By Scott Herr
This coming Sunday, February 22nd, is the first Sunday of Lent, the season which began on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday before Easter. It’s a forty-day season patterned on the “temptations of Christ” recorded in both Matthew 4 and Luke 4 where Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil for forty days. Traditionally, Lent is a penitential period and many sanctuaries are adorned with the color purple. Thankfully, Sundays even in Lent, are considered “mini-Easters” and so not “fast” days!
Lent is the “Holy Spring” of the Church. It’s a time for renewal and refreshment. It’s a time for new life. The English word Lent comes from the Old English word “lencten,” which means “lengthening” and reminds us of the lengthening of days that is part of nature’s Spring. Lent is fundamentally a time not only to prepare for, but to experience Easter new life. Many Christians have inherited the tradition that Lent is a time to “give up something.” The early monastic communities would take this time to fast and “give up” their food so they could be more generous in giving alms to the poor.
Lent is not a time to simply deprive yourself of something so that you feel miserable, as though that has anything to do with healthy spirituality. No, if we give up something, it is to create space for God; for God to do something new in and/or through us. In other words, when we “give up” something for Lent, it should be accompanied with eager anticipation for God to give us something new and even more precious or fulfilling! Typical spiritual disciplines of Lent are increased prayer, scripture reading, fasting and serving the poor. We do this not merely out of a sense of duty, but to rediscover our First Love, and the gift of creating space for God in our crowded lives to cultivate deeper relationship and collaboration with our Creator and Friend.
For Lent this year, I will be inviting our congregation to reflect on, in addition to the lectionary texts, a different question for each of the five Sundays leading up to Holy Week. The questions come from my journey along “The Camino Santiago,” the 500-mile pilgrimage in Northern Spain I enjoyed back in 2017. They are questions which I find helpful in rediscovering the Way of Jesus, and to finding our way to new life which I believe is the point of the Lenten season. The five questions are:
1)“Does it give life, or take life away?”
2)“Does it expand your world, or shrink it?”
3)“Does it lead you more deeply into mystery and paradox, or black and white reality?”
4)“Does it set you free to give yourself away to something bigger than yourself, or enslave you to the fear of ‘not enough’?”
5)“Does it bring you and others joy, or despair?”
Perhaps you might find these questions helpful in discerning the way forward on your life journey? It’s interesting to me that the temptations of Jesus helped clarify who he was in relation to God, and prepared him for his public ministry to others. I pray you will find Lent to be not just a time to give something up, but a time to receive something new from the God who loves you, and calls you forward to Easter new life!
The Rev. Dr. Scott Herr is one of the pastors serving the First Presbyterian Church of New Canaan (fpcnc.org)
