A Different Perspective on Lent

By Bob Hostetler, submitted by Barb Batt

One of the features of my childhood was a cardboard box on our kitchen table during the Lenten season, to collect all of the loose change in the household. On Good Friday, we took it to church and donated it to a “self-denial” fund that benefited missions. Others in my school and neighborhood fasted or abstained from red meat on Fridays during Lent or gave up sweets or television.

Those are fairly common practices, as they help followers of Jesus to observe a season of reflection and repentance for the 40 days leading up to Good Friday and Easter. But this year? Sure, reflection and repentance are always a good idea, but many of us have sacrificed more than usual since last Easter. We’ve laid aside plans, trips, family gatherings and more.

So maybe this year, we can observe Lent in a different—but still meaningful and helpful—way. Maybe this year, instead of giving up something for Lent, we can flip the focus of our prayers and spiritual practices and appreciate what we might gain during this season. Such as what? you ask. Here are four possibilities:

1)  Steep Yourself in Quiet

Do you feel as though you’re surrounded by turmoil and assaulted with bad news? Lent can be a season of turning off the tumult and finding ways to meditate on and experience the shepherd’s Psalm: 

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters,
He refreshes my soul (Psalm 23:1-2, NIV)

So turn off the newscast. Skip listening to the radio in the car. Maybe sit in a park or city church at midday and listen…to the quiet.

2)  Look for a Fresh Perspective

Remember Elijah after his showdown with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18)? He was exhausted. He felt isolated, alone, the last sane voice in the entire nation. But he wasn’t. God spoke and informed Elijah that there were still thousands of faithful souls who could be counted alongside him (see 1 Kings 19:18). This man of God gained a new outlook. 

A change in routine—even an unwelcome disruption—can provide a fresh perspective, if we talk it through with God. He will often (as He did Elijah) restore us and point us in a new direction, if we’re listening. So don’t just spend these days leading up to Easter waiting and wailing. Keep asking, seeking and knocking (see Matthew 7:7). As you pray, look for God to give you a fresh point of view.

3)  Pursue Some Peace

The prophet Isaiah prayed, “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in You, all whose thoughts are fixed on You!” (Isaiah 26:3, NLT). What would happen if you made that your daily prayer during Lent? If you fixed your thoughts on God, could you let go of a longstanding grudge? With His help, could you forgive a long-ago hurt? Could you trust Him enough and make that long-overdue phone call? 

When Jesus wept over Jerusalem, He said, “If you had only known today what would bring you peace!” (Luke 19:42, GWT). Do you know what will bring you peace? Why not make the choices that would bring you inner calm this Lenten season?

4)  Don’t Give Up on Healing

Could Lent be a time of healing for you? Would it be a physical healing? A financial breakthrough? A fractured relationship mended? 

Sure, it may be a sacrifice to give up salt or red meat during Lent, but wouldn’t that improve your cholesterol? You may find it hard to pray for a neighbor who irritates you, but what if it lowered your blood pressure? You might have given up praying for an outcome, but then you’d surely miss the one prayer that might lead to healing.

When Jesus asked the man at the Pool of Bethesda, “Do you want to get well?” the man replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me" (John 5:7, NIV). He felt friendless and frustrated. And that had been going on for years. But on this particular day, Jesus met him and said, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk” (John 5:8, NIV). And the man picked up his mat and walked. 

Have you stopped praying and hoping? Why not take prayerful healing steps this Lenten season to change that?

Maybe this year, however else you might observe Lent, try shifting your focus and looking for what you might gain.

May Today There Be Peace

Submitted by Marilyn Travis

I came across this blog entry from St. Benedict’s Monastery, St. Joseph, Minnesota, September 23, 2010. I found it particularly timely and the two poems referred to here especially meaningful in this time of Lent. I invite you to take some time with this. As poet Minnie Louise Haskins suggests, “put your hand in the hand of God” and go forth!

May Today There Be Peace Within

 “Don’t be anxious,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel (Mk 6:34). But frankly, I’ve been wondering how we are supposed to do that in this terrifying world in which we live. I sometimes wake up in the 3 a.m. “hour of the dragon” and am faced with some of the challenges facing people of every nation and the very health of fragile earth.

I could list all those things that seem to be going wrong around us, and so could you. I could tell stories of people I know and love, stories from my Sisters and our guests in the monastery that underscore the risky world we live in. So could you from your own experience. You and I know we sometimes sit around and spin the risk until we are looking at a catastrophe. So what are we to do?

In 1908 the poet Minnie Louise Haskins published the poem “The Gate of Year,” part of a collection titled The Desert. Her poem was widely acclaimed as inspirational, reaching its first mass audience in the early days of the Second World War. Those of us who lived some portion of those years, or who have since studied that time in history, know that it, too, was a risky time threatening mass destruction of the world. Haskins wrote in part: “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’ So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.“

What was there in that poem that caught the imagination of people of all nations? For those of us who believe in a God who desires only our good, it seems an affirmation that we can trust God. In our times of anxiety, it seems a better light and safer way than anything else.

St. Therese of Lisieux born 85 years before Minnie wrote her poem, offers us comparable words of trust in the midst of this age of anxiety:

May today there be peace within.

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.

May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.

May you be content knowing you are a child of God.

Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.

Growing in God's Grace

By Donna Winchell

 

 

When I was a child I always thought of Lent as a time to choose something to give up like candy and sweets, and to abide by the practice of eating meatless meals every Friday. Boy could my mom come up with some of the weirdest meatless meals, but I’ll save those stories for another time. I honestly never considered the deeper meaning of what we were doing. That by giving up meat we were honoring Christ who sacrificed his flesh on a Friday – Good Friday. My abstinence from candy and meat was really a form of penance and a way to turn away from sin and to turn back to God.

There is something rewarding about abstinence and self-denial during Lent – giving up something allows us to make a tangible sacrifice to the Lord. I love that and won’t be changing the practice from my childhood; but I also plan to use Lent for building my relationship with God, so I can cultivate that relationship far beyond the next six weeks of Lent. I want to become a better human being, to know God more and not just know about God. In 2021, I want to use this season to grow more deeply in God’s grace. I must do some searching in my mind and heart to see what is needed to move in that direction. I need God’s help to do that.

 “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24).

Lent calls us to a self-examination that reflects upon our need for God. To do this we need to honestly answer some tough questions. I invite you to join with me in this self-examination if you also desire to build your relationship with God this Lent.

Starting with prayer we need to ask our Heavenly Father to show us areas in life that are counter to His desire for us as we consider the following questions:

 ·         Am I consciously or unconsciously creating the impression that I am a better person than I really am; In other words, am I a hypocrite?

·         Am I honest in all acts or words, or do I exaggerate?

·         Do I confidentially pass on to another what was told to me in confidence? Can I be trusted?

·         Am I a slave to dress, friends, work or habits?

·         Am I self-conscious, self-pitying, or self-justifying?

·         Did the Bible live in me today?

·         Do I give it time to speak to me each day?

·         Am I enjoying prayer?

·         When did I last speak to somebody else with the object of trying to win that person for Christ?

·         Am I making contacts with other people and using them for the Master’s Glory?

·         Do I pray about the money I spend?

·         Do I get to bed on time and get up on time?

·         Do I disobey God in anything?

·         Do I insist upon doing something for which my conscience is uneasy?

·         Am I delegated in any part of my life? Am I jealous, impure, critical, irritable, touchy or distrustful?

·         How do I spend my spare time?

·         Am I proud?

·         Do I thank God I am not as other people, especially as the Pharisees who despised the publican?

·         Is there anybody whom I fear, dislike, disown, criticize, hold a resentment toward or disregard? If so, what am I doing about it?

·         Do I grumble or complain constantly?

·         Is Christ real to me?

                               Taken from Wesleyan Heritage HQL-9826, p.24

Sisters and brothers in Christ, through this self-examination may we gain the perspective that God desires us to have; and to use this Lenten season to grow more deeply in God’s grace.

 

About Celebrities & Living Small: A Lent to Repent & Live in the Universe of Jesus

By Ann Voskamp, submitted by Brooke Momblow

My mother lives round the corner from a graveyard, and when I drive by in the falling white of a winter night, I look at headstones in snow and it’s true:

Celebrity or saint, scoundrel or steward, there’s a plot of dirt waiting for us all just the same. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, is the way of all of us.

On a Wednesday in February, the Wednesday where we bow and humbly wear our mortality with a smudge of soot, I think of the Body of Christ hurting in all the ways, as I set out our Lenten Wreath. Set out the carved wooden silhouette of Jesus who carried the weight of the cross, the whole aching span of history, on His back.

Honestly, on the Shrove Sunday before Ash Wednesday, I leaned up against a window sill and wept, sick of the cult of personality, sick of supremacy (of anyone over anyone), sick of celebrity, sick of sin, sick of hypocrisy, sick of me. I am the very chief among sinners, the one who says with Chesterton: “What’s wrong with the world? Dear World, I am.”

Sitting at the frayed edge of a Lent in a hurting world, preparing to repent and follow Jesus, the Antithetical Celebrity, through the next 40 days, toward an altar to surrender all, I reach over and pick up that cruciform silhouette of cruciform Jesus and I just keep returning to what this last year has ignited in me:

I no longer just believe in Jesus, I live in Jesus and He is not some optional addendum to my life but my only atmosphere to stay alive and I repent of all the days of living in the Universe of Self, instead of living in the Universe of Christ. If you exit the Universe of Self to live in the Universe of Christ where Jesus is your every breath, you never stop saying it with every breath:

Don’t follow me.

Don’t follow anybody but the Perfect One who had to take on a body.  

Don’t follow anybody made of flesh, because flesh will fail & fall.

Follow Jesus alone, who alone can save.

When the church exits the Universe of Self to live in the Universe of Christ, we repent of our idols and our celebrities, repent of our ways that are Babel’s ways, repent of our addiction to pedestals and golden calfs and grind them all down to dust because we know that which we are made of.

All celebrity has a responsibility to tear down pedestals,
And all of us have a responsibility to not build any pedestals.

All of us: Tear down our pedestals with daily transparency and vulnerability, lest we fall with pride. We limp bruised. We keep turning, and turning around, turning and repenting from the Universe of Self and Celebrity, to turn toward the Universe of Christ that operates with an entirely counter-mentality:

Celebrity has platforms to grow brands, Christianity has altars to come and die.

Celebrity seeks visibility. Christianity seeks self-invisiblity so only Christ is visible though everything.

Celebrity rises to be untouchable. Christianity kneels low to pour out for those mistreated as untouchables.

Celebrity may have all the blue checks, but someday we will all tremble and stand before God for a character check, and the only hope for any of us will be the Scarlet Grace of Christ.

We, the church, repent of raising up celebrities instead of celebrating in our Maker who made all equally in the image of God.

We turn from our idolizing ways to care more about the marginalized and poverty-stricken and the sacrificing ways of God.

We, the church, repent of the way we have done church instead of humbly being the church.

We turn from our dependence on microphones and big lights to share the message, and turn toward serving in micro ways and being the light, by sharing all that we have so that our very lives become the stronger message.

We, the church, repent: Personal sin never stays personal; personal sin grows into horizontal cancer. That only shrinks when it’s brought to the Light, and we stay in the Light, breathe in the Light, live in the Light.

We repent: The root of all kinds of evil in the world is entitlement in our hearts.

We repent: Never let any hypocrisy of a leader hinder any of your intimacy with God.

We repent in sack cloth and ashes, turn to witness God raise beauty from even these ashes.

On the cusp of Lent, we turn and return again to the season where a year ago, the world came face to face with the pandemic of COVID. And maybe a limping year later, we enter this Lent walking more of the humble Way of Jesus:

Mega church has become micro church, microphones and platforms have given way to micro-communities that are spiritually formational and, in these strange days are we becoming more of what Jesus has always modeled:

Small is the real great. Local is where it’s at. Micro ministry reaps macro growth. Local and small is the greatest of all. Because: Ministry is not about going big or go home. In ministry — going big can blow up your home in Christ.

We repent: Travel itineraries with little accountability can lead to great misery. Go Big at the peril of your own soul. The Jesus Way of Ministry turns to walk another way: Go small to Go Home.

Just look at the Way of Jesus.

This is why we repent and turn, to turn and look to the Way of Jesus, to the face of Jesus.

We bow and bend and enter Lent and whisper:

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we live in the Universe of Jesus, where the hand of God sculpts bits of soil into souls, where the breath of God kisses dust to life, where we do more than believe in Jesus, we breathe in Jesus, we live in Jesus.

There are headstones in graveyards round the corner. But we repent and keep company with Jesus, through our days, through Lent, through to the end, more than only believing in Him, but actually living in Him, in the Universe of Christ — where even dust can resurrect.