Several weeks ago I took a trip to a local grocery store. I placed a bunch of bananas in my cart and I picked out a few apples, threw in a bag of carrots and grabbed a few peppers. I was feeling so healthy until I saw in the distance a sign that said "Organic". I looked down at my bananas and apples and suddenly they didn't seem as good. Perhaps I could even see a spot of pesticide on the peel of my apple. I looked back at the "Organic" sign that was nicely framed by a picture of a farm and I began to think about the origin of my carrots and peppers. There wasn't a picture above them, no barn, no field and no farmer on a tractor. As far as I knew they could have been made in a factory or at best forced off the tree or out the ground before they were ready to leave their nurturing environment.
I put back my produce and pushed the cart over to organic section. As I placed my organic produce into my cart I felt pleased with myself. No more additives, forget the pesticides, gone with the mass production, I would become someone who ate all natural products...and then I looked at the price. Come to find out, being this healthy was going to cost me a lot more than I was used to spending. All of sudden there in the produce section I was in an ethical dilemma. Do I buy organic and help the world by ridding it of pesticides? Or do I save my money and give it to someone who needs to eat today? If I say that organic is the only way what does that mean for people in this city that don't have an organic produce section in their neighborhood? Should they drive and what would be a reasonable amount of emissions to produce in exchange for produce? And what about people who simply can't afford it? I felt torn as I stood in that aisle, caught between two principles and not sure how to make the choice.
I bet you're hoping I will now give you the biblical answer to these questions so that you no longer have to sit in the tension between the two. But I don't have the answers or perhaps I have the answers for both. Actually my hope this morning is just that you and I would sit in the tension between the organic and the deliberately produced. My reason for raising this tension is because I believe this is a quandary that we are sitting in not only in the aisle of the produce section but in the aisles of our churches as well.
In recent years, perhaps even over the past several decades much of the protestant church has moved toward the "organic" experience. Many worshippers are not interested in engaging anything that doesn't seem all natural, meaning of course that at that moment "it feels like what I would naturally do and there is nothing forced about it." As a result many protestant churches have tried to create a worship environment that caters to the worshipper and their natural affinities. I must say, I'm not sure that this has been entirely beneficial. First of all, I'm not sure worship is about the worshipper but rather the One being worshipped. And secondly, if faith is reduced to only what we would naturally feel like doing we are all going to be in trouble.While I have been raised in and appreciate a church that cared for me as an individual worshipper and I am thankful for the experiences I have had before God that have arisen out of an organic move of my spirit as it joined with a Spirit that blows where it wills. I must admit that I am equally grateful for the deliberate disciplines that have been offered to me through my Catholic, Orthodox and main-line Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ. When I don't feel worship rising up from within me and I don't have the words to pray. When I'm not sure how to connect with God and nothing good is growing out of my natural environment I am grateful that not everything has to be organic and that the deliberate has redemptive qualities as well.
This Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the 40-day journey towards Easter (Sundays are not included in the count). Lent is a time when many Christians deliberately prepare for Easter by observing a period of fasting, repentance, moderation and spiritual discipline, not because such things are all natural, but precisely because they are not. Historically Lent was a season in the church where people prepared themselves for baptism and the preparation for entering this life as a follower of Christ required that each individual understood in their flesh that becoming a Christian required discipline, denial, and deliberateness. Each year even after their personal baptism members of the church entered into this season again to re-member, to put back into membership, their deliberate commitment to follow Christ
Lent is a clear call to conversion, to that movement away from sin and toward Christ, a movement that we have to embrace over and over again throughout our lives. We begin this season by the celebration of Ash Wednesday where ashes are placed on our foreheads during a time of worship in which we deliberately commit to the dying of ourselves and our sinfulness in anticipation of the rising of Christ at Easter and the ultimate resurrection of our own bodies. We don't wear the ashes to proclaim our natural organic holiness but to acknowledge that we are naturally a community of sinners in need of repentance and in constant need of God's mercy and grace.
When we receive ashes on our foreheads, we remember who we are. We remember that we are creatures of the earth ("Remember that you are dust"). We remember that we are mortal beings ("and to dust you will return"). We remember that we are baptized with Christ who was willing to die and we remember that we are people on a journey of conversion ("Turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel"). We remember that we are members of the body of Christ (and that smudge on our foreheads will proclaim that identity to others, too). Renewing our sense of who we really are before God is the core of the Lenten experience. It is so easy to forget our identity and fall into habits of sin, ways of thinking and living that are contrary to God's will, so today we begin a deliberate journey through this season of Lent looking forward to the day that our faith might be fully organic.
