Going into training
www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, March 02, 2003 By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson
Sunday before Lent sermon by The Very Reverend Roger Dawson Dean of St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral, Caracas
Today is the last Sunday before Lent, which means that Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and the first of the forty days of the Lenten season. Lent for many has come to mean a time for the improvement of our figures because the first thing they think of is fasting, or to use the modern word dieting. But Lent does not exist so that we can turn in a trimmer profile on Easter Day, though losing weight may be good for some of us and fasting may be good for all of us.
Some will save on the housekeeping during Lent and put the money aside so that it can be given to those who need it more than we do and that is good also but that is not what Lent is about either. In fact Lent isn't about food at all; it is about preparation.
Another word for preparation that is not very fashionable is discipline. No one much wants discipline in this world of ours, that has got progressively more liberal over the past fifty years, because most people want to believe they rule their own destiny, and so they believe that any control should come from within and not from some source outside and beyond themselves.
The Venezuelan government currently believes that it can solve all its own problems and help from outside is seen as interference. It is no more than most people believe about their own lives. But in truth, no one is suggesting that our personal lives should be disciplined from outside, indeed I would say that the Lenten discipline is all about a self-control that we develop from within ourselves.
I certainly will not give you a set of instructions as to what you must do during this season. All I will say is that if you want to succeed in becoming a good and true Christian you will need to have a discipline about yourself that is better than most people are able to achieve.
Some of us get good and useful help from outside with our discipline by joining self-help groups. There's a lot of sense in that. and nothing at all wrong with it. and other people's experience and objective views can be of great benefit to us. Such outside help is the basis of many organizations like Weight-Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bible reading and Bible study is often a lot more profitable in a group setting than it is slogging through the same texts on your own. But if you see discipline and self-denial as the same act you may be on the wrong track from a Christian perspective in this century. Self-denial makes a virtue of giving something up and more often than not, something that was bad for us anyway, so where is the virtue there?
Christianity is about taking on a new way of life. Discipline is the extra thing we require to make us more able. Self-denial is a negative; discipline is a positive. Self-denial is giving something up and discipline is taking something on.
When I was young, I enjoyed athletics and was quite good at it naturally, and so I joined an Athletics Club. There were two coaches there, and one had me stand on the scales and said that for my height I was too heavy to be a sprinter. I should lose three kilos over the next month by eating less. I went out onto the track where the other coach was leading a group in exercises.
I joined them and the coach came up to me and said he had watched me in a race the previous week and he though I showed promise. I told him that it had just been suggested I lose three kilos to improve my performance. He laughed and said he wished it were so simple.
Look around you, he said, do you think that thin people are better athletes? I didn't know. The best athletes, he said are the fit ones, the ones who train and get the right muscles for the job. See that fellow over there, he said, and he pointed to a man who was rippling with muscles all over. He thinks he is Charles Atlas, he said, he has more muscles than you and I put together but his muscles are not in the right place. He may impress the girls but he won't win races.
Don't worry about losing weight, but come and train here regularly twice a week and we will convert any spare fat you have into muscles that you need to run well.
The discipline was in going to train twice a week, and working hard at the training when I got there. I hardly lost any weight because the training added muscle that weighs heavier than fat but I was fitter than before and my running improved.
In our spiritual life we need to make equally positive moves to gain what we might call spiritual muscle to carry out and adequately deal with the tasks that our faith assigns us.
We may need to train twice a week, and take on a Bible class or some other kind of exercise, but don't expect to be fit by doing nothing or just by getting thin.
The word lent is an old Anglo Saxon word that means, to get longer.
It is talking about the length of days in a northern climate and we, as Christians, should also be looking towards extending the light.
Our spiritual life, if carried out correctly, will avail us of more light each day when our training is on schedule. We should have training sessions all through the year, but certainly not less than once a year for the forty days of Lent that ends at Easter with the blaze of light that is the light of the world in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
It is not a secret that if we want to succeed in anything at all, we will have to have the discipline of training. If this is seen as giving something up, then it will probably be a misery to us and to everyone else who has to be with us.
For example if you want to be a pianist, you cannot achieve this by knowing the theory of music only, even though this might be a discipline in its own right. There will come a time when you have to sit down and actually play the keys, and do it over and over and over again till your hands and brain knows what to do automatically.
If we want to be Christians, we have to know the theory that we get through bible studies and a knowledge of the faith, and then we have to practice over and over again till it becomes second nature ... our first nature may want to act differently and this is what we have to subdue. Bonhoeffer said that the strict exercise of self-control is an essential part of the Christian life.
Our training regime for being a good Christian may include fasting every now and again, but its purpose has nothing to do with how we look physically but how spiritually healthy we are and to make us fit and able to accomplish the things that God would have us do.