Lent

Lent commeth.

Originally a period of education, in preparation for new membership in the Church at Easter, Lent has transitioned in recent decades to represent a time of penance and plea for forgiveness. It has moved from preparation for a positive inclusion, albeit an orthodox one, to a season of focus on faults, weaknesses and sinfulness.

It is time that we tied these two things together in some creative and imaginative ways.

Each of us acknowledges, I think and hope, that Church membership does not make one right, perfect or sinless. Look around. No one is ideal. Look in the mirror and take honest stock of weaknesses, faults and idiosyncrasies. We are not right, perfect or sinless. The shear fact of the matter is that, despite our membership, we are often wrong, imperfect and sinful.

We could move through Lent as an occasion for making ourselves feel terribly. It has been done far too often. We could recite sins, faults and foibles until we grow blue in the face. We could demand resolutions or sacrifices to be made in order to make us feel better about our wrongdoings, or that liturgies be recited, like incantations, that magically repair what is, at core, pathological in us. We could spend periods of silence and meditation, where we concentrate on our innate humanness and our flawed nature.

To do so would simply make us feel badly about ourselves. To claim that the ritual incantations and sacrifices render us healed, better, more right, more sinless, more perfect is silly. The issue is not that the incantations and rituals don't work. It is that they are wrongly focused. Do you see it? Do you perceive the seasonal misdirection here?

Lent 's focus has far too often been on ourselves. Lent has become a season of fixing ourselves, healing innate sinfulness and natural, human flaws. It, like so much else in the Church, has been about us, we, me and I. In fact, that is why many, particularly in the past, had joined churches. They had been led to think that there was something wrong with them that only the Church could fix. That flaw is overcome in humanity only by God, and the institutions that represent the sacred.

What if we were to see Lent differently? What if we were to see it as the season of walking with Jesus to the Cross of his own sacrifice. The subject of that spiritual sentence would be Jesus Christ. Its object would be every other, those served by the sacrifice that Jesus Christ makes. Lent is not about him. It is not about us. It is about every person. It is about the sacrifices that we make for others, not for ourselves.

If we return to the notion that Lent is time of preparation for entering (again) into the Church, what if that entry meant serving others instead of overcoming our own faults, weaknesses and sins? What if Lent were about being a Church of sacrifice for others, building others up and empowering them in whatever context they find themselves.

Sinfulness, and our Lenten concentration on our own sinfulness, is deadly. It kills the mission of the Church. Instead, if Lent could be about a walk with an imperfect, sinful, uncertain savior to the service of every living being, past, present and future, then we could begin to move the emphasis from ourselves to serving those around us who suffer and struggle. Lent could be about them, just like the ministry and mission of Jesus Christ was and is about them.