2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 4:1-11
Protestants celebrate Reformation Day on October 31st, the date when an Augustinian friar mailed (with an “m”) a ninety-five point academic challenge to the Archbishop of Mainz. He may or may not have nailed them (with an “n”) to church doors in Wittenberg that day, though the coloring book version of history makes that act, and that man, the revolutionary start of Protestantism.
Other Protestant reformers are seen as secondary to Martin Luther, including Huldrych Zwingli, our theological ancestor in the Reform tradition. In truth, Luther’s call for reform was not the first in the Western Church governed by Rome, and neither Luther nor Zwingl was the true spark that lit the fires of the Protestant Reformation. That honor goes to Erasmus, a Dutch Humanist and Catholic priest who brought rigor to the study of scripture, and so inspired both men.
Instead of October 31st, Reform folks like us might well celebrate March 9th as Reformation Day, marking the date five hundred and one years ago when Zwingli joined a group that ate sausage during Lent. It may seem a small thing to us today, but it was a big thing at the time, such a big thing that Zwingli was there, intentionally, but did not eat the sausage himself, instead preparing and delivering a sermon that made clear the lack of biblical support for Lenten fasting and defending Christoph Froschauer, who had hosted the event and was later arrested.
Like Luther, Zwingli would go on to challenge many other of the traditions and canon laws of the Roman church, including clerical celibacy and the sale of indulgences, and would eventually break with Rome altogether. His was a uniquely de-centralized reformation, for he was Swiss and patriotic and so thought in terms not of the rightful rule of king and pope, but in the confederate and semi-democratic style of the Swiss cantons. In Zurich, the bicameral City Council ruled.
You probably don’t know these things because we have been historically embarrassed – that Zwingli died on the battlefield, that he was as willing to use violence to enforce his vision of the reform as were his opponents, that just as the Roman church was trying to suppress him, he was busy trying to suppress the even more radical reform of the Anabaptists. He is hard to clean-up and market, was a messy human. But who isn’t?
Zwingli was correct when he said that Lenten fasting is not biblical. Lent itself isn’t biblical. And abolishing dietary restrictions plays a central role in the struggle that would eventually allow for a Gentile church, for our church. Paul famously preached that non-Jews could follow Jesus without becoming Jews, meaning no circumcision, no need to adhere to the more than six hundred laws in the Mosaic code, including definitions of which food was clean and which unclean, prohibitions on mixing certain things like meat and dairy. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles gives us the dramatic story of Peter, who was an observant Jew in his context, receiving divine instruction to ignore dietary restrictions when dining with Gentiles. Paul would win, with his Jesus movement becoming the distinctive and dominant form of Christianity.
So why do some Christians fast during Lent? And for that matter, what is Lent, this church season that begins this week and is not universally observed among Protestants?
Lent is meant to re-create, in a very low-key way, the forty days and forty nights Jesus spent in the wilderness at the start of his ministry, a season of fasting and prayer. This is the temptation of Christ, the time in the desert, hard and dry.
Because we are so far removed from that age and place, because the Jesus story has been stripped of historical context, we might think of this as a singular thing. Who fasted and prayed in the desert? Why Jesus, of course!
In reality, fasting and praying in the wilderness was a fairly common practice, an initiation ritual of sorts intended to provoke spiritual visions, transcendent experiences, not unlike the initiation ceremonies of so many other cultures, such as the “walkabout” of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
We can choose snark over grace and call it all hallucination, Satan and the high places with an emphasis on high, but I prefer grace,. I prefer to see something valuable in how the ancients made meaning of the story, how we might make meaning of the story. I even value in the practice itself, even if it is not our particular practice. For I can assure you that my ministry did not start with forty days of hunger, and while I may be delusional, it is just standard early 21st century neoliberal capitalist delusion, nothing uniquely spiritual.
Lent is meant to be a sort of retreat while still in the world, a retreat for those who cannot go into the desert. The practices of Lent, giving up chocolate or some other indulgence, hot cross buns and fish on Fridays, these things have no merit in themselves.
Nor are they meant to create suffering, at least not to us. Paul writes in Second Corinthians about the suffering and virtues of the early evangelists and Jesus speaks of the suffering that comes with following his message of radical and selfless love that challenges earthly systems of wealth and power. Suffering happens, the wheel of samsara in the Buddhist tradition, but I am not convinced suffering itself makes us a better person. Suffering is just suffering. Some forge it into gold while some forge it into shackles and chains that leave them weighed down and deformed.
We are the recipients of unearned grace, and while suffering is a reality in this creation, the story of our tradition is that Jesus suffered for us all when he was brutally executed by the powers of empire and religion, that his suffering had redemptive power, though we progressive Christians interpret that redemptive event in ways very different from the dominant blood atonement interpretation.
That same split with the blood atonement faction plays into our encounter with traditional understandings of Lent as penitential, for while there is nothing wrong with repentance, the understanding of humans as fundamentally and originally sinful doesn’t make a lot of sense when we understand ourselves to be evolved apes, miraculously self-conscious, and not the daughters and sons of some ancient woman who ate from a forbidden tree placed in a magic garden by an abusive god. We choose not original sin, but original blessing, end this season not in the despair of human cruelty on Calvary but with the victory of the empty tomb.
The disciplines of Lent, for us, if we choose to practice them, are practices not of suffering but of mindfulness, of making the Jesus story part of our story. Prayer, which we will discuss in our after church session on the Phoenix Affirmations, is another practice of mindfulness., not magic that changes the world, but instead magic that changes us. And in this age, we could all use a little more magic, a little more mindfulness.
One thing our former president was right about is that there is a lot of fake news out there, it just isn’t the news he thinks is fake. It is the non-stop alternate reality woven by corporate media, “inflation” not price gouging, supply chain disruption not stock buybacks, labor shortages not unjust wages that trap people in poverty, a weak administration response not de-regulation and rail industry control over Congress. And the fire burns and the cars leak in East Palestine, Ohio. And we have a major freight line running right through our city, right through my neighborhood.
Mindfulness, even if only for the forty days of Lent, helps us to see the ways we are connected to others and are participants, every single day, in complex systems that are not always healthy, for us or for others, live inside of a story and can choose to be co-authors of that story or to let others write our story for us.
The prophets call for us to fast from injustice. But justice is grounded in both love and attention. Deciding that during Lent you will re-read the four gospels, one each week, is a good thing, for the story is good if a little messy, a little imperfect, just like real life. If giving up chocolate for forty days makes you mindful and spiritual, great. The collateral benefit to your waistline is just gravy, or not gravy as the case may be. If you decide to make sure all your chocolate is fair trade the rest of the year, that’s fantastic too. You don’t have to be vegetarian to understand the catastrophic damage of increased consumption of beef, the depletion of the seas due to over-fishing. Maybe “meat-free Monday” can be a year-round spiritual practice. Or not. And when you do have sausage, whether it is the real deal or a meat substitute, it is permitted, Lent or no Lent, just as Zwingli proclaimed five centuries ago.
Amen.