The 8th Commandment as Lenten Discipline

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

(8^th Commandment)

As we move through this 500^th year since the beginning of the Reformation, many of us are renewing our acquaintance with various writings and resources from and about that medieval movement that changed the church and impacted the world. A great place to begin is with Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. A great time to begin is the season of Lent.

Local faith communities might shape Wednesday worship around sections of the catechism or add a brief time for exploration and discussion of the catechism before or after worship. Families could briefly read and discuss parts of it once or twice a week before saying grace at dinner. Individuals might slowly read through, meditate on, and journal about the catechism in devotional time two or three times a week.

However we engage this important booklet, it won’t take long to realize that its content is not just for memorization by kids or catechism classes and it’s wisdom is as relevant today as it was the day Luther wrote it five centuries ago. Take his reflection on the eighth commandment, for example:

What does this mean? We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.

If there was ever a time and place when this understanding of that commandment has been needed it’s here and now, in this country, in social media and public discourse, and in our churches. Scan through your Twitter or Facebook feed. Listen to ten minutes of a news program. Reflect back on your own conversations over the last week. How many lies or unverifiable false claims have been made about others? How many times has someone been betrayed or slandered or their reputation sullied in some way?

The answer? Too many. Too much of our conversation (and thinking) about others these days blatantly breaks the eighth commandment. It’s one thing to disagree, even vehemently, or to not understand another person’s choices. But, it is another thing altogether to use the disagreement or lack of understanding as an opportunity to lie about, betray, slander, or seek to destroy the reputation of a fellow human being created in the image of God.

Every time we catch ourselves in or supporting this sort of sinful behavior it’s time to repent, trust the forgiveness offered in Christ crucified and risen, and to lean into and offer to others the new and abundant life of Jesus by taking every opportunity to instead “come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.”

Now there’s a Lenten discipline that, empowered by the Spirit and by God’s grace, will not only change us, but will transform our churches, our communities, our country, our world.

Checking Our Sight Lines

sight line - noun

1. 
a hypothetical line from someone's eye to what is seen

-----------

Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. [Hebrews 12:1]

Lent is often a time for individuals to focus on their spiritual life by (re)establishing spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, corporate worship, or generous giving for the poor. Congregational ministries during Lent often support these disciplines through additional worship opportunities, Bible classes, prayer groups, World Hunger coin boxes, and the like. In some ways, such disciplines provide opportunities to check our “sight lines” by asking questions like these:

•  To what have I been giving most of, or the best of, my attention?
• Are the people, things, and situations that I have been looking to helpful or hurtful?
• Does what I look at empower or equip me for serving others or is it just self-serving? Does it move me to give my life away or cause me to hoard it?
• In other words, do my sight lines point me toward Jesus crucified and risen and beckon me further down the way of the cross? Or do they point me away from Jesus toward someone or something else that distracts or harms, disempowers or disappoints myself or others?

Of course, I am referring here to literal sight lines. It is important that we be discerning about what we look at with our physical eyes. What we look at changes us in powerful ways and influences how we interact with the world.

For the moment, however, I am primarily thinking about our spiritual sight lines. These sight lines also form us and influence how we interact with the world.
      What are we looking to in hope that it will provide meaning or excitement or peace or power or whatever else our heart seeks? As it turns out, many of the things we look to cannot deliver on the promises they make. So many of them, even the best looking ones, lure us down endless, dark, distracting rabbit holes of self-absorption and self-justification.

The scripture and liturgies of Lent call us to reassess our spiritual sight lines. They call us to repent, to allow God’s Spirit to turn our sight lines back toward Jesus, the one who actually delivers on God’s promises and who enlists and empowers us to be means by which those promises cross into the sight lines of others.

But this is not just true for individuals; it’s true for the church as a body as well. I wonder what Lent – and the consequent celebration of Easter – would be like if each congregation and its leaders also spent forty days in a sort of communal recalibration of the congregation’s sight lines. Truth be told, nearly every aspect of congregational life – congregational meetings, committee planning, council agendas, youth events, choir rehearsals, staff meetings, fellowship gatherings – can suffer from sight line drift. We start looking primarily at what we don’t have: not enough money or people or young people. Our sights focus on change for the sake of change, or the next great innovation that promises to get people in the door. Our sight lines are directed toward disagreements and power struggles or inward on ourselves.

If we are not careful, over time we drift away from our core mission to simply be the body of Christ in the world, to shine the light of Jesus, to make Christ known. Without even noticing it we “major in minors” and focus our attention and energy on non-central (even if alluringly important) concerns that simply cannot bring life to us or the world if Jesus crucified and risen is not right smack dab in the center of them.

Just as each baptized person is called to turn away from – to repent of – unhealthy, sinful, or otherwise life-snatching sight lines, so is every congregation. Every gathering of the baptized is called to realign its sight lines in order to participate more fully and faithfully in God’s cross-shaped mission of healing and hope in the world.

This Lent, dear sisters and brothers, may God’s Spirit grant that we, the body of Christ, will turn away from distracting and destructive sight lines “and the sin that clings so closely, and run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” [Hebrews 12:1-2]

Reminder, Repentance, and Renewal: A Journey from Ashes to Abundant Life

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and put a new and steadfast spirit within me.

Psalm 51:10

It's time, my sister, my brother. It is time to receive the ashen etching that traces again the oily mark imposed on our brows at baptism. It's time to embark on the transforming trek of Lent.

The journey begins with a smudge on the brow that reminds us who and whose we are: We are broken, battered mortals groping for the God to whom we already belong. We are fragile, failing, fearful creatures, crafted from dust and returning to dust. And...we belong to God. We frail beings belong, ever and always, to the God who does not stand far off, but rather walks alongside us, covered in the very dust and dirt of our days.

Reminded, we repent. After all, our fear, our frailties, our failings move us to act like the world exists for our benefit alone. We use it, and the people in it, in ill-fated attempts to get what we want, what we have convinced ourselves we are due. We turn every which way but the life-giving way of the cross of Christ. Along this journey we repent, we turn again toward the only one who can offer real and abundant life. We fast, we pray, we turn our faces, our hearts and our open hands toward the world that God so loves, the world in which Jesus crucified and risen is getting his hands dirty and his feet dusty.

Along the way, renewal rises as a gift from the dust and ashes of our lives. We broken, battered mortals are forgiven, healed, made new by the God who gropes through the dust to make and remake us into who and what we are created and called to be: children of God and brothers and sisters with all of God's dust-born children.

That's it.  That's the journey...not just this holy season but every season, every day...reminded, repenting, renewed, over and over again on this Lenten way.

Thankfully, as it turns out, we arrive where we begin - in the heart of God and one with God's dusted creation.

Create in us clean hearts, O God,

and put a new and steadfast spirit within us.

Amen

Click this link for an audio version of this blog read by its author

Think Creatively

[The mission territory that I serve as bishop is about to embark on a re-visioning process called "New Vision for a New Day: Listen deeply. Think creatively. Act boldly." This piece is a brief reflection on the second aspect of that process.]

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen

[Ephesians 3:14-21, NRSV]

From the very beginning of scripture to its ending, God engages in the sometimes irritating habit of calling people to think creatively. Over and over again, God’s people seem to limit their vision and, consequently, their creative energies, to the borderline where their own limitations, frailties and failings meet the threats, challenges, and impositions of life.

To weary people on the edge of a promised land fraught with well-armed giants, God says, “Go ahead; take it.”

      To people languishing in exile, God entreats, “Do not remember the things of old…I am about to do a new thing!”

      God in Christ, no longer bound by doors locked tight by fear, appears to dispirited disciples whispering peace and proclaiming, “Fling wide the doors! I am sending you just like the Father sent me.”

      In a multitude of languages, God’s Spirit permeates the people on Pentecost, calling them to dream new dreams.

      God calls to Peter, bound as he is by careful adherence to tradition, to stretch beyond the boundaries and borders at the very outer edge of his vision.

      The truth is, fear binds and faith frees. Or, more accurately, when all we see are the immense challenges in the light of our own frailties and failings we often become fearful, paralyzed, and held captive to our own imagination and to what we already know. On the other hand, trust in God’s redeeming activity in the world, combined with trust in God’s unfailing love and care for us and for the world, offers freedom to let go of what we already know and to reach beyond our own limited vision, well-worn pathways, and daunting challenges to receive with open hands God’s creative, life-giving future.

       Next time you are in a planning session at church, or trying to imagine your way through a difficult time at home, or working with a community committee on some new project, take a moment to consider the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s amazing grace and then let your imagination run wild and free into God’s imaginative future.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen

Using Lent? Using God?

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. [Jesus; Mark 1:15]

Sometimes, I wonder if the season of Lent has become yet another wonderful gift that we tend to grab hold of with our grubby little hands and curve in on ourselves to make it all about us.  And by pulling it so tightly to ourselves, I wonder if we squeeze the very life out of it.

Think about it: we tend to focus on what we give up (like chocolate or some other thing in which we usually take delight) or what we take up (like more worship services or more time at the soup kitchen or more prayer). We talk about our sin, our repentance. We take these forty days to focus on my purpose, the state of my spiritual life, breaking my bad habits and disciplining myself into new and better habits.

 Borrowing from St. Augustine, Martin Luther called this “incurvatus in se,” curved in on oneself.  In his lectures on the biblical book of Romans he says that our nature is so deeply curved in upon itself that we turn the finest gifts of God into something just for ourselves and hoard them. Indeed, Luther says, we use God to achieve our aims. [Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, Kindle location 6745]

It’s no wonder an old friend of mine often ends his emails during this season with “Have a miserable Lent!”

The truth is, if Lent is only about us, our sin, our struggles, our habits, then we are – and will be – miserable people. There is no hope in that, nothing to pull us out of our inward, downward spiral, no power within us to set us free. Left to ourselves these forty days, we may find ourselves crawling into Easter laden with despair rather than lifted with resurrection joy.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Notice that here, at the very beginning of his public ministry, Jesus does not say something like:

Thank goodness you all have finally disciplined yourselves enough, given up enough, added enough devotion and service to your days, turned away from enough sin that God is finally convinced that you are ready for God’s reign.

No! Jesus just shows up as God’s son, in the power of God’s Spirit, at God’s appointed time to announce the nearness of God’s kingdom and to invite folks to simply pay attention and trust that God is up to something new and good.

Repent, and believe the good news!

Repentance is, first and foremost, less about turning our own lives around and more about being opened to the newness God brings near in Jesus. It’s about welcoming the reign of God, trusting it and letting it shape us and our days. To repent is to let go of our white-knuckled grip on trying to be good, to get it right, to be what we’re afraid we are not.

In that letting go and trusting the good news of God’s nearness, we are set free from that inward curve and are turned outward to true and abundant life. And we are moved to share it as freely as we have received it.

The disciplines of Lent are not bad or wrongheaded in and of themselves. They can be ways in which God works in us to open our hearts and hands to welcome and share God’s reign. But the good news, the best news, is that Lent begins and ends not with us, but with God.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.

So Jesus says at the beginning of these forty days. And then he walks the talk all the way to Jerusalem, through the cross and out of an empty tomb, for us and for the world.

Repent and believe this good news!

May your Lenten way be scattered with the wonder of the God who draws near long before you take the first step!

[You may listen to Bill's recording of this piece through the Indiana-Kentucky Synod website: http://www.iksynod.org. Click here: IN-KY Synod Lenten Podcast]

Lent Again?!

The movie, “Groundhog Day” stars Bill Murray as an ill-tempered TV weatherman unhappy about having to cover, yet again, the annual emergence of the renowned groundhog, Punxatawney Phil from his den. While in Punxatawney, Murray’s character (also named Phil) gets caught in a time loop in which he repeats February 2 over and over and over again. Every duplication of the day is announced by his alarm going off at 6:00 a.m. with Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe.” Throughout the movie Phil travels from shock and dismay, into self-centered manipulation of the experience (and of others), through bored endurance, and, finally, into embrace of the transformation offered by seemingly endless reprisals of the day.

Sometimes moving through the church year (even weekly liturgies) over and over and over again can be something like Phil’s experience with Groundhog Day: Shock and dismay…self-centered manipulation…bored endurance…

Yet again, the alarm plays “I Got You, Babe” and Ash Wednesday approaches with its annual ashen imposition of mortality’s shadow. Yet again, we’re invited to engage six weeks worth of Lenten discipline (how many times do I have to give up chocolate, anyway?). Over and over and over we sing those dreary hymns, wonder whether Sundays are included in the fast, hear the stories of suffering and loss, worry that our congregation will do a foot washing…

It’s pretty natural for repetition to trigger everything from dismay to self-centeredness to boredom, even with something like the church year. Yet, repetition also carries promise when it’s rooted in the presence and promises of God. Hearing the stories again and again, engaging the ritualized behaviors over and over, walking the same path with Jesus and other members of his body time after time…all these and more can draw us through repetitious rehearsal into new life, transformation, and deeper engagement in God’s mission of healing and hope in the world.

Wartburg Seminary professor Craig Nessan puts it this way: What each of these ritual occasions provides is the opportunity to...articulate and rehearse what we ordinarily neglect...What we ritualize by means of the historic Christian liturgy is nothing other than the kingdom of God proclaimed and embodied in the person of Jesus…Worship affords the occasion to rehearse the role of one’s true self, a citizen of God’s kingdom [Beyond Maintenance to Mission, p. 37].

Blessed (and transforming) repetition be yours this holy season and always!

Bishop Bill Gafkjen