“Chocolate”

April 2, 2006

Scripture Reading:    Jeremiah 31:31-34

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

Blue Point Congregational Church

In this sermon I would like to talk about the annual tradition of giving something up for Lent.  Did you give something up this year?  I know it kind of late to bring up the subject.  After all, we are suppose to have made the resolutions at the beginning of Ash Wednesday and here we are five weeks into the season with only two left to go.  Never the less, it has been on my mind.   The tradition is that in Lent we are suppose to resolve to give something up for the season.  Among all the things people give up for Lent, I would like to talk about one specific item that always seems to pop up at the top of the list.  That is chocolate.

Chocolate – sweet, brown, creamy – melts so easily in your mouth.  Chocolate can comes in so many shapes and sizes and varieties.  There are chocolate bars, chocolate cake, brownies, and chocolate ice cream.   There is raspberry chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate with peanuts and hazel nuts and macadamia nuts, mint chocolate and, orange chocolate.

Now, I have always been very ambivalent about giving something up for Lent.  My ambivalence is evident in the fact that I am preaching this sermon so late in the season.  I am selling peanuts after the circus has passed, or almost passed.  Why do I try to ignore, and dismiss this idea of giving something up for Lent?    I have decided it is because of this chocolate thing.  Up to now it has always seemed to me that giving up chocolate for Lent is the most silly thing in the world.  It seems as if it trivializes the whole idea behind the tradition.  Frankly, I don’t spend much time thinking about giving up something for Lent because I don’t want to be associated with these chocolate people.  It seems to me if you are going to give up something you should do something that has more weight to it.  If you are going to give up something, give up the money you would spend on chocolate to charity.  Or, give up your Friday nights and work in soup kitchens the whole season.  Or, give up anger for Lent.  Or give up drinking until you pass out on the couch.  Admittedly, a lot of people do give up things that have more weight.  But each year, being a minister, I run into chocolate Lent people at parties.   These people who say they are going to give up chocolate for Lent and beam proudly at me as if I should admire their deep spirituality and profound insight. 

It is clear to me that I am a religious snob.   I think this is a hazard of the profession.  Unless there is a serious weight issue,  I can’t think of any reason why not eating chocolate would please God.   Chocolate seems to trivialize the sacrifice that Christ made for us.  In fact, I can make two good arguments why someone should start eating chocolate during lent instead of stop eating chocolate.  For one thing, maybe the caffeine in chocolate would make a person more alert, more aware of their neighbor and their neighbor’s needs.  Or more seriously, chocolate comes from the tropics, usually third world countries.  We should start eating chocolate more because we would be supporting the economy of these countries. 

Furthermore, chocolate Lent people give a bad reputation to Christianity.  They make others think that Christianity  is all about abstaining from things you like for no real reason.   Why are you giving up chocolate for Lent?  “Just because…” is the answer often given.  There is a wonderful movie called “Chocolate.”  It is set in 1960 in a small town France.  Vianne Rocher and her preteen daughter move into town and open a chocolate shop just as lent is beginning.  The town’s small minded mayor can’t accept this and does his best to shut her down.  But, her warm personality and incredible chocolates manage to win over many townsfolk.  In fact, the chocolate eating heroin is more Christian than the non-chocolate eating mayor and his non-chocolate eating church friends.  When a group of river drifters stop into town Vianne has compassion on them and befriends them.  Meanwhile she is truly helping other people, unlike the uptight non chocolate eating Christians.  For instance, she is helping a woman out of her abusive marriage, etc.    The message of the movie is that doing things to make yourself happy such as eating chocolate makes a person more compassionate rather than less.  ( or something like that.)

In my snide ruminations about chocolate people this Lent, I was chuckling cynically about those who have a hard time keeping their promise.  A woman is offered chocolate mint Girl Scout cookies and takes one shrugging, saying that it is St. Patrick’s day and the box is green.  Someone else talks about having chocolate cake at her daughter’s birthday party.  Right when I was in the midst of my most cynical ruminations, and feeling vastly superior to any of these chocolate people, (although I never paused to admit to myself that I had not even tried to give up anything for Lent because I am so ambivalent about it) it suddenly struck me why.  It struck me why giving up chocolate for Lent is important.  Why trying to give up anything for Lent is important, even if it is something as silly as chocolate.  It is important because giving something up for Lent is a spiritual practice of change.  To give up chocolate you have to change.  Change is hard. 

God was talking about change in today’s scripture passage.  “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors – a new covenant, a new contract.”  This is a chance for change. 

It is no secret that God’s people were resistant to change.  Go back to Exodus and you’ll see that even after God had parted the Red Sea and brought them out of slavery in Egypt, the people began to fight the change and wanted to go back.  The known is better than the unknown.  At Sinai, God framed for them a covenant on tablets of stone – clear directions and rules for change which they immediately began to ignore and started dancing around a golden calf.  Repeatedly throughout their history, both as a nation of Israel and as the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, God’s people have a hard time really buying into the change that’s good for them and are constantly wanting to be like those around them, their idols and pagan practices being the dominant from of the day.  Even when they’re threatened with being overthrown, conquered exiled, destroyed and even threatened with death, they can’t seem to make the change and follow in the ways of God.  This drove the prophets crazy!  People can’t you see you have got to change your ways, or God is going to punish us!  But they didn’t change, and they were vanquished and exiled and killed.      We are not that different than they are and is it therefore any surprise that our attempts to change are often unsuccessful.  Our promise to give up something is broken and broken again.    

Any of us who have been around churches for any period of time know how hard it is to get people to change.  You know the old joke… How many UCC people does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer:  What do you mean, change?

UCC members aren’t the only ones who have a hard time with light bulbs.  Case in point:  People who had heart bypass surgery, most definitely a life and death matter are directed by their doctors to change their eating habits, stop smoking, exercise, and significantly alter their lifestyle.  They know they should make those changes – know that they’ll die sooner than later if they don’t – yet many studies have shown that in just two years after such major surgery, 90 percent of these patients have not significantly altered their behavior.  People dying of emphysema still smoke.

Change isn’t just a health care issue.  Corporations spend millions each year on consultants to bring in new practices and promote change but any changes made are, at best, short lived and at worst rejected out of hand. 

The word chocoholic is a term given to people who are addicted to chocolate and get perturbed when they are deprived of chocolate at regular intervals. This condition is caused by the effect of endorphins on the brain. Endorphin is a substance that is present in chocolates. Some people feel restless when they do not get to eat chocolate regularly. Such people are said to be suffering from a chocoholic condition.

We all are addicted to the same old, same old.  That is why it is so hard to change.  The economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” Dostoevsky said, “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”  Perhaps this proverb says it best, “The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.”

If you really want to change peoples behavior, you need to give them not a new set of rules but a relationship.  That is why the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous is not a set of rules but a relationship.  The first two steps one must do is admit that one is not the head of the universe and in control of your own life.  Your life is not your own,  it is in relationship.  That relationship is either going to be with the addiction or with a higher power, with God.  It is strengthening your relationship to a higher power that allows a person to change.    Step one:  "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable."  Step two:  "Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity".

How is our relationship to our higher power doing anyway?  Giving  up something for Lent, anything, even chocolate,  can test how we can change which in turns tests our relationship with God.  If we can change in these ways, perhaps little ways, then we can change in big ways.  So in the prophet Jeremiah, instead of another legal prescription or warning of impending doom did something different.  God did something new.  God did not create new laws, but established a new relationship.  “I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.”  No longer would they know about Goad as an external agent who calls for their obedience, buy they would know God with their emotions, their hearts and their very lives.  God offers hope.

Have you ever wondered what is written on your heart?  Is love really there?  On a beautiful 68 degree day September 11 2001, the people on the 103^rd floor were pouring their morning coffee, straightening their desks, reviewing their Tuesday appointments,  bantering with office mates.  Someone no doubt ate a little chocolate.  Then one minute later none of that mattered.  At 8:45 twenty floors below, a 757 transected the building, leaving the 103^rd cut off, trapped, hopeless.  But not dead. 

Those who found phones called – not their stock brokers to check the latest ticker, not their hairstylists to cancel the afternoons appointment, not even their insurance agents to check their policy.  They called spouses to say “I love you” one last time, children to say “You are precious” one last time, parents to say “thank you” one last time.  Through tears they called best friends, neighbors pastors and priests and rabbis.  “I just want you to know what you mean to me.” 

Love was written upon their hearts.  What would you do if suddenly you only had  ten minutes  left of your life?  You would you love.  You would not eat chocolate.    Gladly give it  all the things that we think are important to declare and establish that relationship of love.  That is what giving up something for Lent is about.  It is a slow motion, forty day test, of what you would do the last ten minutes of your life.  It is a test of what is written on your heart.

Giving up something for lent is a declaration of freedom.  Chocolate is symbolic.  We are not stuck but can change through the openness and reality of the loving relationship with God by a promise written on our hearts.  The future always open and creative because of this relationship.   It sets God’s word of hope against despair. 

I know lent is almost over.  When someone says, “What are you giving up for Lent?”  I am going to say with a big smile, “Chocolate.”    Valentines day is usually a week or two before Lent.  The stores are filled with heart shaped boxes filled with chocolates.  Lovers give each other chocolates.  Love is written on my heart, it is the new covenant God gave to us.  Therefore, I am going to give the God who I love a box of chocolates for Lent and not eat them myself.  I am going to make a change, even a little change in my life to recognize the relationship that is truly important and the relationship that makes me free to change.  It is a small thing, but it is a big thing too. 

After all God changed for us.  God loved us so much that he gave us the first covenant, the ten commandments.  Then God loved us so much that he gave us another covenant, one that he wrote upon our hearts, a covenant of love and relationship.  Finally god changed again and gave us a third covenant to seal the love that is written upon our hearts, he gave us his only Son.  God changed for us.  God changed death itself to show us his love, and his resurrection.