Maundy Thursday

Every year, Christians of various denominations observe Lent, a six-week period ahead of Easter, where participants "give something up" while pursuing a closer relationship with God. Usually, when someone decides what they will be giving up, they will pick a habit, food, or hobby that they enjoy enough that it will be significantly missed throughout the period of Lent. That way, its absence is extremely noticeable (and even a little uncomfortable) as they make such a substantial shift in their typical day-to-day. Then, the yearning for what has been given up works as a reminder to turn to God and recognize how He truly meets all needs.

For those who observe Lent annually, it can be challenging to think of new ideas of what they will give up each winter. Trying to figure out what you'll be giving up for Lent this year? Here are 10 meaningful things to give up for Lent:

1. Complaining – Take the opportunity to choose gratitude over grumbling.

2. Sweet treats – It will help your health and be a reminder that only God truly sustains us.

3, Television – Stop the small screen binge and grow in your spiritual life instead.

4. Screen Time – Spend less time checking friends’ updates and check in with Christ.

5. Gossiping – It’s easy to insult or judge others. Instead, tame your tongue biblically.

6. Video games – Instead of fantasy worlds of adventure, read the real-life stories of the Bible.

7. Shopping – Decide not to store up treasures in your closet, but store them up in heaven.

8. Coffee – Instead of facing the world with caffeine, learn to rely on God.

9. Soda – Every time you think about grabbing that fizzy drink, use it as a reminder to pray.

10. Worrying – You can’t stop worry completely, but choose to go to God with it instead.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This a good way to set up a sermon on Lent or spiritual disciplines.

In the 1980s, a research facility called Biosphere 2 built a closed ecosystem to test what it would take to eventually colonize space. Everything was carefully curated and provided for and trees planted inside sprung up and appeared to thrive. Then they began to fall.

The botanists must have looked on in dismay, finding no evidence of disease or mite or weevil. There was nothing to cause the trees to topple; the conditions were perfect. And then they realized what was missing—something so simple, yet absent within the confines of the structure: wind.

The air was too still, too serene—an ease that guaranteed the trees were doomed. It’s the pressure and variation of natural wind that causes the trees to strengthen and their roots to grow. Though the trees of Biosphere 2 had all the sun, soil, and water they needed, in the absence of changing winds they built no resilience, and eventually fell under the weight of their own abundance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Lent helps us see the trials of life in a new way. Could it be that our difficulties, more than our delights, are what drive us closer to God? Though we may still have a strong aversion to pain, we can see the hand of God when the winds of trial come to buffet, and we can take solace in the fact that our roots are growing deeper. Romans 5:3–5 encourages us: “We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope….”

In the fall of 1937, Ed Keefer was a senior in the school of engineering at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Tall, slender, and bespectacled, Keefer was the president of the calculus club, the vice-president of the engineering club, and a member of the school’s exclusive all-male honor society. He also invented the Cupidoscope.

The electrical device could not have been more perfectly designed to bring campus-wide fame to its creators, Keefer and his less sociable classmate John Hawley. It promised to reveal, with scientific precision, if a couple was truly in love. As the inventors explained to a United Press reporter as news of their innovation spread, the Cupidoscope delivered on its promise “in terms called ‘amorcycles,’ the affection that the college girl has for her boyfriend.”

Built in the school’s physics laboratory, the Cupidoscope was fashioned from an old radio cabinet, a motor spark coil, and an electrical resistor. To test their bond, a man and a woman would grip electrodes on either side of the Cupidoscope and move them toward one another until the woman felt a spark—not of attraction, but of electricity. The higher her tolerance for this mild current, the more of a love signal the meter registered. A needle decorated with hearts purported to show her devotion on a scale that ranged from “No hope” to “See preacher!”

It all sounds like a slightly painful party game—but the Cupidoscope was one experiment in a serious, decades-long quest to quantify love. This undertaking garnered the attention of leading scientists across the United States and in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and it is memorialized most prominently in the penny arcade mainstay known as the Love Tester.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“How do you measure love?” The Bible gives an answer to this important question: It is measured by the self-sacrifice of the Cross—“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16); “Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:17-19).

In 2013, Micah Redding founded the Christian Transhumanist Association, a group bringing faith and ethics into transhumanist conversations. Transhumanists believe that human capacities can be enhanced by science and technology.

Some are anti-aging researchers applying biomedicine to improve humanity. Aubrey de Grey studies preventative maintenance for the human body and believes the first human to live to 1,000 has already been born. Others look to computing advances; futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by 2045 artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to “the singularity,” where everyone’s brain will be connected to “the cloud.”

These predictions may seem outlandish, but recent breakthroughs in the science of aging do make modest, if not radical, life extension a real possibility. Various studies on lab animals have extended lifespan by up to 30 percent.

At the same time, the church must continue to proclaim the basic reality of our existence, as summarized in the Ash Wednesday call, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Life is a gift.

Philosopher Diogenes Allen made the distinction between extended life and eternal life. Extended life is what we are trying to make for ourselves through scientific solutions. Eternal life, on the other hand, is “that which we can experience and have to a degree in this life but can have fully only after death.” Eternal life, in other words, is received.

To the extent that we receive this eternal, abundant life, Christians offer it to others—through loving our neighbors and building communities of mutual care and hospitality. This is our ultimate goal. Though caring for bodies may be part of this process, it is not everything.

In the days leading up to 9-11, fighting in Afghanistan between local groups and then the Taliban resulted in thousands of refugees pouring down into neighboring Peshawar, Pakistan. There they were squashed into tents and mud hovels in refugee camps in intense heat and poor sanitation. J. Dudley Woodberry and his wife Roberta were working in the refugee camps at the time. Woodbury describes what happened in the camps:

Conditions at one camp were harsher than at the others; so Roberta and her class took school supplies to the students so they had more than just blank slates with chalk. Another group of eight workers imported thousands of sandals for the children who ran around with bare feet on the rough parched ground. But they decided that they would also wash their feet as Jesus had. My daughter-in-law joined the group.

For a week they washed every foot with antibacterial soap, anointed with oil, and silently prayed for the child. Then they gave each of them new sandals, a quilt, and a shawl, plus a small bag of flour for every family. At first the sores, pus, pink eye, and dirt were revolting. But then our daughter-in-law felt a deep love as she silently prayed, “Dear Father, this little girl looks like she does not have anyone to care for her. Let my touch feel to her as if you are touching her. May she remember how you touched her this day, and may she seek after you hereafter. Thank you for those who seek you will find you." Many children looked up and shyly smiled.

Sometime later a teacher in one of the tents used for a refugee school asked her class, “Who are the best Muslims?" A girl raised her hand and replied, “the kafirs" (a term meaning unbelievers that is often used by Muslims for Christians). After the teacher recovered from her shock, she asked, "Why?" The young girl replied, "The Muslim fighters killed my father, but the kafirs washed my feet.”

National Public Radio aired a segment on dying well and what the living can learn from the lives of the deceased. The segment featured a marketing expert named Lux Narayan. Narayan and his employees examined 2,000 editorial, non-paid New York Times obituaries over a 20-month period. What surprised them was that the most common word in the obituaries was “help”:

I was fascinated when I saw that word because when you're analyzing 2,000 paragraphs of text, you wouldn't expect one or two words to stick out and stand out as prominently as this did. And what we found fascinating when we went through some of those descriptors was the fact that the help took on different contexts. For example, Reverend Rick Curry, who helped veterans and disabled people by running writing and acting workshops. There's Jocelyn Cooper, who was a grassroots organizer in Brooklyn in the 1960s. And she helped pave the way for the first African-American woman to sit in the US Congress.

It's beautiful that the people … are remembered … in terms of helping people … And even more fascinating was the fact that the overwhelming majority of obituaries featured people famous and non-famous who did seemingly extraordinary things. They made a positive dent in the fabric of life. They helped … It was beautiful how that word stood out so strongly.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Easter; Redeemer; Savior – In his death (and resurrection) Jesus is the supreme example of unselfishly helping others. He came to serve and give his life as a ransom for many (Matt. 20:28); 2) Church, Mission of; Help; Serve - Christ followers should also have the goal that the significant word of their own life will be “helped.”

In 1943, 230 women were arrested as members of the French Resistance and sent to Birkenau concentration camp. Only 49 survived, but this in itself is remarkable. These women were as diverse a group as could be imagined—Jews and Christians, aristocrats and working class, young and old. Yet they were united by their commitment to the French Resistance and to one another. In her book A Train in Winter, Caroline Moorhead reconstructs the story of these women through the journals and memoirs of survivors. The solidarity of these women sustained them through unspeakable horror and torture.

In contrast, many Holocaust survivors hoarded whatever meager resources they could save for themselves. And how could they be blamed? Survival became the only goal—no matter what the cost, even to others. Yet, in most of the cases with these French women in Birkenau, their solidarity toward each other trumped the selfishness that engulfed so many others. As Moorhead writes, "Knowing that the fate of each depended on the others … egotism seemed to vanish and that, stripped back to the bare edge of survival, each rose to behavior few would have believed themselves capable of." Moorhead recounts that when unrelieved thirst threatened to engulf one of their members in utter madness, the women pooled together their own meager rations to get her a whole bucket of water.

This kind of love is very rare. Putting one's own needs first is as natural as breathing, and just as unconscious. Yet the women of the French Resistance provide a contemporary model of what Christ has done for us. But there are two big differences: first Jesus willingly chose to stand in solidarity with us in our suffering. Second, he stood in solidarity with his enemies. He walked among humans including the very least of these, and chose to share the horror of human death. Even after the victory of his resurrection from death, this One still bore in his body the wounds of his earthly suffering. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. This is solidarity for life.

On his 39th birthday, poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer. He wrote frankly about the agonizing effects of his illness and the treatments.

I have had bones die and bowels fail; joints lock in my face and arms and legs, so that I could not eat, could not walk … I have passed through pain I could never have imagined, pain that seemed to incinerate all my thoughts of God and to leave me sitting there in the ashes, alone.

When the diagnosis came, Wiman was a rising star in the literary world and the editor of a prestigious poetry publication. Though Wiman confessed his Christian faith had "evaporated in the blast of modernism and secularism to which I was exposed in college," the diagnosis started a journey that ultimately led him back to God. It wasn't a particular doctrine that drew him back to the faith, but Wiman found a friend in the suffering Messiah.

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me." … The point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering. I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ's passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolute solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion. I'm not suggesting that ministering angels are going to come down and comfort you as you die. I'm suggesting that Christ's suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering.

In the face of brutal, isolating pain we don't really want answers. We want a person. At such times there is simply no substitute for the presence of Christ.

What's your biggest regret in life? If it's anything like these random New Yorkers, it has one very important word in it. Students from Strayer University set up a chalkboard on the sidewalk near Lieutenant Petrosino Square in New York City for one day. At the top of the board was written, "Write your biggest regret." They provided a supply of colored chalk and set up a video camera to record people writing on the board.

The chalkboard attracted many people walking by and was soon filled to overflowing with written regrets that were poignant and thought-provoking.

• Burning bridges
• Never speaking up
• Not being a good husband
• Should have spent more time with family
• Staying in my comfort zone
• Not saying "I love you"
• Never applying to med school
• Not making the most of every day
• Not being a better friend

As the board filled up with so many different stories, they noticed that almost all of these regrets had one thing in common. Nearly all of them involved the word "not." They were about chances not taken. They were about words not spoken. They were about dreams never pursued.

But then they gave these same people an eraser and wrote "Clean Slate" at the top of the chalkboard. As she erased her regret one young woman had tears in her eyes as she said, "I feel hopeful. It means that there are possibilities."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Christ, cross of; Christ, death of—In and through Christ we do have a clean slate. All of our sins and regrets have been washed away. (2) Regret; Failure. People you meet every day carry a weight of regrets normally hidden below the surface of their lives. They need to hear that they can find freedom in Christ.

Editor's Note: Watch the video here.

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.