The Holy Season of Lent

This Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, marks the beginning of the holy season of Lent: forty days to prepare for the Lord's passion and resurrection. It is a time set apart for self-examination in order to turn (and return) to God. In the language of the twelve steps, it is a time specifically devoted to step four. We can only do our own work, even if it seems easier or more fun to confess other people's sins. 

On Sunday, February 21, we will mark the First Sunday in Lent. Although I am not preaching anywhere, I wanted to share some reflections at the beginning of the week specific to that day, but also as a way of getting ready for the season. The readings for this Sunday can be found here. 

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The forty-day season of Lent begins with a reminder that “we are dust, and to dust we shall return.”  Some of us (maybe even most of us) don’t like hearing that very much. It freaks us out to think about death generally, but it's even harder to be reminded that we are not exempt from that club. One day, we too, will die. All of us.  

Yet paradoxically, this mark of our mortality is good news because it is a reminder that we are creatures and not the Creator. That frees us from any foolish notion that we are god or that we can control everything that happens in our lives, or that we are responsible for everything that happens in our neighborhood or congregation. It frees us from the delusion of believing we must be perfect. 

The ashes allow us to focus on trying to be human. And even more specifically, to be the specific and unique human person God has created us to be. That is enough, for any of us, without the confusion that we are called to do anything more than that.  

This mark of our mortality also frees us from the mistaken notion of thinking that we have all the time in the world to do that. We do not. We probably all have known people who try to postpone living until some future date: after college or after the next promotion or once the kids move out or after the mortgage is paid off or when we retire or... 

And perhaps we have been such persons at time. But it's a chasing after wind and it's heart-wrenching when plans are postponed until, as it turns out, it's too late. Some day we'll take that trip to Europe, but some day never comes. We are not guaranteed tomorrow. The wisdom of Lenten spirituality and the disciplines that go with it remind us that we cannot change the past and we cannot control the future; what we can do is live Now. This Lenten reminder that our days are limited can be received as good news and as a great gift if we allow the words to sink in. Because our days are numbered, each one is precious. We are invited to “seize the day” by living in the present moment. People who have had a brush with death or face a terminal illness very often gain this wisdom, daring to ask as they contemplate the end of their lives the central question that each of us can only answer for ourselves: what will you do with your one, wild and precious life?

Once we are freed from the false (and dangerous) notion that we must do everything or that we can do it later, then we can remember that we are called to do something and that now is the acceptable time. This forty days of Lent can then become for us a more focused time for prayer and reflection and discernment: an opportunity to open our hearts and minds to God as we seek to understand the “something” that we can do, both as individuals and as faith communities called to participate in the Easter life with our risen Lord. For that is where this journey leads: to the empty tomb with its promise of new and abundant life. 

So three days after the ashes, we come to the first Sunday of Lent. I am "old-school" so when I was a parish priest we always began with The Great Litany. (See page 148ff of The Book of Common Prayer, or click here. This line is one that always gets me: 

If we are standing tall today we pray for strength; if we are feeling weak-hearted we ask for comfort and help; if we have fallen down we ask God to raise us up again to new life. 

These words remind us that the journey of our lives continues to unfold and as it does we will find ourselves in different places each Lent. This season we may be standing tall; if so we ask for strength. Our friend (or parent or spouse or child) may be feeling weak-hearted or may even have fallen down: we pray together for comfort and help and the promise of new life for those who are in that place. We may trade places next Lent, or the season after that. But all of us are utterly dependent upon God. The Great Litany gives us a chance to be thankful that God has given us to one another as companions in this pilgrim journey.

Yes, the Great Litany is long, and clearly it comes from a pre-text-message world. Some of the language may be off-putting to us theologically or need to be translated to make sense to modern people. But this ancient prayer also reminds us that the Church wasn’t invented last Tuesday afternoon. The Church is bigger than us and we are members of a communion of saints that extends back even further than that first Pentecost which we sometimes call “the birthday of the Church”—back to Moses and the prophets and the people God led out of their bondage in Egypt and toward the Promised Land. It seems to me that this is worth remembering in a time of global pandemic when we are weary and many of us feel like we need strength, and comfort, and help. And ultimately the new life that Easter morning promises. 

Sometimes we wish the Church would change faster and adapt more quickly to our modern and post-modern concerns. I get that and I feel that way a fair amount myself. We rightly expect the Church to be relevant to the context of this time and place. But I am also comforted by the fact that the roots of a holy, catholic, and apostolic Church go deep, like an old gnarly tree that is still able to bring forth new life each spring. It means among other things that we don’t need to be overly anxious about what we believe or don’t believe on a given day: the Church can hold it for us as we continue to grow into the full stature of Christ.

In the early Church, Lent was the time to prepare converts to the faith for Holy Baptism, which would then happen at the Great Vigil of Easter. Baptism isn’t fire insurance. It’s not a magic “get out of hell” free card. It’s a reminder that we have been knit together into the fabric of a faith community that has died with Christ. Yet, because we have died with him, we have also been raised with him to new life. Death never gets the last word. Just as God claims Jesus as the Beloved in the River Jordan, so each of us have also been claimed and marked and sealed as Christ’s beloved forever. It is also a reminder that we are members of one another; part of a community that shares one another’s joys and bears one another’s burdens.

Like our Biblical forebears, however, we are prone to suffer from amnesia. The whole Book of Deuteronomy (one of my favorites in all of Scripture) is a plea to God’s people to remember. Or, to be more precise, to “not forget.” The slaves who left Egypt with Pharaoh’s army on their heels forty years earlier were changed by their wilderness experience in the Sinai Desert. So we see them in Deuteronomy standing on the verge of the Promised Land, almost able to taste the “milk and honey” that await them.

Not so fast, Moses says. Before they can enter into that land, Moses has something to say. Actually he’s been working on a long sermon for forty years so they might as well get comfortable.  He’s an old man who has been reflecting on a ministry that began with confronting Pharaoh’s claim on their lives and the crossing of the Red Sea followed by four decades wandering around in the Sinai Desert. Moses preaches a lengthy sermon, but like most long sermons it can be repetitive and there is really just one main point, so even if you doze in and out of the Book of Deuteronomy you can’t miss it. He tells the Israelites they have two choices: to get busy living or get busy dying. If they mean to choose life, he says, the key practices are to remember where they have come from and to give thanks to God in all things. He says:

Remember what you learned in the wilderness. Remember what it is like to be utterly dependent upon God, one day at a time, for daily manna and water.  Whatever successes come your way, don’t forget who you are and where you have come from. You were slaves whom God has given the gift of freedom. Don’t fool yourself into the idolatrous notion that you are self-made or self-reliant, because there is no such thing. And remember to always be grateful for the blessings that come your way; because in the midst of affluence you will be tempted to forget what a miracle the small things of life truly are.  

So when Jesus is driven into the wilderness for forty days after his Baptism, that is the context for him as a faithful Jew also. He is not sent there as some kind of punishment, but as something more like what native peoples might call a “vision quest.” He is going to the place where his ancestors found God, to the place where daily manna and water and Torah were all given as gifts by a generous and merciful God. Yes, the God of the Old Testament is generous and merciful! The God of the Old Testament is the One whom Jesus teaches us to call “Abba.” Jesus goes to the desert in order to be in touch with the core experience of his people, back to the place where a band of slaves fled from Egypt in search of a better life. There he is tested for forty days, just as his people had been tested for forty years.   

One of the desert fathers from the early Christian tradition, Abba Evagrius, said: “take away temptation and no one will be saved.” Like so many of those desert teachings, this is worth pondering as we reflect on the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness. And the ones we face, too. 

We sometimes think that all temptation should be avoided and even pray, daily, that we might not be led into temptation. But what happens when we begin to see temptation as the path toward spiritual growth? The move from slavery to freedom is never easy. Sometimes we’ll resist temptation and it will make us stronger and clearer about what it is God is calling on us to do next. Sometimes we’ll fall into temptation. We will not get it right all of the time, because we are creatures and not the Creator. God knows we are dust, however, and our God is a God of second (and third) chances: a God who forgives, a God of steadfast love and mercy. 

If we are standing tall today we pray for strength; if we are feeling weak-hearted we ask for comfort and help; if we have fallen down we ask God to raise us up again to new life.

The invitation of this season, from beginning to end, is not about shame or fear. It is meant to draw us closer to the love of God in Jesus Christ, so that in that love we gain a greater clarity about who we are and who we are called to become, and whom we are called to serve.