Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

March 13, 2011


So if you’re a Christian, raise your hand.

That’s good.

Some hands flew up. Others came up a little more slowly. Some of you, I’m sure, might have thought it was a trick question, as in ‘what comes next if I raise my hand?’ I asked Mary last night how many hands would go up if I asked that question and she said she thought everyone would raise their hands. This is a pretty safe place, maybe the safest place in all of our worlds to claim our identity as Christians. We all have some idea of what we are about in this setting. We can be reasonably sure that the people around us are here for reasons similar to ours. This is the place where we come to remember our life in God and our connection to God through Christ. We come not just because we are Christians, but to mark ourselves as Christians again so that at the end of the hour we can head out into the world again, newly confident in our identity as Christians. This identity thing is so important for our spiritual lives and for our work in the world, but living into even an identity we have chosen can be difficult.


A few weeks ago I spent a day praying and chanting and talking about faith with a group of clergy from many traditions up at the Shalem Institute in the city. As we began the day we went around and introduced ourselves and were asked to give our name, what faith community we belonged to and one other important thing about ourselves. When my turn came I told them my name and I mentioned this community and then I told them I was a painter. I don’t think I’d ever actually used those words to describe myself before. I said, “I’m a painter.” I had gone to Shalem hoping for a safe place to spend a day just being part of the congregation. I was hoping for the kind of spirit-friendly setting where unspoken ideas and truths find their way to the surface and are met by grace. I was a little surprised at myself as I heard the words coming out, I am a painter.


Though I have painted most of my life and was an art major for a while, I have never called myself an artist or a painter. Several reasons come to mind. I have always thought you had to be a good painter, maybe a commercially successful painter to call your self a painter. I have admired the works of painters and wished I could be one, but the gulf between my work and theirs always seemed very wide. I sometimes paint out in public, I set up my easel along the trail and paint the marsh or I go downtown and set up. People walk up to me when I am painting and for some reason--I mean they see the paints and the canvass and all--they will ask, “are you a painter?” I guess I figure if they can’t tell at that point then I must not be one so I usually say something like, “Oh I paint a little on my day off” and try to move them along. I think too that I have thought being an artist would make painting easy. If I were really an artist, I wouldn’t be scraping this onion off the canvass for the fifth time trying to get the color in that shadow right.

I have always been able to see the reasons I shouldn’t be called an artist and I had somehow come up with the idea that that identity would be conferred upon me by others or in response to the wonderful work I hoped to do someday. What I heard that day at Shalem was my own voice claiming the identity of artist, knowing somehow that claiming that identity was a necessary beginning to growing into it. Maybe I was able to say that about painting because I had gone there knowing I needed to give some attention to growing into my identity as Christian.


Maybe it is true that there can be no separation between who we are and who we are becoming.

If our identity as “Christian” is an unfinished business, not just a description of who we are but also of the life to which we aspire, then we need to be reminded from time to time that becoming who we are takes some effort. We are at the same time Christians and we are not yet finished becoming Christians. The identity we have taken on is one we must live into intentionally. The season of Lent reminds us that we still have work to do.


We hear in the readings today just how hard it can be to live into the identity we have chosen. Adam and Eve discover honoring a relationship isn’t automatic, that we humans are quite capable of choosing to do the exact wrong thing, even with our eyes wide open and in the best of situations. Paul is sure that there must be something in our DNA that causes us to miss the mark when we set out to be the people we know we want to be. And Jesus knows that even the desire for good things like food and safety and some power over our lives can lead us into danger. In the seasonal cycle of the Church year we are reminded today that it is time to apply ourselves, take stock of where we are and do whatever it takes to fit ourselves for the next part of our journey. Welcome to Lent.


The main reason I wanted to talk about identity today is that in this season of Lent we will be hearing as we always do, quite a bit about sin. I think sin reads differently for people who understand that they have at the same time already claimed their identity and are also living into that identity. We have all probably heard that sin separates us from God. Scripture doesn’t seem to bear that out. In the stories of our faith God just doesn’t give up. That is the message of our tradition. Sin does, however, show us where we need to be working. Lent isn’t the season of realizing that we are somehow cut off from God and in need of salvation. It is the season in which the God who has called us into our true lives pulls up alongside us on the path and asks, “how’s it going?” God may listen for a while and then ask again, “No, really, how’s it going?” expecting us to get honest about our answer. There may be sins and omissions of which we are not proud, but the promise of Lent is that checking in and getting real about our lives is a part of moving forward. We have all promised to follow Jesus. We have all promised to live into the God life. Lent asks us, How’s it going?


Maybe I was helped in claiming my artist-hood at Shalem by my reading the writings of some of the great artists. Robert Henri, the Amercian painter in his fine book, The Art Spirit, and Twyla Tharpe the great choreographer, in her book The Creative Habit, both say the same thing. In order to call yourself an artist, you have to know yourself to be a student. To be an artist is to be in the process of becoming an artist. So I ask you now, who in this room is still learning to be a Christian. Amen.