Descending into the Season of Lent

This week with Ash Wednesday we begin our descent into the season of Lent.

We do Lent because Easter is coming. Resurrection is on the horizon.

But before we revel in Resurrection, Lent invites us deep into the heart of God. Lent invites us to feel the feelings God feels for a sin-soaked world. Lent invites us to lament. Lent invites us to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Lent reminds us of Jesus’ invitation, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me.” These are footsteps that lead straight to the cross and death.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. That all sounds so bleak and dark and horrible.

Well. Yeah. It does.

But such is the state of the sin-soaked world. We practice Lent because we practice Easter. They are a continuous story. Lent invites us to identify with Jesus, and we can’t identify with the resurrection without first identifying with the cross.

In Lent, we de-clutter our spiritual lives. We take stock of our interior lives and do some hard, discerning work of what’s essential and what’s not. We make space for God to make something new. Lent de-centers us. It causes us to reorient ourselves to ourselves and to our communities.

We celebrate Lent because Lent is about Jesus.

What is Lent?

We live in a time and place where Lent is about giving things up. Oftentimes these are luxury foods: coffee, meat, chocolate, soda.

But the church tradition of Lent is so much deeper than simply putting a spiritual glaze over our doubled-down New Year’s resolutions.

Lent is part of the larger story. The Christian faith holds to two distinct doctrines—Incarnation and Resurrection. In no other religion did the gods become human beings. This is the Incarnation. God put on flesh and blood, became a vulnerable human. Creator became creation. This is the narrative behind the seasons of Advent and Christmastide. The movement of darkness to light defines these seasons.

And in no other religion do the gods die and then overturn death, thus re-creating the world all over again. This is the narrative at work behind Lent and Eastertide. The movement from death to life defines these seasons

Lent is 40 days leading up to Easter. It is a season of preparation, self-examination, and fasting. The fasting of Lent is done in preparation for the feasting of Easter. There’s no feast without the fast, and likewise, no fast without the feast. In fact, the feast of Eastertide gets 50 days, compared with the 40 days of Lent.

We don’t give things up in Lent for the sake of simply taxing our willpower. We give things up in Lent because we want to be more available to God and because we’re recognizing the things in our lives that may be distractions.

In Lent, we tell the truth about the reality of sin and death in us and in the world. We get honest about the falseness of our false selves. Sin is real. It hurts. It breaks God’s world. We suffer.

Lent prevents us from skipping over or taking lightly this part of the story.

If we might summarize the story in terms of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Re-Creation, then for the season of Lent we tell the truth about the Fall, and then, in Eastertide, we tell the truth about Re-Creation.

Why Lent?

The season of Lent is a descent leading to the cross. In Philippians 2, Paul writes, “You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.” He then follows with an old hymn of the early church about Jesus humbly descending followed by a victorious ascent.

The way up is the way down. Which is completely backward from the messages we’re bombarded with daily. The way up is strength, power, competence. But not Jesus. Jesus pours himself out, gives sacrificially, submits when he doesn’t have to. Down, down, down, all the way to the cross.

This is the story of Lent. In Easter, we rise. But for Lent, we follow Jesus down, down, down, all the way to the cross.

At one point in my life, I played the guitar a lot. And within a day or two, the strings would get all out of tune. Sounded terrible. Not because I was a bad player or because there was something faulty with the instrument. It’s just what happens when you play the guitar. And so, in Lent, we recognize how out of tune we are.

And not just for ourselves, but we also recognize how out of tune the whole world is. Things are not the way God intended. So we identify with Jesus who wept for his friend Lazarus because that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be.

Paul writes in Philippians, “I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!”

Here we have not only our agenda for Lent but also for Easter. In Lent, we suffer with Jesus, sharing in his death. In Easter, we experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead.

What do we do?

A key theme in Lent is “repentance.” I remember as a kid thinking “repentance” meant feeling really, really sorry for my sins, as evidenced by the number of tears I could produce. “Repentance” is one of the more misunderstood words in the Bible. It has nothing to do with emotion.

Rather, “repentance” means accepting a new piece of information and then making necessary changes. Like when your GPS recalibrates. It doesn’t feel bad. It simply makes the needed adjustment.

So Lent is about doing things differently. We make adjustments. Classically, the church focuses on prayer, fasting, and giving to the poor in Lent, based on Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6.

Here some ideas for experiments to try in Lent, ways to disrupt your routine and lead you closer to Jesus:

• Commit to a new intentional prayer practice.

• Fast. You may find “fasting” from social media to be helpful. However, every time the Bible talks about “fasting,” it’s in the context of food. Try fasting for one meal each week.

• Find a special charity in your area to give to.

• Research a particular social issue that interests you, something that affects you and your neighbors (domestic abuse, mass incarceration, creation care, public education, homelessness, food insecurity). Notice the ways it affects your neighbors.

• Read a devotional classic (Dark Night of the Soul, Imitation of Christ, The Cloud of Unknowing, Interior Castle, The Rule of Benedict).

• Pay attention to the cries of the needy, create space to listen rather than judge. Pay attention to the margins. Watch for the “shadows” in your community. Who are the “invisible people”?

• Accept God’s invitation to mourn, lament, and feel sadness over the brokenness and suffering in the world.

• Soak in the Gospels and Psalms of lament.

• Embrace lament as a spiritual discipline.

• Notice the interior clutter of your life. Perhaps schedule a meeting with a spiritual director.

The ways of engaging Lent are endless, but they all bring us to the same place: ready to join the resurrection work of Jesus in the world.

When the sun rises on Easter morning, seven weeks from now, everything changes.

God will be growing something new.

If you want to dig deeper into the church calendar and the meaning of Lent, be sure to check out Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year by Robert Webber.