When God began his particularization of the plan of redemption, he chose Abraham to be the father of a vast race of people defined by faith, a covenant relationship with himself, and a calling to be agents of witness and blessing in the world. God’s people have always been “a peculiar people,” radically distinct from the cultures around them.
God made these peculiarities concrete for Israel through laws, testimonies, and precepts. Essentially, Israel was to be his holy (i.e., set apart) people. Therefore, Israel was given instructions on the forms and practices of worship and Sabbath that struck to the root of the accumulation of wealth and exhausting drivenness to achieve. She was taught Godly morality, ethical behavior, justice, compassion, protection, and provision for the most vulnerable people in society, the weak, strangers, widows, orphans, children, and the poor. Practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, rooted in the grace and mercy Israel had received from God, were taught. Character traits of humility, compassion, gratitude, and radical generosity were commended and commanded. Overall, Israel was called to be fruitful, living in the world for the sake of others, giving witness to the God from whom all blessings flow.
Distinctive peculiarity still defines the Church: 1 Peter 1:14-19; 2: 9-12, 21-25; 3:8-17.
One way that the Church has determined to put Christian peculiarity into practice is by living by the Church Calendar --- how we tell time. All the seasons of the Church Calendar set us on a different path from that marked by the Hallmark-Sports-School-Political calendar of our world. Our two most counter-cultural seasons are those where we step into reduction, quietness, reflection, and simplicity, Advent and Lent.
In these early days of entering into a Holy Lent, I am helped in my resolve by remembering some basic principles of this season.
We do not reduce (fast) out of some heroic, Spartan virtue of bodily self-denial but in order to strengthen our appetite for spiritual life and unseen realities. We reduce so that we can gain space, time, and money to spend on learning and satisfying deeper hungers with truer food. Our fasting should always be coupled with our feasting, even in Lent. We may choose to fast, for instance, for an hour from distractions of technology and to-do lists first thing in the morning in order to feast on God’s presence, our ears more alert to the voice of the Shepherd.
We strengthen our spiritual practices in order to deepen our spiritual practices beyond simply doing into understanding. For instance, we may seek to strengthen our prayer life, our speaking to God, only to discover that God has already been speaking to us. He’s waiting for us to listen so that our speaking (praying) can be in response to his promptings. We may read the Gospels more attentively in order to strengthen obedience to the commands of Jesus, only to find that every obedience opens the door to the experience of God’s intimate presence (one of our deepest longings) more widely. Obedience becomes a matter of friendship, not following some strict code of life.
We find that, in reduction and silence, we become more human, more alive. Our current culture’s drive to assertively claim full humanity through satisfying all desires and consuming all goods – denying ourselves nothing – expresses fundamental confusion concerning our deepest identity. Counterintuitively, not satisfying all our desires, not consuming every possible food and pleasure, opens the door to becoming more fully human. Why? Because we are made for God, to live in fellowship with him, to have our souls attuned to God, to walk in even greater joys than those found in the pleasures and beauties of this world. The joys and pleasures of this life can be truly delightful, and we have countless reasons to give thanks to the Giver of every good and perfect gift. At the same time, we are called to remember that this is not our truest, best life. This is not the most beautiful world we will inhabit. This is not the sweetest music we will hear. THIS life is preparation for REAL life in eternity. The Church has always wisely believed that, in order to feed the soul we must concretely deny the flesh. Spiritual disciplines are needed to guard and wean ourselves from the golden calves of sensuality and pleasure so that we can feast on sweeter food and prepare ourselves for the deeper pleasures that the Lord wants us to have.
Lent is not a season of strange spiritual disciplines to be endured only so that we can get back to living our normal lives in Eastertide. Rev. Dave Linka’s Ash Wednesday sermon spoke wisely to this. He told the congregation (which included Sally and me) that everything called for in Lent is called for in the everyday Christian life. The ways that Lent calls us to greater attentiveness to our souls and to the Lord himself are the very practices that fuel Christian maturity. Lent simply reminds and reinforces in us the values and practices of the normalChristian life. It is not a season we “endure until it’s over and we can return to normal” but a season that stays with us. It is not an endless cycle of spiritual dieting followed by weight regain followed by another round of dieting followed by another round of weight regain . . . Lent allows us to experience and redefine spiritual vitality for the rest of our lives.
Lent affords an opportunity to learn something unique and new in our relationship with the Lord. That may sound like a contradiction to the previous paragraph, but it’s not. It is an addition. Lent is reinforcing the normal AND introducing the new.
This year, the Lord forced me into a bit of a spiritual corner before Ash Wednesday. In desperation and no little frustration, I poured myself out before the Lord in my journal. Eventually, I exhausted my complaints. Worn out, I was out of words. Then, I finally began to listen. The Lord spoke two words into that silence, sanctuary and chastening. He was calling me to a season of chastening, offering to shelter me in the sanctuary of his presence. These are obviously not unknown words. They are, however, strange words in my normal inner lexicon. So for Lent, I am determined to bring those two words into conscious consideration at the beginning of every day.
- Chastening: Something that moderates, rebukes, or restrains us so that we are humbled, purified, subdued, and silenced, so that we want to improve or change. Its deepest etymological root seems to be the word for being made pure.
- Sanctuary: A place of refuge and protection, a sanctified place of worship and rest.
A couple of days in, I’m learning new and precious things in this Lenten discipline that the Lord lovingly forced upon me. God was kind enough to paint me into a corner and speak to me, but you don’t need to be that hardheaded. Any of us can set aside a time of silence and listening, get our junk out on the table, clear out the internal clutter, and seek the Lord for a special Lenten word, phrase, or practice through which he can reshape our lives for the long haul.
This year, with so much chaos and pain in our world through social and political conflict, physical illness and death, family conflicts, church conflicts, and our shared proclivities toward misunderstanding and defensiveness, Lent offers us a wonderful gift of penitential resetting of our souls Godward. Receive this season with gratitude. Determine to observe (and receive) a Holy Lent.
SERVUS SERVORUM DEI,
Bishop Steve