Now I am not a big Super Bowl fan; I didn’t even mention it last week even though I was proud of myself for knowing who was in the game and who was favored to win. But I am a sports fan. Growing up in the Mississippi Delta there wasn’t a lot to do as a teenager except to throw yourself without abandon into school activities and into church. Well, sports were a big part of school life. If you hail from a small town, you may be able to relate. The whole town showed up for high school football and basketball games. Middle-aged businessmen purchased box seats at the high school stadium for their families. There were waiting lines, almost like going to a rock concert. Parents of band members and ball players worked in the booster stand selling the popcorn, cotton candy, coffee, and hot chocolate. Younger siblings sold bleacher cushions and other wares. Sports were not only school events or even family events, they were entire town events. But the game was only the culmination of all kinds of preparation. Ball players, and to a lesser extent even the band members, held a kind of status of prestige during the season of their work. People knew who the players were and put signs in their front yards to show support not only for the team but also for individual players. Families of players had special yard signs. Every day people would drop by to watch the band practice marching and the team practice scrimmages. Parades were held before particularly important games and dances held after every home game. And, caravans of folks traveled together to away games. While winning and losing meant a whole lot, it was the importance of the entire ritual that made the game hold meaning. Without all of the rest, the game could have been any game – one watched on tv or listened to on the radio played miles away. We committed, as a town, to these events – to making them special, in holding them up as important community rituals. Have you ever had a person ruin a sporting event that you didn’t get to see live but that you taped by just blurting out the final score? It’s an awful feeling. The one area of my life that still holds this place in me if March Madness; you’ll most likely find me doing a lot of work at an area sports bar with a friend during March. It’s awful not to participate – to have other people take away that one opportunity to get immersed. Now, I’m not going to equate this experience with Lent and Easter, but in the world that I come from, they really aren’t that much different. I remember those few families that were fair-weather fans; boy did folks talk about them when they weren’t around. How could they possibly appreciate the victory when they had no idea what went into make it come about? How could anyone celebrate with them knowing that if it had been a losing year they would not have braved the bitter cold (and yes it gets bitter cold in the South during winter) during a mediocre or losing season? How can we possibly show up on Easter expecting to understand the message, the victory, the hope, if we don’t use Lent for introspection, prayer, fasting, learning, and other forms of spiritual discipline? Well, clearly we can’t.

Free will has a lot to do with it. It has everything to do with our scriptures today and everything to do with how we live our lives. We will choose this year whether or not to make the time to experience, explore and discover during Lent.

Let me tell you about my two Lenten disciplines. This year I have signed up to meet with a trainer at my gym and I have decided to pause for grace even while eating in public. Making the choice to take on these disciplines is only followed up by my daily choice to follow through with them. Taking time to honor the body/spirit connection is my overall focus in Lent, but it will only be a real focus of my time if I intentionally make the choice each day to live into the decisions made at the beginning of Lent.

We have always struggled with the power that comes with free will. This is not new. One of the greatest church fathers, Saint Augustine, rejected the teachings of the church for a long time because he found the scriptures and the emerging tradition to be insufficient in their dealings with evil and with suffering. He couldn’t understand how a religion could claim God to be both omnipotent (all powerful) and omnibenevolent (only good) and there still be evil things in the world – suffering of all kinds. His struggle with Christianity did not go away – not ever. He did not like the dogmatic approach of the Church. Instead, he wanted to be able to uncover a truth that would be sensible regarding these two things. For him the answer lay in free will. In short, Augustine believed that all of creation is good in that it exists, but that people through free will often choose to live below their intended greatness. Evil existed in real ways for him through free will. I am not suggesting that Augustine’s view is without problem or that I subscribe to it, but what is important is that he struggled with his faith and wouldn’t turn his back on this fundamental issue and all of its important implications. Free will implies a great deal of responsibility for us. Do we want it?

The two stories that we read today say: Adam and Eve misused free will. Jesus, finding himself in the desert, seemingly alone with temptations beyond measure had only his free will to rely upon. Just like us, Jesus had hard choices to make. Dorothy Day talks about the end of Jesus’ time in the desert, with a little humor (Lent p67).

Today we live in a culture that tells us unrelentingly about our destiny. For those of you a bit younger these may be shows you watch: The Matrix, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vamp Slayer, LOTR, Smallville, Charmed, and on and on. For those, perhaps in the same age range I just spoke to but also those who are a bit older, Oprah Winfrey talks about it all the time – this was “meant” to be or that happened “for a reason.” Saint Augustine could not abide this philosophy; clearly it was alive and well during his lifetime in the late 300’s. Today’s scriptures challenge us to stare long and hard at our circumstances and then to use our free will wisely – to look beyond our immediate comforts or advancement to something more meaningful. We, particularly us Americans, don’t like this kind of challenge. I only know of one President seeking re-election who talked about sacrifice and he lost his re-election bid – President Jimmy Carter. Let us take the challenge to explore our free will seriously – to explore the choices that we make in our lives and to recognize that our choices affect people and non-human creation we may never meet. Augustine did believe in a kind of destiny – that we all are destined for a holy life, but that we use our free will to claim or undermine this sacred destiny. We choose over and over again against God and also against ourselves. Before we can move into Lent with spiritual practices of prayer or journaling or works of mercy and love offered to others, we owe it to ourselves and to all we affect to examine our choices. Even some of the programs I listed above make room for choice. The Matrix highlights free will as one of the most important traits of human beings (I’m a big Matrix fan). But it was Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets who said to Harry when we was feeling trapped by destiny, afraid that he would become like the Dark Lord Voldemort, “ “. I couldn’t have said it better myself…and if I could have then I should be making hundreds of millions of dollars writing children’s books! Amen