The Challenge and the Gift of Lent

Lent started this year with our Ash Wednesday service on February 17. For some of you, the significance of this season in our church year was made personal when you came forward and received the ashen cross on your forehead and heard these words spoken: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

I imagine for some, Lent is considered the season of darkness with this beginning cknowledgement of our mortality. Thinking about these words cannot help but give us a sense of sadness at the reality of having to let go of all we hold dear. Our hearts grieve the losses we will face even before our death arrives. Our hearts tremble as we hear and meditate on the message of Lent from our lectionary that proclaims Jesus’ coming death on our behalf and thus the hope of resurrection.

But the resurrection hope is not yet realized. Lent has begun, and we need to live in this dark place between the ashes and the bread and wine, between the declaration of our mortality and the declaration of Christ’s redeeming work. “Lent is a time to reckon with the reality of darkness.” Writes Katherine Ireton in The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year. She continues, “We do so with hope, because the season ends in Easter, in Resurrection, in new life. But we can be raised to new life only if we have first died to the old one. That is the challenge and the gift of Lent”
Lent has several aspects in that we can take advantage of. First, it gives us the opportunity to create space in our lives for God. This year, our midweek services will use Luther’s Large Catechism to help us focus on our spiritual direction. The first week’s reading is about the Ten Commandments. As Luther makes clear, the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” gives us the focus in life we need to walk the journey of faith.

Another aspect that Lent offers us is the opportunity to be set free from sins that keep us bound up. Unfortunately the word “repentance” often leaves a bad taste in peoples’ mouths. A young person told me once that prayers of repentance were like “reciting unhealthy mantras to convince someone of their own unworthiness.” But I think Jesus has such a person in mind when he included them in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” I think that there are persons who are not made to pray. For them it is hard to speak to the “capital LORD who deals in mountains and seas,” as the poet Taia Runyon writes.

I don’t think a lot of us will “fast” this season of Lent. But all of us can repent. We can honestly look at our lives and figure out the habits that stand in the way of being the loving, forgiving, and joyful person that God intended us to be. Like fasting and almsgiving, repentance creates space in our lives; it allows us to hear the voice of God speaking to our hearts.

The season of darkness reminds us that one day death will take us. But it is also the season we begin to see that Christ walked through death before us and walks through it with us.

The Good Shepherd carries us through death and into life.

Pastor Tom