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Lent: Almsgiving

The third thing the Lenten season invites us to practise is almsgiving. Jesus insisted that we care for those in need and that we do this without looking for a reward. “When you give alms, your left hand must not know what you right hand is doing; your almsgiving must be secret, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you” (Matt 6:3-4).

We can look at almsgiving in the specific and concrete sense of offering practical help to those who are hungry or homeless or without clothes. In Matthew’s Gospel chapter 25 Jesus makes it clear that this kind of charity is a non-negotiable essential for his followers. “When I was hungry you gave me to eat, when I was thirsty you gave me to drink; when I was sick or in prison you came to see me…. For as long as you did this to one of the least of my brothers and sisters you did it to me.”

But we also need to look at almsgiving in the much broader sense of our attitude to life. The late actress, Audrey Hepburn, once said, “As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping other people.” Our lives are not just about ourselves and our own needs. Our lives are also for others. When we serve others we are making a difference to their lives. We are also making a difference to our own. In fact, we are becoming who we are meant to be. We are showing love and love is the meaning and purpose of life. It is a truth that unless and until we give our lives away to others we do not seem to have them ourselves at any deep level.

Lent: Fasting

Perhaps the thing we most associate with Lent is fasting. Jesus knew the value of fasting and promoted it in his teaching. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries saw fasting as physical and public acts of penance which they used to promote their ‘holy image’. “When you are fasting, do not put on a gloomy look as the hypocrites do: they go about looking unsightly to let people know they are fasting. In truth I tell you, they have had their reward. But when you fast, put scent on your head and wash your face, so that no one will know you are fasting except your Father” (Matt 6:16-18). Obviously Jesus wasn’t convinced by the practice of fasting used by the Pharisees. He knew there is a tendency in human nature towards attachment and addiction that is not healthy and balanced.

For Jesus fasting is not just about giving up things like sweets or cigarettes or alcohol. It is more about what we need to do to keep our hearts mellow and grateful. To keep our hearts mellow and grateful we certainly need to control our desire for possessions and power and popularity. As Jesus himself discovered during his retreat in the desert these are potent demons in the human heart that need to be tamed.

Fasting is unfashionable among Christians today. Yet never has it been so necessary. In the so called first world which is mainly nominally Christian we are now the most indebted, obese, addicted and medicated generation in history. Jesus’ teaching on fasting has the power to improve our health, our relationships and our environment. Yes, the real cause of climate change is our unwillingness to say, ‘I have enough.’ To fast is to say, ‘I have enough.’ Lent is a good opportunity to identify some area in my life that is out of control and to say, ‘enough is enough!’

Lent: Prayer

It is no secret that the religion of Jesus can be summed up in the word love. But Jesus is no dreamer. He knows that the reality of evil and the wounds we carry can make it difficult for us to love. For this reason the main thrust of his teaching is focused on what it is that creates a loving heart. Right in the middle of his Sermon on the Mount Jesus mentions three things which could be described as a practical programme to help us grow in love. These are the three things the Christian Churches invite its members to practise in earnest each year during the season of Lent. They could be described as the non-negotiable essentials of the Christian religion. They are prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Significantly they are three of the five pillars of Islam.

Jesus’ teaching about God is clear and simple. “Say this when you pray, Our Father in heaven” (Matt 6:9). “You must call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father and he is in heaven” (Matt 23:9). “Your heavenly Father knows all that you need. Set your hearts on his kingdom first and all these other things will be given you as well” (Matt 6:32-33). Jesus teaches that God is our Father whom we can call Abba. Jesus’ Abba is in relationship with each of us. He knows each of us personally and loves each of us unconditionally. Abba is looking after us and providing for our needs.

If the God of Jesus is called Abba then prayer is spending time with God who is a tender and affectionate Father. “When you pray, go to your private room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in that secret place” (Matt 6:6). What a beautiful and accessible description of the activity of prayer! Spend time on your own with your Father. During this time thank him for his presence in your life and for looking after you. Talk to him in a personal way about what is happening in your life. Ask him for the things you need, especially the things you need to help you develop a loving heart. And, perhaps most importantly of all, hear him tell you that he loves you unconditionally, as you are. For Jesus prayer is nothing more and nothing less than our personal act of surrender to the Father; to the Father’s love, to his care and to his help. It is an act of surrender we need to make every day.

Lent

Today, Ash Wednesday, the annual Christian fasting season known as Lent begins. Most great world religions have an annual fasting season. The Christian one lasts for forty days and significantly coincides with spring. There are many reasons why it is good to have a fasting season. Let me mention a few.

It offers us an opportunity to start again, to make a new beginning. Failing and falling are part of the human condition. In the Christian view of life failing and falling should never be a cause for despondency or despair. The God of Jesus is a God of abundant mercy and radical forgiveness, a God who wipes out past failures and invites us to make a fresh start. We should never be reluctant to begin again. New beginnings are a necessary part of the Christian journey.

Lent is also an ideal time to restore the balance in our lives. Virtue is the happy medium, the golden mean. But the golden mean is hard to achieve. There is a tendency in human nature to over indulge, to develop addictions, to abuse our bodies, to become overly preoccupied with work, to neglect important relationships, to put too much emphasis on our material needs and not enough on our emotional and spiritual needs. Lent provides us with an opportunity to reintroduce a healthy diet; a healthy diet of food, of exercise, of relaxation, of prayer. Restoring the balance in our lives helps us to sort out what is good for us and what is bad for us.

Lent is the Christian fasting season which means that it should be focused on Jesus who is the Christ. There is really only one yardstick with which to measure the success of our Lenten fasting: Does it enable us to become more like Jesus? The goal of Lent is to get rid of the ‘old man’ which is the selfish me and to put on the ‘New Man’ which is the loving Christ. Ultimately, Lent is about Jesus, not about us. It is about Jesus’ vision of life, his values and the building of his Kingdom in the world. Therefore the best type of fasting we can do in Lent is the fasting that helps us to pay greater attention to Jesus and move closer to him.

The Heart’s Journey Home

“You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” These are the often quoted words of St Augustine. There is a longing in the human heart to come home. It is a longing for God who is the fulfilment of our hearts’ desires.

The longing in the human heart to come home is a longing to be held in the tender embrace of God, the Father of Jesus. It is a longing to live in the Father’s house. It is a longing for a room in the Father’s house, a room of our own where we can experience our belovedness, be ourselves and find peace. Jesus knows the longing we have inside us. This is why he tells us, “There are many rooms in my Father’s house. I go now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too” (John 14: 2-3).

The journey through life is the journey home. But we cannot make the journey home alone; we are not meant to make the journey home alone. We need the companionship of other people. Without the companionship of other people we wither and die inside, emotionally and spiritually. The idea that the Christian journey is a private one is false thinking. Jesus gathered companions around him and so must we. We go to God with and through other people. On the journey home we also need the companionship of Jesus. Jesus walks the road of life with us. He is the invisible companion of our life’s journey. He helps us find our way home. This is what Jesus means when he says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me” (John: 14:6). To call Jesus our Saviour is to accept that we need his help and guidance to find our way home to the Father’s house. The heart’s journey home is a journey best made in the company of Jesus.

Compassion

Abraham Lincoln was once challenged by his supporters about why he reached out to his political opponents and offered them positions in his government. In reply Lincoln said: “When I make friends with my enemies then they are no longer my enemies.” Lincoln’s answer was a simple statement of the obvious. But it required greatness to put the obvious into practice.

If there is one thing we human beings have repeatedly failed to do down through history it is to love our enemies and to forgive those who offend us. As a consequence we have experienced war, after war, after war. There is nothing more futile than war, nothing more destructive, nothing more devastating to the human spirit. Yet we persist in using it as a way of settling disputes, of defeating our enemies and as a means of asserting our power and gaining control.

It is understandable that one of the major concerns of Jesus was the building of community. Jesus offered people a way of living together that would both respect difference and create unity and peace. For Jesus the key to creating community was compassion. “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). This one simple instruction is at the very heart of Jesus’ teaching. Some would even say that it sums up his teaching.

Compassion begins with acceptance, unconditional acceptance of others. Unconditional acceptance means that I accept others no matter what their colour, class, culture, religion and sexual orientation might be. Compassion is also about my willingness to understand the experience of others, to listen to their stories, to hear what they are saying, to learn where they are coming from, to stand in their shoes. In its purest form compassion is about my capacity to enter into the life of another at the level of emotion, where my heart knows the heart of the other. Compassion is what distinguishes the follower of Jesus; it is the mark of a true Christian. It is the way to end war and conflict and create real community among the peoples of the world. Compassion has its source in God who is compassion itself. It is a gift, a gift that we must pray for, and pray for every day.

Twin Sisters

Jesus has been described as a man of prayer and a man of compassion. This is certainly the way he comes across in the Gospel. Indeed for Jesus prayer and compassion were like twin sisters that could not be separated.

Jesus needed time to be alone. He needed times of quiet, of silence in his life. These times of silence gave him the opportunity to pray, to nourish his relationship with the one whom he called Abba Father. For Jesus times of silence were an experience of solitude. In the silence he was intimate with his Father. Times of silence were so important to Jesus that he was prepared to get up very early in the morning to have them.

Jesus was also a man of compassion. He responded to human need when he found it, in the form he found it. Jesus was deeply aware of the burdens that people were carrying, of the pain, sickness and anxiety in the lives of those he came into contact with. Jesus not only sympathised with people, he also empathised with them. His own humanity enabled him to know the humanity of others. Jesus’ struggle with his own human weakness allowed him to understand what human weakness can do to the lives of others. “For the high priest we have is not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us, but he has been tempted in exactly the same way as ourselves” (Heb 4:15).

The word connect is used a lot nowadays to describe the benefits of the internet and the mobile phone. In our modern world we certainly have a variety of types of connection. But not all of these bring depth to our relationships. Prayer enabled Jesus to connect with his Father at a deep level. Compassion enabled him to connect with other people at a deep level. The human heart is made for deep connection. We are made for friendship, friendship with God, friendship with other people. Prayer feeds our friendship with God; compassion feeds our friendships with other people. We can learn from the life of Jesus about the importance of prayer and compassion. We can also learn from Jesus not to separate these two beautiful and life-giving sources of connection.

Relationships Come First

Someone living in England once told me he believed with conviction that the dominant value in UK culture is work. Work comes first. It is more important than anything else. If this is true, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is, then people are measured by their productivity and by their usefulness.

My conversation with this man reminded me of something I once read in The Little Book of Calm. “If you tend to get overly serious about your work and your responsibilities remind yourself that the most common deathbed regrets have to do with neglected relationships, not unfinished business.” The truth is relationships are the most important thing in our lives, not work. Of course we need to work, but we do not need to define ourselves by our work. If we define ourselves by our capacity for work we lose touch with what it really means to be human. We are, after all, called human beings not human doers!

The consequences of a culture that makes work the number one priority are many. Words like busyness, ambition, competition, exhaustion, burn- out, depression naturally come to mind. But there are other things too perhaps less obvious. Those who are unemployed or unemployable feel worthless. Those who stay at home to look after children feel devalued. Those who take time to relax and play feel guilty. The work ethic that drives western culture and that supposedly creates prosperity does not make people feel any happier about themselves; in fact it makes them feel worse.

Jesus put relationships first. For him who we are is much more important than what we do. When Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God he was not speaking about territory or politics or the exercise of power. He was speaking about the way people relate to one another and to God. Jesus sought to create an inclusive community, a community where people would experience relationships that are just, caring and compassionate. For us, two thousand years later, the challenge remains the same: to make relationships, not work, our priority.

Our North Star

I recently had a conversation with a man in his late thirties. He told me that many of his contemporaries had no real source of guidance in their lives. “They have no north star,” is the way he put it. It is certainly true that there is a breakdown of trust in our society. Many people have lost faith in the major institutions that have been the bedrock of our way of life. We are missing a moral compass and things like consumerism, individualism and the social media are filling the vacuum.

On the feast of the Epiphany, sometimes referred to as ‘little Christmas’, we meet three men who had the courage to follow a new star that appeared in the sky. Their journey brought them to an unfamiliar place and to an unexpected discovery. They found a child who had come into the world to offer its peoples guidance and hope. So convinced were they of their discovery that their lives took a whole new direction and were given a new sense of purpose. The Gospel tells us that they returned home by a different route.

The truth is there is a moral compass to guide us. We do have a ‘north star’. This star is the person of Jesus discovered by the Magi in a stable in Bethlehem. Jesus is the Word of God who came among us to speak the truth that sets us free. He is the wise man who inspires and guides us. The teachings of Jesus provide us with meaning and give purpose and direction to our lives.

Let’s not allow the failures of the Church and her ministers prevent us from hearing the message of Jesus. The Church in her weakness may confuse and disappoint us, but Jesus will not. He has words of comfort and hope, words that will change the way we see ourselves, other people and the world around us. Peter once said to Jesus, “Lord, who else is there to go to; it is you who have the words of eternal life” (see John 6:68). Jesus is still the only one who can offer us the message of eternal life. It is he who is our ‘north star’.

The Family

A number of years ago I attended a baptism. After the baptism was over the grandfather of the child who was baptised said to me, “The best gift in life is the gift of a healthy child.” What a wonderful thing it is to give birth, to bring new life into the world, to create a family. Creating a family must be one of the most fulfilling and rewarding things that human beings can do.

Of course raising children is hard work. It is a 24/7 business. It involves making numerous daily sacrifices – early mornings, late nights, constant vigilance. I once heard someone make this comment about raising children: “Give children plenty of who you are and little of what you have.” What children need most is time and attention. Time and attention are more important than things. When children get time and attention they feel loved and they feel secure. The best preparation children get for life is the time and attention they receive from their parents. There is much wisdom in the saying, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Nowadays fathers are spending more time rocking the cradle. Parenthood is a great vocation, but it does carry huge responsibility.

I once saw a plaque hanging on the wall of a kitchen that had these words written on it: “Home is the place where you grumble the most and are treated the best.” That is a fairly good description of what it means to belong to a family. In your own home, among the members of your family, you can let your hair down, give out about the world, complain about what is happening in your life and yet you know that you will always be accepted, cherished, and safe. The love we receive within our families allows us to be ourselves. It also enables us to live and work in the world with healthy self-esteem and self-confidence.

The relationships within the home are the most significant and important relationships in our lives. And yet because of the pressures of life and the need to succeed we can end up neglecting the relationships within our homes. The life of the family of Nazareth, known as the Holy Family, is a good example of quality relationships within the home. Joseph, Mary and Jesus were attentive to one another; they made time for each other; they put one another first. This helped them to deal with the hardships and challenges they had to face. It also strengthened the bonds of love and peace that were between them. If we prioritise the relationships within our homes we too will experience the same resilience, love and peace.