Lent is the season to sort out the gods.
Ken Sehested
Text: Philippians 3:17-4:1
Invocation. “Lovers of the world unite / bound to Creator’s vision, bright / that even these our darkest nights / become the light become the light.” — “Hope Beyond All Hope,” Alana Levandoski
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You may have seen this social media meme. It’s a painting, of a woman in Victorian style dress, and the caption reads: “These days most of my exercise comes from shaking my head.”
Any of you been doing this kind of exercise lately?
Without a doubt, we’re in a rough patch as citizens in this republic. Clearly moving toward an extreme autocratic (or oligarchic) federal government. Depending on your definition, you could also say fascist. Reminds me of Jeremiah’s scathing criticism in his age: “Were [the rulers] ashamed when they committed abomination? . . . (No) they did not know how to blush” (Jer. 6:15). Or recall the judgment of Amos, who complained that the rich sell the poor for silver, and barter the needy for a pair of shoes (8:6). We are millennia removed from the ages of these prophets, but their sharp accusations are as relevant as ever.
On the very day of his assassination in Memphis, Dr. King called his office at Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta to give them his coming Sunday’s sermon title. That sermon title was this: “Why America may be going to hell.” By the time of that fateful day, King’s popularly among the general public had tanked, particularly in the previous 12 months since his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City. After that speech, loudly condemning the war, most of his supporters among white liberals vanished. He was bitterly criticized by more than a few leaders in the civil rights movement. His clear linkage between domestic oppression and international aggression suddenly turned his fame into infamy. Dr. King recognized that the goals of voting rights, integrated schools and buses and lunch counters, were too tame. Something more fundamental was at stake. That’s when he began speaking more directly about predatory capitalism.
And when he did . . . well, you know the old aphorism: Now he done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’!
Just so, what is needed from the community of faith is that its preachin’ includes meddlin’—meddling in the ways money becomes the supreme arbiter of value, in which case the poor and the weak become expendable. What is at stake in this moment in history is more than our democratic norms, the rule of law, maybe the very soul of our nation. This is a profoundly spiritual struggle.
There have always been times when some in power have exercised cruelty and deceit. But never have the majority in all three branches of our government displayed such cold hearts, cruel minds, calloused hands and feet. A time when empathy, a vigilant attention to suffering, has been explicitly repudiated. As our shadow president, Elon Musk, said recently, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”
Many economists believe that the current state of our ruthless economy and politics of fraud are worse than it was in the Gilded Age, during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when robber barons amassed their wealth at the expense of workers, when political corruption was rampant—or, as the title of my sermon says it, quoting Paul’s letter to the small Christian community in Philippi, “their god is their belly.” And I’m not just talking about stomachs or culinary habits—it was (and is) a gluttony of twisted desires and rapacious appetites, where might most certainly, and most ruthlessly, makes right.
I’m remembering, too, the Prophet Micah, who warned of the judgment to come of those, as he puts it, “who devise evil deeds on their beds!” And can’t wait until the sun rises to seize the property of others, who covet fields and oppress householders (2:1-2). Those who, like our golden-dyed hair-of-a-president, resurrects our nation’s colonial past by his intention to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, ethnically cleansing Gaza to establish it as a massive tourist resort—even to the point of annexing Canada, all to satisfy his insatiable quest for personal gain and coercive plunder.
We are witnessing as never before the transforming of common wealth into private equity. Filling his unquenchable belly, and those of his parasitic patrons.
Now, put on your seatbelt because I’m going to make a hair turn maneuver to ask what in the world does this have to do with Lent?
One of the unheralded theologians of the 20th century was Charles Schultz and his serial “Peanuts” cartoons. In one day’s panel, Snoopy the dog declares he’s going on a hunger strike. The next day’s sequel has Snoopy banging at Charlie Brown’s back door, food bowl in mouth. Charlie Brown opens the door and says, “Your hunger strike didn’t last very long, did it?” To which Snoopy replied, “The brain may be important, but the stomach is still in charge.”
Though we’ve all recognized this fact over and over, we’re still surprised when our consciences are overruled by our exaggerated appetites. Long before Karl Marx’s claim that money is the prime factor in human decisions, Jesus said it much more concisely: “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
The brain may be important, but the stomach’s in charge.
Lent’s labor is designed to give devoted time to our own hearts and minds; to examine the work of our hands, the paths of our feet; to inquire into the orientation of our eyes and our ears; to audit our speech, whether we have been true and truthful, whether we have said too much—or too little; to scrutinize our longings and desires to see if any have breached their healthy boundaries, if some need retraining of retracting—or reviving.
But hear this! Lent is not for our self-absorption or flagellation, which can be yet another form of narcissism, of pride, of conceit. The work is not a spotlight on ourselves, much less a despairing obsession with our own failings. It is the work of triangulating our attention, in alignment with and yoked to the Work of the Spirit, in a world that has forgotten its origin, its promise, its purpose.
Lenten observance is simply the recognition, followed by corrective measures, that pipes can get clogged; moving parts need lubrication; bodies, in need of medical intervention; cracks exposed and rot replaced.
Remembering that you are dust is not an insult, for such is the very stuff of the universe, ordered and animated in God’s own delight. Do not grovel! Simply allow your compass to be adjusted, as needed.
When we do this, we begin to gravitate toward the most essential question, which Missy mentioned last Sunday: What does it mean to draw near to the heart of God?
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Prepping for Tenebrae. “My harp is turned to grieving / and my flute to the voice of those who weep. / Spare me, O Lord, / for my days are as nothing.” —English translation of “Versa est in luctum” by Alonso Lobo, 16th century composer, performed by Tenebrae Choir conducted by Nigel Short
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And what, you may ask, does calling out dictators have to do with drawing near to the heart of God?
This juxtaposition seems senseless and contorted. Oil and water. Material and spiritual. Doesn’t this confuse piety and politics? And with today’s text, two things are connected in ways that seem preposterous: gods and bellies. Are you kidding me?! Gods and bellies! Can there be a more ridiculous pairing of words?
This is the very point where our piety has too frequently abandoned the very meaning of holiness. So let me see if I can clarify.
In short: To be holy is to be made whole. To draw near to the heart of God is to enter into God’s delight over the created order and into God’s pathos, God’s own grief over a world gone amok. On the one hand, we are called to recognize and proclaim the beauty of what God has created. On the other hand, to accompany the Spirit into God’s grief and anguish is to come alongside those afflicted by the business end of the gun barrel, the pointed end of the knife, the bludgeoning end of the billy club.
This kind of piety—which is rooted in beauty, not duty—prompts us to live in compassionate proximity with those who are shamed, disfigured, silenced, or abandoned. When we experience the loveliness of God—when we draw near to the heart of God—we become lovely, most expressly with those for whom love and care have been suspended.
There are limitless ways to do this, of course, some very ordinary and familiar and nearby; some more ambitious or dramatic or faraway. Integral to our work is to train our attention both to the earth’s beauty and the world’s disfigurement. Sometimes we are called to go beyond our comfort zones, to get ourselves in “good trouble,” to call out injustice or call in the wounded.
Hear this, you Little Flock of Jesus: Trouble is when we go with the people we love. The imposition of Ash Wednesday is not an act of subservience, like a supplicant to a monarch. It is to allow our appetites for fatty foods and sugary colas to be corrected.
In the so-called “real” world, the market insists that we are what we consume; that we are utterly alone, with no covenants, no lasting relationships, no communal bonds. The market’s propaganda says might makes right; that only the strong survive; that you keep what you can seize; that the rich take what they want and the poor suffer what they must.
Lent is our iconoclastic season, to sort out the gods. In particular, Lent’s interrogation is to examine the relationship between gods and bellies. To examine the ways our appetites are serving, or have been severed from, our relationship to the One who alone is worthy, the One who both delights in creation’s sacred status but also grieves over the ways humanity has been warped by inhumane loyalties, desecrated neighbors, and nature itself.
So, let me sum all this up as make our journey with Jesus to Jerusalem: In the immortal words of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “Carry on. Love is coming. Love is coming for us all.”
Live accordingly. Do the truth. In times of trouble, come what may, return again to the Love that will not let you go.
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Benediction. “All the pain that you have known / All the violence in your soul / All the ‘wrong’ things you have done / I will take from you when I come.” —Sinéad O’Connor, “This Is to Mother You”
Recessional. “Verbovaya Doschechka.” —Ukrainian folk song, with 94 violinists from 29 countries collaborating on this rendition
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Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville NC, 16 March 2025, Lent 2
