Lent 2016 - Exposing the lie

It’s an idea we’re going to have to get used to. Donald Trump may yet become President of the United States of America, which is still the most powerful nation on earth. How might this come about? There is no simple answer, and I am no political pundit, but one thing seems clear; that the fomenting of hatred gets you a long way in politics. 

Source: The Guardian

The guile it takes to foment hatred serves as both trowel and weapon, useful as a means of turning over the blackest, and often richest, soil of emotions in the human heart, and as the deadliest of all weapons, the guile which is also known as duplicity, or deceit. Guile, or duplicity, covers up a multitude of evils, most notably those which used to be known as the seven deadly sins.

Thinking about the politics of America, which claims in its own constitution to be ‘one  nation under God’, the rhetoric swirls around as the presidential primaries get under way, and we detect its heavy religious undertones. The tool of religion, whose purpose is to ‘turn over’, or convert, human hearts and so open them to the transforming work of love, becomes the weapon of xenophobic fear and ultimately of hatred itself, hatred which is spawned in human hearts through pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth – the seven deadly sins. In and through any or all of these, using the tools of duplicity and deceit, the demon of hatred urges a nation on into the night. Perhaps it is time we all thought more carefully about our politics.

When it comes to duplicity, politics and religion are easily confused. They merge in the shadows of those outmoded deadly sins. Take lust, for example. Lust has more to do with power than it does with sex, although the two often go together. Lust for power is not always immediately recognisable because it is easily disguised by personal charisma or by flattery, both pandering to the lowest common moral denominator.

Evil is of its very nature duplicitous. In terms of politics, evil can be disguised quite effectively, either as what is good for the nation (because those who are infatuated with one man’s charisma are encouraged to believe that it is they who represent the nation in its purest state), or, on the other, as an ideal which they both want and deserve. Once these two untruths have been firmly established, nobody should be allowed to question the means or the motives for promoting them. But occasionally the terrifying truth slips out, as it did when someone recently asked what it will feel like to know that Donald Trump has it in his power to press the nuclear button.

Either way, fear seems, once again, to rule the day. But this too is part of the great deception. The period which Christians observe prior to celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is also a time for exposing deception. Exposing deception begins with ourselves. The season of Lent is a season for reflecting on unquestioned attitudes which we may not even know we have, attitudes to race, gender, power and the unconscious assumption that somehow ‘might is right’.

Our private assumptions and our most secret prejudices combine to make the sum total of a nation. So Lent is an opportunity to review, and perhaps repent of, our politics. By doing this personally we also do it as a nation, knowing that ‘all have sinned’ in this area at one time or another. As nations we have all fallen short of the loving purposes of God, and as nations we are invited to be open to the transforming work of his grace – and to the new life we share in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Lent 2016 - The reason for the season

Resilience and self-reliance have long been a British characteristic. Faced with adversity, we pull ourselves up by our boot strings and get on with things. Consistent with this national trait it is reasonable to suppose that many of us think of Lent as a season for self improvement in which God is only marginally involved. Generations have been shaped by the idea that when it comes to facing life’s difficulties, and to self improvement, ‘God helps those who help themselves’. So they can think of Lent as a chance to pick up those New Year's resolutions, that fell by the wayside towards the end of January, with increased determination.

But what makes Lent difficult is that, unlike New Year’s resolutions which almost always aim at self improvement, Lent can very quickly seem purposeless. A couple of days after Ash Wednesday we find ourselves wondering what point there can be in giving up chocolate or wine.

This is one of the ways in which the season corresponds so closely to the forty days spent by Christ in the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan, however we choose to imagine that particular figure. The real temptation lay in purpose, or the lack of it. What was the point? Did Jesus believe in himself enough to go through with this gruelling exercise, let alone the suffering which was to come? Would it not be just as useful, more useful perhaps, if he appealed to people directly by raising his celebrity profile as quickly as possible? Did he even really believe the fantasies he’d created for himself? “If  you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the nearest tall building and his angels will come to your rescue before you even hit the ground, then they’ll believe you” says the tempter, which was true of course.  But it misses the point.

The temptation was not to doubt himself, or even to doubt God, but to doubt that God’s purpose would be worked out and fully revealed in him through suffering. But does the same apply to our own self imposed discipline during Lent? Here we already run into difficulties. If we equate God’s purpose purely with suffering and privation, and our own suffering as something to be got through in order to win God’s approval, Lent becomes little more than an endurance test . But Lenten self discipline is not that kind of test. The purpose of Lent is not to succeed or achieve higher personal standards through some kind of minor privation. It is to accept failure and our need for grace.

Part of the purpose of Lent is to remind us that if there is anything resembling purpose in human suffering, it is bound up with the purpose of God’s Son choosing to ‘empty’ himself, a literal translation of the greek word used in Paul’s letter to the Philippian church. Christ chose to empty himself of his divine freedom, but not of his divinity, in order to bind himself, like a slave, to human suffering and the consequences of human greed and selfishness. The mystery of suffering, or its ‘purpose’ becomes part of God’s purpose in Jesus Christ, a purpose which is still being worked out in the world today. The outworking of God’s purpose through suffering and what we call sin means that all human relationships are transformed in the minute a person or nation recognises and seeks the grace which comes with forgiveness. With forgiveness comes reconciliation and the beginning of a new creation.

The new creation begins with reconciliation with God, leading to ultimate reconciliation among people and nations. This may sound overly optimistic until we remember that reconciliation depends on all parties to any dispute wanting it enough to be truthful with themselves and with each other about whatever suffering has been caused and the part they have played in it. In other words, there has to be a willingness to say the word ‘sorry’. Reconciliation can only take place when this word has been spoken.

Before we dismiss this idea as impossible, a good Lenten discipline might be to take five minutes of the day to be truly still in the face of this life determining truth. Being still means being open to God so that God, in the nakedness of the suffering Christ, can look at us. In doing this, we see ourselves as he sees us, beginning with where we have wronged or been wronged by others. This is not simply a matter of  going over the past, waiting for anger, guilt or doubt to surface and then quickly burying the whole painful business until the same time tomorrow. It is a matter of allowing transformative grace to penetrate the deepest and darkest parts of our hearts and memories and waiting for God’s purpose to be worked in us in this moment of truth.

If we can spare another five minutes, we might try to imagine the unimaginable, in other words to pray the unthinkable; that all the parties who are contributing to the devastating destruction being wrought at present in Syria would pause and be still in a similar way – and allow the mercy of God into their hearts and minds, so transforming the lives of millions of innocent suffering human beings.

Lent 2016 - Confronting Fear

I read in Saturday’s Guardian that a woman who had tripped and fallen while crossing a road was ignored by two passing cars, before being run over and killed by a bus whose driver had not noticed her lying there. Did all three of these drivers perhaps half notice the woman, but for fear of getting involved (the legal and practical ramifications of doing so would have been considerable) simply pass on by? Selfish individualism, as the Guardian article suggests, runs on the fear of getting involved.

Selfish individualism is no new thing, as the story of the good Samaritan also reminds us, but what does not immediately register with the reader of that story is the acute loneliness of the two who pass by on the other side. We get a sense of this loneliness in the incident which took place on a city street in the UK only a few days ago. The drivers of the cars and bus, like the religious experts in the gospel story, seem disconnected from other people’s humanity, and perhaps even from their own.

The selfish person almost always ends up being the loneliest and the most alienated, as we often see with some of the elderly people in care homes whose families seldom visit them, not because they do not care about their relative, but because their love has been absorbed, sponge-like, over many years by a self obsessed and often fearful individual.

The loneliness of the self obsessed individual could also become the plight of the selfish nation. The selfish nation only thinks short-term and takes what it can from the wider family, the family of nations. In certain contexts its short-term thinking has been compounded by the  fear of what might happen to the nation if it started to risk itself for the sake of the powerless. The plight of the selfish nation returns us to the plight of the selfish individual who is too timid or self obsessed to be pro-active about taking in refugees, for example.

It seems strange that all of this fear is often confused with religion, or with the lack of it. Lack of religion is sometimes seen, by those who do not understand what religion is about, as lack of moral fibre, or a version of the same. But one cannot help suspecting that, for them, the real problem with religion is that it involves passion. Dispassionate morality, or virtue, is easier on the conscience; suffering and need become someone else’s problem. Who knows where passionate love for a loving God might take them?

This being said, the critics of religion have a point. Religious people are often blind to their own self obsession and the threats which it poses when it is cloaked by religious individualism. Religious individualism feeds on the same fear as any other kind of individualism. It feeds on the fear of those whose religion is strange to us, with the result that we feel we must protect ourselves from whatever we think they might do to us.

One way around this problem would be to take advantage of the most powerful resource which all people of faith have at their disposal – prayer. Prayer takes one of two forms. It is the intimate conversation which the human being has with the creator God who is loved and trusted by the one doing the praying. Prayer also involves desiring the highest good for all human beings, beginning with those whose religion is different from our own.

Christians are about to enter the holy season of Lent. I think many Christians would greatly value the prayers of Muslims for our highest good. Many of us will be praying for them during the coming weeks. Here are two prayers which Christians say together on the Sunday before Lent begins.

Lord, who has taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth, send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted dead before thee; grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

Merciful Lord, grant, we pray, to your faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I hope that those who read this blog will continue to say these prayers throughout the coming weeks for all Muslims of good faith, as well as for themselves, and that Muslims will join us in saying them for us in a spirit which is true to their religion: