The Divine Vending Machine

Lent has never been a big thing for me. I grew up in a non-denominational church where the more traditional aspects of Easter weren’t celebrated. We had Easter Sunday and maybe something for Good Friday but that was as much as anyone did for the season.

I’m not saying that you should celebrate Easter that way. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found a lot of meaning in the more traditional aspects of the celebration. I’ve attended my fair share of Ash Wednesday and candlelight services and they’ve been wonderful. But the one tradition I just can’t seem to get my head around is Lent.

I get it in the larger sense of fasting to grow closer to God but that is so rarely how it’s presented. So often it seems Lent is celebrated in one of two ways: either it’s people trying to give up the biggest thing and suffer the most in some sort of Christian darwinistic one-upmanship or it’s people giving up something they either don’t need or shouldn’t have in the first place to fulfill an obligation. 

Please don’t get me wrong, I believe in fasting and I’m sure that many people have used Lent to facilitate great spiritual growth, I just haven’t seen it. Too often it looks like Lent is another dollar we put in the divine vending machine expecting to get some divine reward for our effort. It just doesn’t work like that. We can get so caught up in the rituals and practices that we expect them to be the point of all of it, but that kind of religion always comes up empty.

It’s not like this is a new problem. People have been getting lost in the rituals for as long as they’ve tried to connect to God. This was just as much a problem for the Israelites. In Isaiah 58, the prophet Isaiah has a lot to say about empty rituals, especially fasting.

Isaiah 58:3-5 (niv)

‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,

 ‘and you have not seen it?

Why have we humbled ourselves,

 and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please

 and exploit all your workers.

Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,

 and in striking each other with wicked fists.

You cannot fast as you do today

 and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,

 only a day for people to humble themselves?

Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed

 and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call a fast,

 a day acceptable to the Lord?

The Israelites wanted the ritual to be the whole point. They fasted, they did the thing, now where’s the blessing? Sound familiar? As it turns out, this is not how it works. God expects something more. He expects A LOT more.

Isaiah 58:6-7 (niv)

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:

to loose the chains of injustice

 and untie the cords of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free

 and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry

 and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—

when you see the naked, to clothe them,

 and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

It would seem that God thinks that all the rituals in the world are worth nothing if they don't help other people. The Israelites saw the ritual as a way to enrich themselves, God saw it as a way to prepare themselves to serve others. 

Maybe that’s how we redeem Lent. Maybe we’ve been looking at it wrong. We’ve been celebrating the greatest sacrifice ever by trying to enrich ourselves, to make ourselves better. Maybe the thing we should be sacrificing isn’t a thing at all.

This year, for Lent, I am giving up myself.

I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to my time and my effort. I like my alone time, I like doing what I want to do. I’ve called it self-care, just doing what I need to function, but really so much of it is just selfishness. Yes, we all need time to decompress and spend time with just us and God, but we’re more disconnected now than anyone has ever been. Surely we don’t need that much room. 

What if I celebrated Jesus’s sacrifice of his life for me by sacrificing my life for others? What if, in a world that constantly tells me to think of myself first, I stopped thinking about myself as much as possible? What if I trusted God to worry about me and I used all that effort worrying about others instead? 

So that’s it. It won’t be easy but imagine the things we could do if only we stopped trying to impress each other and started just serving each other. Imagine the world we could make by giving up our need to be rewarded or acknowledged. 

Maybe the greatest thing we can sacrifice for the Easter season is ourselves.

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Over the next few weeks, you can find reflections here at vineyardrichmond.com. Use them to prompt yourself to focus on your faith in a fresh way. Each week we will consider a different theme as we build up to the resurrection event. On Mondays, we will draw your attention to a biblical focus on a character in the gospel accounts. On Wednesdays, we will reflect personally on how that theme affects our spiritual lives. On Fridays, we will focus outwardly as we consider how God is inviting us to engage the world around us for his kingdom. If what you are learning is meaningful to you, click one of the share buttons at the top of these posts to share it with your friends. Let this be a time of personal reflection and careful examination of our own hearts and minds.