Invitation to a Holy Lent
Link to video: https://youtu.be/eDX8xde8gwg
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
March 6 2022—Lent 1C
In the BCP service for Ash Wednesday, there is a passage called Invitation to a Holy Lent.
“Dear People of God,” it begins
And then speaks of the history and practice of the season of Lent,
of preparation and fasting, of self-examination and repentance,
all leading to reconciliation and restoration of relationship
It’s a lovely, formal passage, with echoes of the first English prayer book to it.
There are “therefore,”s and even “thereby”s in it,
and I’m not sure I could proclaim it to you without going full English
So I will commend it to you (BCP 264) and share with you
a slightly pithier Lenten invitation, from English priest Sam Wells
(HeartEdge Sermon Workshop video, Facebook)
“Lent is fundamentally about asking the Holy Spirit to take away
the one significant thing that stands between you and God right now.”
[Which, he notes, might mean you doing something new,
might mean you stopping something old.]
But what does that mean? What sorts of things stand between us and God?
In wilderness, Satan attempts to put several things between Jesus and God:
Comfort: I will make these stones into bread
I will take away your hunger, take away any sense of need
I will make you full, and happy (and then, perhaps, complacent)
Power: I will give you authority over all the kingdoms of this world
You will have fame, and access to all sorts of things
You can even, perhaps, command people and order things
To be the way you think they should be
(this one, honestly, is probably the most tempting one for the idealist,
for the one who is so clear on the ways that the world is
wrong and broken and awful)
Invulnerability: You can throw yourself off the temple and angels will save you
Essentially: You will be released from fear,
because you do not even need to fear death
Jesus says no to all of these things
Tempting as they are, all of them would have stood between him and God
Would have pointed him AWAY from God’s kingdom
God’s kingdom includes all of them, but in a different, much larger way.
As Wells points out, Jesus says a bigger yes to all of them, later on in the story:
He turned down bread in the wilderness, but made loaves and fishes to feed 5000
He turned down worldly power over the kingdoms of the earth,
But lived and preached the kingdom of God for all people
He turned down invulnerability,
But suffered and died on the cross, only to rise again
showing that God’s power lives and breathes and triumphs,
even through the cruelty and death that exist in this world
Jesus said no to all these things that would have come between him and God:
Comfort and power and the desire to avoid suffering.
Said no to them, so that he could say yes to the versions of them that
bring God closer for everyone
And some version of those things might well be the things
Standing between us and God too
Comfort? Not for nothing do people give up pleasures and indulgences for Lent
They don’t just expand our waistlines:
they can encourage a self-indulgence
and an ease that let us ask very little of ourselves.
And having our own needs met so extravagantly
can allow us to be less aware of the needs of others
Power? Well, there is certainly danger in the seduction
of worldly status and influence, in the seeking of admiration
… and the urge to pull others down
And the instinct for self-protection, and a desire to avoid suffering
Which can prevent us from living fully,
and drive us into the arms of unhealthy coping mechanisms,
as we seek to insulate ourselves from the pains of this world
Lent invites us to examine our lives deeply, to think about these things.
Not with the goal of perfect behavior
But simply a fuller relationship with God
As Wells notes, it is the Spirit that drives this action
And the Spirit who can accomplish in us
the work that we can’t do by ourselves
We go into our own inner ground, and in the stillness, the Spirit transforms
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent.