is always guaranteed, than the obsession becomes that dessert is
included or that it is all organically grown.
Public figures spend their lives being adored by thousands go into a
depression because they get a letter from one person saying how terrible they
are. A multi-millionaire stops giving to
charity because the market dropped ten percent and they are worried about their
future. The world is broken, and our
experience in it has left painful holes that we can try to cover and fill. Then the more we try, the less happy we
really are.
Finding where these holes are in our lives is the real work
of Lent. Being able to discover the
places we are acting on our own plans for happiness. Ultimately, this striving for what we think
we want that can’t satisfy us is what God asks us to repent of during our
wilderness of Lent. Jesus faced the same
difficulties during his wilderness temptations.
He was offered the same choices by Satan. Turn stones into bread and have all the
physical comfort you could ever want.
Have all the nations of the world follow you and love you. Never worry about security again since God’s
angels will bear you up even if you throw yourself down from the top of a tall
building. Jesus says, “No,” to all those
temptations, but not because bread is bad, or because people shouldn’t love and
follow him, or because he doesn’t want angels watching out for him. He says, “No,” because anything less than God
isn’t ultimately good enough and eventually fails us.
Our Lenten work, then, is twofold. First we want to deal with the false plans
for happiness we have built to cover up the painful holes in our lives. Then, second, we want to open those painful
holes to God for his healing and redeeming.
Both parts of this Lenten project are really the spiritual journey of an
entire lifetime. But we can
intentionally focus on this work in Lent, and consciously make a decision to
allow God to deal with our scars instead of trying to cover them up
ourselves.
Most of the things we talk about giving up for Lent are
designed to help us overcome our false plans of happiness, but they will only
work if we are actually intentional about them.
Giving up chocolate doesn’t matter so much if what we spend our lives
doing is trying to ensure everyone likes us and thinks nice things about
us. If the soothing deception in the
back of our head is that we are fine as long as no one is angry at us, a good
Lenten discipline might be to say what we think, especially when what we think
is likely to upset someone. Then we can
live through the experience with fear and trembling and realize we are still God’s
beloved children, even though someone thinks our opinions about the Cleveland
Browns are incorrect. Of course, if we
need to have things just the way we want them and to be in control of every
situation, we probably already say whatever we want. For those of us with that plan for happiness,
we may need to decide that we will just listen and do what people ask us to
without whining, and be as happy as possible while doing so. Then the people who might need to think about
giving up chocolate are the people who spend the time immediately after lunch
planning the dessert they will have after dinner. Just like the people who probably need to
give up anything are the people who spend the entire rest of their day thinking
about getting that one particular thing, whether it is a cookie, a shopping
trip, a romantic liaison, a computer game, a work project, a bubble bath or
even a book. If we keep obsessing about
one thing, even a good thing, then we probably are using it as a screen to hide
behind so we don’t have to face something else. Lent is a good time to identify those
screens and start to take them down.
Then, as the screens start to come down, we are in a pretty
vulnerable situation. We are coming
closer to face the various pain and tragedy at the core of our lives, and we
have set down some of the coping mechanisms we have used to ward that pain off
in the past. For that reason, we also
need the positive spiritual disciplines so that we can take that pain to God
and allow him to begin to sooth and heal the traumas of life. These positive disciplines mostly include
different kinds of prayer that allow us to build a deeper relationship with
Jesus, because the closer we are to him, the fewer lies we can tell ourselves
and the more his love casts out our fears so that we can face our pain and move
forward. Centering prayer or other
contemplative prayer can be key, where we can just sit and offer ourselves to
God. Bible study, Stations of the Cross,
or other reading where we allow ourselves to find out more about Jesus and open
our lives to him are also helpful.
Regular worship and receiving communion are also powerfully helpful. Good
works can also be important, so long as they don’t become another way of
substituting something good for a deeper life in God. For us, the most important component,
however, is the decision to turn away from our own plans in favor of walking
with God, however painful that walk can be at times. We need to draw closer to God to be able to
deal with what comes to light as we become more honest with ourselves. The road will not be easy for us, but it will
be very good, and in the end, it will not disappoint.
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