Always Mardi Gras and Never Lent

Our culture reminds me of Mardi Gras, where spectators line up along the street each night, intoxicated by drink and the spirit of the celebration while watching a parade go by.

Mardi Gras parades include floats, marching bands, costumes, glitter, lights and strings of beads being tossed from the floats. Each float is a gaudy, brilliantly illuminated artistic creation, presenting some theme or other and usually manned by celebrities or exotically costumed characters in masks, face and body paint or skimpy outfits. Catching the beads is part of the fun for the onlookers. The whole concept of Mardi Gras apparently originated as a period of time set aside for people to get their fill of sinful pleasure before the annual start of Lent.

I see American culture very much the same way. Like at Mardi Gras, the music of our culture is always loud and always playing in our ears, reinforcing the spirit of the party. The entire generation seems intoxicated with alcohol, drugs, consumerism, entertainment, politics, and sexual energy. Each TV show, web site, movie, video game, news or media spectacle is another float going by and actors, politicians, athletes, news people and talk show hosts in their various costumes, pass by their audience each night offering a glimpse into a caricature of life that entertains, titillates, outrages, shocks, informs and sells. The spectator hoard catches the beads every time they buy a new flat screen TV, iPod, hybrid car or hamburger.

This perpetual Mardi Gras parade and its variety and diversity of floats all really serve the same purpose and the ultimate effect is the same. That is, to hold the attention of the crowd and give each spectator a feeling of meaning without having done anything to deserve it. It is the ultimate shallow gratification. I watch a TV show like a float going by. I am entertained, I feel satisfied, I have a sense of visceral stimulation, but I have done nothing. I have accomplished nothing, changed nothing, built nothing and stood for nothing. I have only attended a parade. I am a well-behaved drunk. I sometimes feel slightly guilty but I am an addict; I cannot resist.

The Bible says: "But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead?" James 2:20

On another float in the same parade, American culture has created a generation of Christian Mardi Gras spectators, expecting to be entertained by their preachers and threatening to change the channel. These people attend church like watching TV and think that merely being a spectator makes God happy. Many feel the same visceral stimulation at church as a good episode of CSI and leave the service just as unrepentant, unchanged and spiritually ignorant.

But at least Mardi Gras has Lent; a period of self denial before Easter. Our modern culture has no such self-correcting mechanism. The Bible says: "Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. "For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? "For the Son of Man will come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He will reward each according to his works." Matt 16:24-27

It is clear that believers are required by God to put feet to their faith. At some point we must decide to voluntarily turn from the cultural Mardi Gras parade and embrace a spirit of Lent as a vital aspect of each of our lives. C. S. Lewis wrote about a curse on the fictional land of Narnia that caused it to be "always winter but never Christmas." We live in a seemingly opposite but equally off-balance land—a land where it is "always Mardi Gras and never Lent."