Lent I
Genesis, 9:8-17
1 Peter, 3:18-22
Mark, 1:9-13
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
“And so they are linked, cinema and religion, two grand designs conjuring light out of darkness.”1
Ian McEwan made that comment in an appreciation of John Updike’s work, and specifically remarking on an Updike short story about a man who loses his wallet. While sitting in a movie house, the man declares to his wife, “Without that wallet, I’m nothing.” He recognizes that without it, “he is a phantom, flitting about in a house without walls.” Losing his wallet is a near-death experience. His epiphany – the lightbulb in the darkness, his recognition of the reality of how he values his life – happens in a cinema.
For Updike, cinema and television have become our religion, but he didn’t wag his finger at us about it. He observed in his own youth that “it was the movies that moved me, and gave me something to live for, to live toward.” That flickering light is our pre-eminent, probably quintessential, art-form. While it often falls far short of its potential, the cinema – or your family room – can be a place to encounter beauty, truth, even reality.
But do we really want the pictures to show us a glimpse of reality? Do we really want the movies and television to show us ourselves?2 That question is put squarely to us in Good Night, and Good Luck, a good film, but not a masterpiece. It tells the story of Edward R. Murrow, the iconic CBS reporter, and his battle with Senator McCarthy and the anti-communist paranoia of the early ‘50s. Throughout his career, Murrow examined quite thorny, sensitive issues: segregation, apartheid, J. Edgar Hoover, migrant workers. His work showed that when you start looking closely, we didn’t always look so good.
The film portrays Murrow as David who slays the McCarthy Goliath. Murrow has a prime time news show, and he uses it to direct critical attention to McCarthy. Murrow discredits McCarthy, and takes him down, but his muck-raking also unsettles his corporate bosses and financial sponsors. Murrow defeats McCarthy, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory, the beginning of Murrow’s end. He loses his prime time audience, then his show, gradually the limelight. He is cast into the wilderness. He may have shown us too much of ourselves, more than we could bear.
As he was fading away in the late ‘50s, Murrow bitterly attacked television for its decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.3
“Distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us” – isn’t that what religion can do, and sometimes does do? Like cinema, or television, it can direct us to truth and growth, or it can stunt us, enfeeble us, infantilize us.
Our country has high, lofty ideals to which we aspire and which make us proud. It’s possible that Murrow’s contribution was pointing out to us the gap between our ideals and our reality. People who point out the gap between our sense of ourselves, our ideals, and our reality are doing dangerous work. Look what it got Jesus. Every group, every person has a limited capacity for it. Murrow’s boss, William Paley, complained that he couldn’t handle the constant stomach ache every time Murrow took on a controversial subject. Focusing attention on difficult issues creates lots of distress and turmoil – emotional, spiritual, psychic, even physical distress and turmoil. The greater our capacity for contemplating that gap, however, the greater our health, the stronger the possibility of growth, the more we can embody our ideals.
Lent focuses our attention on that gap between our ideal and our reality. It is a time to prepare ourselves for what we will be, for what our future with the resurrected Jesus looks like. This is daunting, difficult, unpleasant work, looking squarely at ourselves and considering how we’ve fallen short. Good Night, and Good Luck refrains Shakespeare: “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Are we willing, able, to look at our faults, assume responsibility, and not blame our stars? If that’s our Lenten work – hard, painful work, then it seems perverse for the Church to call Lent a ‘joyful season.’
If taken seriously, Lent will stir some distress and turmoil in us, but it also provides the opportunity for new life. Until the thirteenth century, the word ‘Lent’ meant ‘spring,’ the renewal and rejuvenation of life. In typically Christian irony, our renewal and rejuvenation come in self-awareness, self-denial, self-giving.
So much of life tries to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, but Lent can cut through to the fundamentals, helping us to re-connect with our essential desire, what we want at the deepest core of our selves, where we find meaning, purpose, something to live for, to live toward. Religion, church, coming to mass can be a place to hide from God, to fantasize about ourselves, and to avoid our realities. We can get wrapped up in minor, petty religious issues that occupy us instead of focusing on God’s love of us, on our love for him and one another, on our growth as disciples of Jesus.
How do we grow into our ideals? How do we close the gap? There are two basic human responses. The first seeks to earn God’s favor and love through our own effort. It is about earning God’s acceptance through moral striving and obeying clear-cut rules. In the gospels, the Pharisees represent this approach: we avoid sin, perform many good works, engage in pious devotion so that God will bless us. If we live a good, moral life, all will be well. It’s a fantasy as old as humanity, a primitive impulse lurking in every heart, but it doesn’t expand our hearts or help us know God’s love, and we don’t have to act according to it.
Since we have high spiritual and moral standards, impossible to achieve, every Pharisee knows deep down, way down, that they can’t live up to them, that they are not pure. This breeds anxiety and insecurity, expressed in a brittle pride, hostility toward those with different views and customs, and a minimal capacity for acknowledging any gap between their own ideals and reality. The Pharisaical temperament is exclusive, closing itself off to new things, fearing the unknown, criticizing the different. It’s arrested development. It quickly makes value judgments – finding clear-cut good and evil – about everything, rather than acknowledging the mixed up state of most things and people, rather than engaging with the confusion and ambiguity of life.
Tom Wright, the brilliant Bishop of Durham, recognizes our desire for a world where everything is clear-cut. He thinks that is why we follow sports so closely and passionately. It’s straightforward – our team, the good, against the other, the bad; our guys against the enemy; it’s clear-cut dualism. He writes,
One of the disappointments of growing older, in fact, is the realization that nothing is as straightforward as it once seemed. Take politics, for example; or even church politics; ...there are many who urge us to view both as if they were [straightforward, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys], preferring the quick certainties of youth to the humility of age. Fundamentalism, to that extent, is the attempt to do with religion what many do with sex, using it as a way of recapturing lost youth.4
The humility of age suggests that we can’t know and judge all that much and that we don’t live up to our ideals. It challenges youthful certainty and helps to produce Christian maturity. We can have humility, and yet still be confident, hopeful, sure of God’s acceptance of us. This is the gospel: God accepts us and loves us regardless of what we do or say or think. God loves us no matter what.
For Christians, the way to close the gap between our ideals and our reality is not through our own effort, but through grace. It is a work of God. Rowan Williams writes, “Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part upon knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.”5 If we know God loves us, wants us, cherishes us, takes pleasure in us, we overflow with gratitude.
In Lent, most of us take up some spiritual disciplines – usually along the lines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, or prayer, restraint, service. We might give up meat and chocolate and eat less. We might even give up television and pick up a book. We might do something more substantial – spend more time in prayer, being silent, aware, present with God. We might give more to the church and to those in need. We might do service for the poor and the lonely. We might confess our sins and seek amendment of life. We might do any number of things to close the gap between our ideal and our reality. But whatever we’re doing this Lent, it’s essential that our Lenten disciplines are not something we should do, they’re not about staying on the right side of God, they’re not about duty and obligation, they’re not punishment for our failures.
The motivation for Lent, and really all of life, is gratitude: God loves me, and I express my gratitude for his love for me in the way I live. God has given me his Son, Jesus; he’s given me a new life, someone to live for, and to live toward, a purpose. God wants me. He makes my life significant. I don’t deserve this, but this is what he’s done for me. Lent is a way we express our thanks for grace. So, properly observed, Lent is an expression of our gratitude, that Jesus loves us, that we’re part of him. Gratitude is why it is a joyful season.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1 Ian McEwan, ‘On John Updike,’ The New York Review of Books, March 12, 2009, p. 4.
2 “People want to forget their troubles.” Martin Kaplan explaining why movies are so popular right now. Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes, ‘Despite Downturn, Americans Flock to Movie Theaters,’ The New York Times, March 1, 2009, p. A01.
3 Screenplay of Good Night, and Good Luck, re-presenting Edward R. Murrow’s speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association on October 15, 1958.
4 N. T. Wright, Following Jesus, Eerdmans (1994), p. 85.
5 Quoted by Paul Elie, ‘The Velvet Reformation,’ The Atlantic Monthly, March 2009.
©2009 Lane John Davenport
