This week, I’m still mulling over what it means to “do” Lent-what offering could we possibly make, what could possibly be meaningful to God? One idea from Scripture that has struck me particularly forcefully lately is a line we heard from Psalm 50 from our Tuesday Eucharist:
For every wild animal of the forest is mine… ‘If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High.
And again, the prophet Isaiah on Ash Wednesday-we don’t really quite know how to honor God. On that day, we hear that God chooses a fast of justice-making, not just a fast of abstinence. God wants service to the oppressed, not liturgies and ritual.
Psalm 69 says something like this, too:
I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify God with thanksgiving. This will please the Lord more than an ox or a bull with horns and hoofs.
We don’t offer sacrifices of animals anymore, but that doesn’t mean this comparison has nothing for us. As I wrote in this space last week, there is something “to” giving things up, not so much for stopping that particular behavior, but to make us more mindful of what we might experience without it. On another level, though, somehow it can feel more ‘worthy” to do things that are hard. Making a sacrifice of just “thanksgiving” somehow doesn’t seem like it would be enough. (note that I’m not even getting into all the theology about Jesus’ sacrifice-for sure it’s linked, but let’s leave it off the table for now)
But, but, but. What if we took seriously the idea that we can offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving? What if gratitude to God could shape us more and more in God’s image? What if offering thanks actually is hard because it’s so simple? Or if we were really thankful for the fact of our own lives, maybe we’d spend more of them doing the work of God? Thanksgiving for gift of life is something that everyone-of every circumstance-can offer. Gratitude to God for life isn’t about the stuff of our life-not about your house or your car or lack thereof. It’s about understanding that it’s not that you would have nothing if not for God, it’s that you would be nothing. Let me say that again: it’s not about having nothing if not for God, it’s about not being in the first place. And that’s quite a paradigm shift.
So give whatever you can-obviously. Give your money, give your time, give your abstinence from whatever it is you’re giving up. But remember, too, as winter turns to spring, the pleasure of oxygen drawn deeply into lungs, the strength of tiny crocuses coming up from underground. Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, for your life and for all there is.