That's What You Got?

Have you ever walked out of a movie theater with a friend and asked, "What did you think?" and been utterly stunned at their response? When they said something like "I didn't like the music," or "I've never liked Hugh Jackman," or "The color of the whole thing seemed too blue...I hate when they do that." And you just want to scream, "Really? That's what you got?!? We just sat through two-and-a-half hours of movie time and you were stuck on the soundtrack??? Do you even know who Martin Scorsese is?"

I haven't written on my blog for several weeks now...very busy and not feeling especially well. But also nothing has particularly inspired and/or bothered me. Until this past weekend. Easter weekend. And now I've got something to say...still busy, not feel very well, but have to write about this.

I actually heard an ad on the radio that said, "Of course Easter is in the spring...it's the most beautiful time of the year!" What? Did someone just say that? Did someone have the audacity to say that our Lord Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead in the spring because it was prettier to do it then than, say, sometime in September?

That just brought to the surface a frustration that was building in me over the preciousness associated with Easter this year. I don't mind the pretty flowers and bunnies decorating everything in celebration of spring. It really is a beautiful time of year as everything is in bloom and the energy in the air is contagious and invigorating. But there is a line that we need to be careful not to cross, and that ad on the radio just jumped (or hopped) all over it.

I imagine Jesus walking through one of our stores--say, Wal-Mart or Target--and into the Easter section, and saying, "Really? That's what you got? I died on the cross, overcame the powers of death and sin, and rose on the third day, and this is where you take it?"

Of course, we could explain to him that we use Easter eggs to symbolize new birth. We could explain that the Easter bunny is...I don't know...I really don't have a clue how to explain that one. And we could point out that it's a celebration of springtime. 

And then we would tell him to just show up on Easter Sunday morning and listen to our church service...that he would be really impressed with the music then. 

Here's my bottom line: We Christians have been making a huge deal lately about keeping Christ in Christmas. How about we keep Christ in Easter? 

We know he is risen indeed...let's remind the world!

Marked for Life

Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, which many of you have heard of, associating it with the craziness that goes on in New Orleans every year at this time. 

Today also begins a forty-day season known in the Christian church as Lent. Many of you already understand that Lent is the period of time leading up to Easter. The reason for its being forty days is tied to Jesus’ time in the wilderness of fasting and praying just before he began his ministry (see Matthew 4:1-11). Christians use those forty days to prepare our hearts and minds to fully celebrate Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection—his sacrifice for our sins and his victory over sin and death.

We begin that period with Ash Wednesday. It is a day to repent…to acknowledge our own shortcomings and our need for God’s grace in our lives. It is a day to grieve the sin that continues to oppress the abused, the disenfranchised, the needy in the world. It is a day to mourn the hearts that have yet to hear the good news and to lament the times that we have fallen short of the call of God on our lives to carry the message of God’s love in large and small ways to a needy world desperate to receive that gospel.

I grew up in the Baptist church and then joined the Nazarene church when I was seventeen. Ash Wednesday was not a significant part of our church calendar throughout most of my life. It’s only been in the relatively recent past that our local church has begun having an Ash Wednesday service. It has become an incredibly meaningful day of the year in my life; the evening service has a powerful effect on my heart.

Ours is not a highly liturgical church, meaning that we do not have a formal set of rites, a traditional sense of dress among our clergy, and a given series of readings. But for our Ash Wednesday service we borrow a tradition from the liturgical churches. Following communion, or the Lord’s Supper, one of the church elders will use ash to smudge a cross on each of our foreheads. This symbolizes the death of Jesus for our sins.

The first time I received a cross on my forehead, I immediately began weeping. Weeping, by the way, is not the same as crying. Weeping comes from a deep sense of grief, and I was grieving. That cross on my forehead brought home a deep sense of responsibility and a deeper sense of connection to the one who had taken the responsibility for me.

I play one of the keyboards at my church and when I returned to the keyboard, I was unable to see the music through my tears. All I could think was, Jesus died for me. Jesus actually died for me. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

After the service was over, we all left the sanctuary silently and somberly. What I had not prepared for was the vision that awaited me out in the foyer of the church. Every forehead I saw had an ashen cross smudged on it. Every single one. This time I started crying tears of joy.

Just before he went to be crucified, Jesus prayed to his Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23).

We were all marked for life. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

Can You See Me Now?

The Super Bowl was on last night, along with the famous commercials that keep everyone talking for days about which ones were the funniest, the silliest, and the most memorable. One of the ads that caught my attention was the Nationwide ad featuring Mindy Kaling, who decided that she was, in fact, invisible and proceeded to do, well, whatever an invisible Mindy thought she could get away with . . . including sneaking a selfie with Matt Damon. Didn’t work so well.

I thought about it later and realized that I remember a time I felt invisible. We moved back to Orlando when I was halfway through the tenth grade and I went from a high school in College Park, Georgia, where I knew literally every person in my class, to a school that was so huge, I got lost every day the first week.

Each morning I would board a bus for school, and then I would arrive to a teeming mass of almost three thousand students swarming through the halls and sidewalks of a huge campus. I recognized a few faces from elementary school, having lived in the same neighborhood years before, but only one friend made a connection with me. The rest would swim around me between classes as if I weren’t there . . . or invisible.

Until I made it into the choral ensemble that summer. I had played the piano for years, so I auditioned to accompany the select choral group for the school, and I was chosen along with another girl to play for the group. We would spend six weeks in summer school practicing music and preparing for a busy year of performances and competitions. And those six weeks would change my life.

I had friends now. I had an identity. When school started back my junior year, I had a family scattered throughout the population of the school and I felt connected, united, to the other members of my group. Beyond the select ensemble, I was also closely connected to the members of the chorus so that gave me an even broader “family” unit throughout the school population. I was no longer invisible.

Mindy Kaling and the Nationwide folks make invisibility look fun . . . but it’s not. It’s terribly lonely. A lot of kids feel invisible at school; young people, you need to look around and see the other people around you more. Patients often feel invisible in the hospital; we need to visit folks who are sick more often. Family members feel invisible at home; we need to stop to look and listen to each each other more. Whenever someone is feeling invisible, something is terribly wrong; something is broken. It needs repair.

One of the worst places for people to feel invisible is in the church. Yet, that is where we hear the complaint so often: “I went to church, but it felt like nobody even saw me.”

So let’s get busy fixing that one. Look at the people you see at church. Look them in the eye. Say “Hi, there!” and put some feeling into it. Stop and shake a hand. See them. Make sure they feel visible.

Maybe they’ll come back.