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The
whole church-Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant-enters
this week into that annual period of devotional frenzy we call LENT.
The
forty days from Ash Wednesday through Easter is considered
an especially holy time. Traditionally
it has been thought of as a time of preparation
for Easter, a time in which Christians seek to purify themselves
by partaking of extra helpings of sacrifice, self-denial,
and spiritual
discipline.
Lent
is seen as a time to be "extra good." The
idea here is to try to make yourself more worthy of the great
gift of eternal life which God gives us through the resurrection
of
Jesus on Easter Day. The
way most people have come to think of Lent, I suppose, is that
it is a kind of spiritual "shape up and slim down" exercise.
The
way it works is that each of us is supposed to identify some
particular excess that gives us a lot of pleasure. Then
we try to give that very thing up for the next forty days,
hoping that God will notice and think better of us. After
all, why wouldn't he (or she)?
The
assumption is that we'll be better,
more spiritual people by learning about and exercising
our willpower over our typical enslavement to earthly, material
appetites.
And,
of course, the only problem is that it doesn't
work. We may wind up hungrier, smarter, or with lower
cholesterol but it's a given that, with all our well-intentioned
efforts,
we have not produced the slightest change in our relationship
with God. If
you have tried to observe Lent this way and found it, year
after year, as fruitless as a bunch of broken New Year's resolutions,
you need to change your understanding.
This
view of Lent is based on a false assumption: that
you can overcome sin and
failure by trying harder; that the opposite of sin is "being
good" or "doing right." That is certainly not
the Biblical view.
Instead,
sin is seen as a matter of DISTANCE or SEPARATION.
It is a state of being apart from God, living
out of harmony or out of unity with the One who is the
only truth and meaning there is to life.
That
condition is the real
problem, and the bad behaviors we typically think of
as sins are actually the symptoms. There's
only one "cure" and
it's not being "good."
The
cure is receiving the reconciliation that only Jesus
Christ can give to us as a free
gift of grace. But you need to acknowledge and accept
it.
You
see, sin's authentic opposite is simply Faith--being
fully committed
to, trusting, and living in-synch with God everyday
because you're grateful and you want to say thanks.
Living thankfully
leads to right actions. The
point is this: Every single one of us is always and already
loved absolutely, profoundly, and unconditionally by the God
who created us and who knows us better than we know ourselves.
Lent
is a time to discover anew that great Truth and
its reality for you. Far from giving
up something, how about taking on
something? How about opening your mind and your heart to
the presence of God?
Living
with God at your center will teach
you all you need to know about Thanks-living. If you can
do that, Lent will be a time of total personal
transformation
and Easter this year will truly be something very, very
special indeed.
Faithfully,
Bob Hansel
From
THE
CHRONICLE, February 10, 2002, the newsletter of Calvary
Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee.
Copyright ©2002 Calvary Episcopal Church
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