Sermons

“Cross Pollination – Pull a Weed, Plant a Flower”

Matthew 4:1-11; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – March 1, 2020

Cross Pollination Lenten Sermon Series #1

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might open our hearts to the wisdom you are sending us through our neighbors.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

The truth is I can’t resist a good pun.  I am excited about this sermon series, but I promise it’s not just because of the cheesy name.  The phrase “Cross Pollination” reminds us to seek wisdom from the cross, as we move through the season of Lent.  But as a biological metaphor, “cross-pollination” teaches us that we are stronger when we mix things up.  When we add more diversity into the gene pool, we are better able to resist diseases and other threats.  This is as true culturally as it is botanically.  We are stronger together.  With the Faith Story series Tesa is facilitating, this means recognizing that as new people become part of the VLM community, their backgrounds and experiences will enrich who we are as a congregation, by broadening our perspectives, our vocabulary, and our understanding of what God is doing here.  As we hear from one of our newer members each week, I hope you will open yourself graciously to the gifts they are bringing into our community.

For the “Cross Pollination” sermon series, we’re reaching out beyond VLM, seeking wisdom from other faith traditions.  Each week, I will be sharing with you about a conversation with a faith leader and often a lay practitioner of another religious community, about how the things that we address during Lent are handled in their tradition.  We will be talking about things like sin, confession, forgiveness, and spiritual practices including especially prayer and fasting.  We will be in dialogue with Catholicism, Judaism, Presbyterianism, Islam, and Buddhism.  If you’re interested in participating in one of these conversations, please let me know as soon as possible.  I have no idea how this whole thing is going to go, but I am confident that we are off to a good start!

This past Tuesday, Beckie & Bob Neely and I met with Father Emmet Farrell and Sister LaVern Olberding.  Father Emmet is a retired Catholic priest.  He’s originally from Iowa, but spent the largest portion of his career serving in Central America.  Now that he’s “retired” in San Diego, he still leads numerous services every week, primarily in Spanish and mostly out in Lakeside, along with a host of other things that keep him busy.  Sister LaVern, as many of you know, runs the Franciscan Peace Connection and is practically an auxiliary member here at VLM, leading some ecumenical discussion groups here and frequently showing up to help with Shelter and other ministries.

I asked Beckie yesterday at Praying & Coloring about her impressions of the conversation.  And I want us to hear carefully the significance of one of her observations:  Beckie said she was struck by how similar the Catholic practices are to what we do with Lent here at Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).  Why is this a big deal?  It makes me want to declare that this sermon today is a major milestone in the evolution of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).  Forty or fifty years ago, even thirty or twenty in many cases, Disciples churches didn’t do Lent.  We didn’t do worship any differently in the weeks leading up to Easter, we didn’t care about changing the banners and paraments to purple, and we certainly didn’t have an Ash Wednesday service.  Do you know why?  There are, of course, complicated theological reasons having to do with our doctrinal roots.  But the shorthand explanation you would have gotten from the people in the pews is that Disciples didn’t do Lent because it was “too Catholic.”  And everybody knew that was a bad thing.

I knew I wanted to start this series with Catholicism, because that is where Lent comes from.  And I was so blessed by our conversation with LaVern and Father Emmet.  But as we begin this exploration, we need to confess that Disciples, and mainline American Protestants in general, have an ugly strain of anti-Catholic bias lurking in our history.  We are barely one generation removed from that bias, and it still occasionally haunts our conversations.  So the idea that someone can look at how we do Lent here at VLM and how Catholics approach Lent and see how intimately connected they are is joyous sign of denominational spiritual growth.  We have managed to go out and bring that baby back in from where it was tossed out with the bathwater.  And what’s more, we’ve even come to appreciate how precious the bathwater we’ve left behind is to others and grown in our capacity to respect their experience of faith, despite its differences from our own.

So I do think this qualifies as a milestone, a Disciples sermon celebrating the capital-C Catholicity of Lent.  The cultural impact of Catholic Lent cannot be denied, and that’s something I think Disciples have always been low-grade jealous or resentful of.  Have you noticed how you can always tell when Lent is approaching because all the fast food places start advertising their fish sandwiches?  They don’t say why; they just start having sales on the filets-o-fish, just in case you might be changing up your eating habits at the moment.

I had been hearing that Chinese restaurants were experiencing a slow-down in business because of racist misunderstandings and paranoia about the coronavirus.  So I convinced Todd that we should get takeout last night, to support our local Chinese place.  When I went to pick up the food, I asked if they thought business had been slow because of fear of the virus?  You know what they said?  Business had been a little slow, but they thought it was because Lent had started and people had given up eating meat!  Catholic Lent is everywhere!  But from what Father Emmet shared with us, I would caution us to realize that these secular culture interpretations of what Lent mean are superficial and somewhat misleading.

Father Emmet wanted us to be very clear that Lent is not intended to be a crash diet.  He confessed that when he was a kid, they would give up candy for Lent, but use the occasion as a chance to hoard all the candy they could find and then pig out on Easter!  That’s not it, he said.  Lent isn’t about proving your will-power to resist desires for a set amount of time.  It’s about identifying something in your life you’d like to be doing differently and using the tools of the season to make that change permanent.  It’s not just about giving something up, but about adding something in.  He said it repeatedly: “Pull a weed; plant a flower.”  Fill in the space of the presumably negative thing you’ve removed with something positive.  We’ve heard from lifestyle experts that it takes 21 days to form a new habit.  Lent gives us almost double that.  The fasts that we choose during Lent are not about punishing ourselves; they are about offering us an opportunity to be re-formed.  As Bob mentioned, if you give up soda, drink more water.  By the time you get to Easter, you’ll be a much healthier person!

Father Emmet and LaVern both talked about the disciplines we take on for Lent as experiences of joy.  Father Emmet referred to Matthew 6:16 repeatedly: “do not look dismal!”  “If you’re going to change something, be happy about it,” LaVern said.  “By the time Easter gets here, be burden-free!  Have less baggage!”  Can you imagine the impact of thousands of people enthusiastically getting intentional every year about becoming better people?  Father Emmet’s vision for this is not limited to personal health or piety.  His primary work these days is related to the encyclical Pope Francis released in 2015 called “Laudato Si” or “Care for our Common Home.”  It is aimed at helping Catholics embrace environmentalism as a Christian practice.  Father Emmet has developed a guide for people to use to study the encyclical and figure out how to apply it to their own lives.  Lent is the perfect time to make lifestyle shifts that reduce our ecological footprint, not with the presumption that we’ll go back to our wasteful, destructive habits after Easter, but with the idea that this season of intentionality can assist to make the changes necessary to care properly for God’s creation.

If we are going to do big things as communities of faith, we need to be adequately spiritually prepared.  In addition to the passage where Jesus instructed us not to “look dismal” when we’re fasting, Father Emmet referred to the story from Matthew 4, of course, which is the original inspiration for the season of Lent.  If Jesus needed to spend 40 days fasting and praying to prepare for his ministry, there is no doubt we can benefit from a similar season of preparation.  The temptations Jesus faced are not that different than the ones we deal with: physical comfort, idolatry, wealth, fame, abuse of power.  For each thing the devil offered him, Jesus had a scriptural response.  Don’t just say no to evil; fill in the gap with good.  “Pull a weed, plant a flower.”

Have you figured out what spiritual discipline you are going to take on for Lent this year? Perhaps you weren’t planning on doing anything.  But might you consider it now?  Not just giving something up, but adding something in.  Perhaps there is an unhealthy habit you know needs tweaking.  Perhaps you’ve developed a dependency on a crutch that you know will eventually do more harm than good; maybe you could find a prayer or song to turn to instead.  What weed do you need to pull?  What flower could you plant?  How can we help each other cross-pollinate and grow stronger?  May we all find a fast filled with joy.  Amen.