Little could we have imagined how much our world could change for the course of a year. Just a year ago we were entering into Lent anticipating again that embarkation for a journey into deeper relationship with God. We remember how the church created this period of 40 days prior to Easter as a time of preparation for hearing and receiving that death-shattering good news. We remember how this time was structured to parallel Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness and all of those other 40-day (and year) periods in scripture when God's people would be challenged to grow into the people who God intended them to be. Could any of us a year ago have imagined how the mention of toilet-paper shortages would bring a knowing nod? Could any of us have imagined that we would be carrying the weight of over a half a million deaths from the pandemic in our country alone, in less than a year? It is easy to grow numb as we wander in the wilderness. Or could any of us have imagined that we would holding an Ash Wednesday drive-through ashes, communion, and chili supper? It continues to be quite a year!
I would like to think that, even during the exhaustion, this year has offered us lots of opportunities to deepen our faith journey. This season of Lent would be a good time to reflect on that perspective as a guide for how we might draw closer to God.
Often in Lent I have heard people talk about what they will “give up.” This is a response to that wilderness experience of Jesus when after forty days it says that he was famished. This has been translated by the church into such things as fast days and giving up flesh meat during Lent (for some this included even dairy and eggs). At some point in history, we see fish allowed — a practice that some connect back to a concern for the fishing economy, while others connect the fish back to it being a simple pauper’s food. Of course, many of us now look to eating fish not as a hardship but a treat — the opposite of a fast. Always, the concern of fast days and dietary laws is to focus our attention and our prayer life on God and our faith. So, if fish-fry does that for you, go for it! But if not, then perhaps there are other ways to create reminders that reorient your life to God's ways. In a year in which so much has been taken away already, I would encourage the Lenten discipline of adding an expression of God's grace rather than subtracting one more thing. What small thing happens for you every day or every week that you could use as a reminder to practice the prayer discipline of generously sharing in God's grace. Perhaps it is stopping before you take your first sip of coffee to set aside an offering for charity, or a prayer for peace for the world, or love for your enemies? Is it a new discipline that when you do your laundry, you consider what emotions you are carrying that you need to let God's love flow over and wash away? Perhaps we need to choose what we could add to our daily discipline in this season that would nurture our souls.
Last year I shared a prayer from The Iona Community in Scotland that I read again this year with very different eyes:
You keep us waiting. You, the God of all time, want us to wait for the right time in which to discover who we are, where we must go, who will be with us, and what we must do. So, thank you…for the waiting time.
You keep us looking. You, the God of all space, want us to look in the right and wrong places for signs of hope, for people who are hopeless, for visions of a better world that will appear among the disappointments of the world we know. So, thank you…for the looking time.
You keep us loving. You, the God whose name is love, want us to be like you – to love the loveless and the unlovely and the unlovable; to love without jealousy or design or threat, and most difficult of all, to love ourselves. So, thank you…for the loving time.
And in all this you keep us, through hard questions with no easy answers; through failing where we hoped to succeed and making an impact when we felt useless; through the patience and the dreams and the love of others; and through Jesus Christ and his Spirit, you keep us.
So thank you… for the keeping time, and for now, and for ever. Amen
We know that God journeys with us in love and invites us to be servants of that gift. May God bless us again with a hunger to live God's love and ways in this Lenten season,