Singer Lady Gaga performs during the halftime show of the NFL Super Bowl 51 football game between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, Sunday, Feb. 5, 2017, in Houston. (AP)
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” --Gospel of Matthew 4:1
Leave it to this year’s Super Bowl 51 Halftime Show and this year’s 89th Academy Awards to invoke spiritual wisdom for this year’s Christian season of Lent. The Oscars as the Super Bowl of movies and the Super Bowl as the Oscars of football (sort of) unwittingly create a cache of provocation and prayer that should not pass unnoticed.
Putting some of the holy into Hollywood, Viola Davis accepted the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in her role as Rose in the movie Fences. She said: You know, there's one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered. One place--and that's the graveyard.
How very Lent-like.
She went on to say: People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola? And I say, exhume those bodies. Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost.
The star actress’s words echo what is humanly divine and divinely human about this 40-day Lenten season in which Christians follow what the Spirit led Jesus to do for 40 days in the wilderness: to remember who we are and what we are made of and to take action on what we are called to do in the world.
Lent begins with the mark of ashes on our foreheads as we hear and heed the words, “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.” The ashes mark our mortality and remind us to honor our human finitude. While I can’t recall where I first heard this, these poetic words feel true about how human identity is infused with equal parts human and divine: Human beings are mud and spark, beloved mud and spark, but always mud and spark, earth-bound and spirit-led.
“Beloved” is the powerful, divine word Jesus heard at his baptism, right before he was spirit-led into the earth-bound wilderness. Once in the wilderness, Jesus’ identity as “beloved” came under attack by a lying, accusing voice that tempted him to be less or different than whom God made him to be. Jesus’ temptation to be someone he isn’t is our temptation, too.
To this end, the Super Bowl 51 Halftime Show inspired by the musical liturgy of pop superstar Lady Gaga communicated a Lenten theme of embracing our identity as God’s beloved. While Lady Gaga may be famous for wearing wild costumes and having an eccentric public persona, she takes a hope-filled message of grace and inclusion and non-judgment to youth and adults alike who may feel left out or excluded or who have been made to feel that who they are is inferior.
For starters, Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime liturgy included this call to prayer based on her current single, “Million Reasons”:
I bow down to pray/I try to make the worse seem better/ Lord, show me the way/To cut through all his worn out leather
The Lord was showing the way to many millions as she also performed her hit single from a few years ago titled “Born This Way.” The song may not make a church’s hymnbook, but it is a hymn promising solidarity to those who have been targets of bullying. It is a sobering reminder that Lent as a season of self-denial is sometimes hard for people who are used to being denied or abused. Thus this from the Lady Gaga liturgy who need to fast from shame and feast on love:
I'm beautiful in my way 'Cause God makes no mistakes/I'm on the right track baby I was born this way/ Don't hide yourself in regret/Just love yourself and you're set/I'm on the right track baby I was born this way
Don't be a drag, just be a queen/Whether you're broke or evergreen/You're black, white, beige, chola descent/You're lebanese, you're orient/Whether life's disabilities Left you outcast, bullied, or teased/Rejoice and love yourself today/'Cause baby you were born this way.
It may not feel like it, but when we trace Jesus’ tracks in the wilderness, we are on the right track, too. The divine word Jesus heard at his baptism, “beloved,” was God’s way of saying; “baby, you were born this way.”
Jesus is then beaten down and bedraggled in the wilderness even as God’s beloved. In the wilderness, Jesus is bullied by the devil; tested and taunted because of who he is.
To any who have been tested or taunted in their own kind of emotional wilderness, they need to know that God is “gaga” about them. And while many may cultivate a “spirituality of giving up” this Lenten season, others may need to give up self-hatred and accept God’s acceptance. Others may need to give up self-doubt and accept God’s belief in them as beloved daughters and sons.
With how heavy things can be in life, it’s no wonder that “giving up chocolate” is usually at the top of the list in what to give up for Lent. (One might think that God was anti-chocolate despite sharing the first 3 letters with the name Godiva!) But as much as we might crave it, there is no such thing as chocolate-covered Christianity. There is nothing sugar-coated about what Jesus endures in the wilderness. There is nothing to dull his senses. No Godiva. No Grey Goose. No Ambien of any kind in the desert. His dependency is on nothing other than the God who calls him beloved; the One who gives him an identity in which he need not prove his worth or his superiority; the One who teaches him and all of us to embrace the goodness that is deepest and truest about us and to remember what we are made of: We are God’s beloved mud and spark, and baby, we were born this way.