The stories coming out of Sedona are tragic. Several people have died in James Arthur Ray's spiritual retreat ceremony of the "Sweat Lodge". One of Oprah's gurus is in deep weeds. Three are now dead having paid a reported $9695 dollars to come to the "spiritual warrior" event. Nineteen of the sixty-three people involved in the ceremony were hospitalized.

They were seeking cleansing. The way to purity was through the experience of the retreat which culminated in the Sweat Lodge ceremony where all impurities were released from the body. A channeler, reportedly brought in by Ray's organization, explained that the dead were having so much fun in their out of body experience "they just never came back".

What is it about us? How could sane and reasonable people get to this? We collectively all seem to have this restlessness about our selves. We want resolution. The self help racks seem to be recession proof. We all have a sense that something is wrong and needs fixed. We need cleansed, purged from pasts we'd like to redo. The predicament is so dire, there seems to be no limit on what we might do to face it. Ten thousand dollars and a death-trap hot tent (a mix of a Native American spirituality and New Age visions of cleansing) are not prohibitive.

C.S. Lewis said that we are created with a God-shaped void that we constantly fill with everything else. Nothing fits and we come back time and again to that sense of estrangement we have with our selves and with each other. We entertain that nagging suspicion that someone is at home in the universe and something is not right that needs fixed.

We love credit and love to earn everything the old Smith-Barney way. That is why things that we can do to cleanse ourselves and get right are our preference. We can do it our way. It affirms our own esteem and grooms our pride. In the end, we die being our own savior.

How foreign such ideas are from the Good News offered to us in the Bible! God came near to our sinful and estranged lot in Jesus Christ. He invites us to embrace by faith what he accomplished in taking up our sin and dying our deserved death. The grace extended to us at Calvary now opens the way for purity, given to us as a gift, one not earned or deserved. "By grace we have been saved" (Ephesians 2:8-9). To shed guilt and grip grace and hope (Easter) is to restart our lives anew-a life on completely different footing. Who would not like liberation from a haunting past? What about a fresh start with our Creator? Deep down many crave a peace that settles over all of life. "Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost." (Revelation 22:17). It's no sweat. It's his blood! The benefits are open to all of us, free and without cost.