I have often been asked lately why we do some of the things that we do in Lent. Sometimes our practice on Sunday mornings seems quite foreign. Familiar pieces of the liturgy are gone, some churches remove the processional and altar crosses have been removed or veiled, there is no prelude music filling the air when we arrive and there are no banners adorning our surroundings. So why is it that we do these things?
We don’t know much about how the first-century Christians treated the forty days before Resurrection Sunday. But by the second century, the church was starting to use that season as a time for training new believers about how to rightly think, live, and believe as Christians. (The churchly word for this training is ‘the catechumenate’.) This was done, in part, by reliving the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s final time before He was crucified. It was done with the whole church community as they, too, relived it, and fasted together. The end of that period was Holy Week, and Easter would be the day that the new believers would be baptized into the Church. As the Roman world became mostly Christian and more people had already been baptized as children, the season began to shift meaning in a way which would be of great value for new and long-time Christians alike. It would become a time for looking at the depth of one’s own sin, and turning away from them. A time for learning what it means to follow Christ, and to listen to the Spirit. A time for going about changing one’s ways to be more as Christ would have them be.
Lent is the season for this experience of giving your life over to Christ and to what the Spirit is showing you. God wants us to surrender ourselves, and let the Spirit work in us. In Lent, we take responsibility for our acts and thoughts. Lent is a time of self-discovery of the parts of ourselves we don’t want to discover, through prayer, fasting, and other disciplines. It is the opening up, the turning over to God, the repenting of our sins, the turning away from that which does not please God. Yet there is just a glimpse of Easter through the heavy clouds of Good Friday — that Christ has taken the burden, and you don’t have to carry it anymore.
Lent starts on Ash Wednesday (which is March 5th this year). Traditionally, the tone of Lenten worship and church life changes starting with the worship services of that day, all the way to Palm Sunday, and then again to Easter. Gone are exuberant praise and sermons about joy, pride, politics, authority, evangelism, fund-raising, or building programs. The feeling is subdued, with a pensive hush, in awe of God, in sharp awareness of how each of us — and all of us together — are not as God calls us to be. In liturgical churches like ours, Ash Wednesday is marked by the ancient rite of the imposition of ashes (dating back at least 1000 to 1200 years). At the start of the Ash Wednesday service, the believers are asked to come forward to the altar. The minister dips their thumb into a small dish of ashes (burnt from last year’s Palm Sunday palms, with a drop of olive oil), and with it marks onto each person’s forehead the sign of the cross, saying the words “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (from Ecclesiastes 3:20). Lent is not the season for talk of victorious living. It is the season to be focused on turning from wrong-doing and dedicating anew to the kind of life Jesus taught us to live.
I suppose there are numerous ways in which we could choose to spend our Lenten season. For some there is a need to ‘give up’ something so that they gain a sense of what Christ gave for them. For some, there is a need to ‘take on’ something so that the focus of life changes dramatically. This year, we will embark on a journey of focusing on prayer and more specifically, The Lord’s Prayer. On Wednesdays at 3 pm, we will join together in a ‘Table Talk’ that will focus on prayer using the Lord’s Prayer as a guide. I am encouraging us to ‘take on’ a journey of the heart so that we might explore with some intentionality what we say and do when we pray The Lord’s Prayer. It is a journey that we will explore what our own prayer life is like. A time in which we can hopefully learn from each other and find ways to enhance what we are already doing in our prayer life.
Whatever the case may be in your life, I hope and pray that this Lent provides you with the opportunity to turn and meet God in a new way so that you will be freed to experience the Risen Christ with a new-found exuberance this Easter.
