Lent is for...what again?

Today marks the beginning of the season of Lent, a time set aside for penitence, self-examination, and renewal of our spiritual lives.  We are set some tasks for this season:  self-examination and repentance; prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.  And we are called during this time to prepare ourselves for the experience of Holy Week and Easter.  But of all these tasks, often we focus only on the self-denial aspect:  what are you going to give up for Lent?  Chocolate, or alcohol?  Usually whatever it is we’re giving up is something we feel a little guilty about anyway, as if this season is another chance to shape up, redeem the broken New Year’s resolutions, improve ourselves into better people.  So sometimes we try to counter this trend by asking, what are you going to add for Lent?  A few minutes of prayer each day, or attendance at our Wednesday Morning Prayer, or volunteering at a soup kitchen?  All laudable, yet all things that maybe we know we should do or want to do anyway – again, Lent as a booster shot to our sagging self-discipline.

After all, we sag on our discipline a lot.  ‘Discipline’ isn’t something we’re very keen on these days, it’s right up there with ‘duty.’ We might have discipline in some areas of our lives – if we’re athletes training for an event, or students studying for finals, or business folk preparing a project presentation, perhaps – but then we can lack discipline totally in other parts of our lives, our diet or our daily ritual or getting enough sleep at night.  And often where we lack discipline the most is in our spiritual lives. Somehow that relationship that we know in our heart of hearts is the most important of all is the one to which we accord the least time.  Which leads to a difficult mix of guilt and longing and unmet expectations – so of course we grab hold of a season like Lent to put ourselves to rights again.

But to make of Lent another chance for self-improvement is to set ourselves up for failure.  Not only will we fail at our well-intentioned efforts to make things better – you know what they say about the road being paved with those – but we fail at the most important thing of all:  our relationship with God.  For when we spend our focus and energy on ourselves and what we have done wrong, how we could improve – what many see as the point of penitence – we lose sight of where we should be focused, on God. 

This is what Jesus is getting at in the gospel reading we hear every Ash Wednesday.  I remember as a young person fasting all day and going to the evening service hungry, smelling the delicious aroma of the soup supper being prepared in the parish hall.  And when I heard those words about looking cheerful while you’re fasting, I just about died.  But Jesus isn’t telling us to fake being happy like the classic martyrish mother – you go ahead and eat, dear, I don’t need anything – or to fake anything at all.  He is saying, the point of penitence, of the traditional threefold task of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting, is authentic relationship with God.  You do these things because you are in relationship with God and because you want to deepen that relationship – not because you will be a better person if you do so, not because anyone else will think better of you if you do so, but because your love of the God who loves you grows as you do these things:  as you care for others around you who are in need (almsgiving), as you do away with non-essential clutter and gluttony (fasting and self-denial), as you spend time in communion with God (prayer).  That’s what Lent is about:  in other words, it’s not about you.  It’s about God – or more accurately, about you and God and your love for one another. 

And we mark this individual relationship of you and God here together in community because that is how we are made:  social beings in relationship with one another.  We can’t focus each on our own relationship with God without it affecting everyone we meet.   God doesn’t say let’s you and me sit in the corner and have a tête-à-tête, God says love one another as I have loved you, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, clothe the naked, take care of your family and relatives.  Who we are ‘internally’ with God is who we are ‘externally’ with one another – there is no distinction between the two.  God is not a private God – Christianity is not a private religion.  We give alms so that others less fortunate might live; we fast so that we might know what it is to go hungry; we pray for the needs of others and for our own hearts to change.  The prophets make it very clear:  to pursue a deep relationship with God without tending to the needy around us is a perversion of faith.  This season of penitence is a time for us as a community as well as for us as individuals. 

So I invite you this season to the observance of a holy Lent.  Forget about the nice resolutions for diet and exercise – God likes chocolate, I’m sure of it.  Instead, we’ll be spending some time as a community practicing our discipline – spiritual disciplines, that is, practices for grounding ourselves in God. So that we might let this be a season for reorienting ourselves, our hearts and souls and bodies and lives, towards the God who is at the center of our very being; to leave behind what we do wrong or what we leave undone, and to take hold instead of the love and forgiveness on offer before us.  A love and a forgiveness that by their very nature spill over out of us and on into all those around us in this church community, in our workplaces, on the streets as we pass by.  And so this can be a time of renewal:  as we are reminded that we are but dust, we lay hold of the bountiful spirit of God that faileth never, the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.