Lent, Ashes, and the Way of the Cross
If you are new to St. Patrick or come from a non-liturgical tradition, you might wonder why you are hearing about Lent, fasting, Fat Tuesday, and Ash Wednesday. You might even be thinking, do these things have anything to do with the gospel? Or, I thought only Catholics did those sorts of things? Or, is St. Patrick into “high church” stuff? Whatever your questions are, I am glad you are asking them. What once looked weird and mysterious to me is now bread and wine to me. So, I am glad if you are asking why St. Patrick is totally dedicated to a Liturgical Calendar which includes a season of fasting and rubbing death into your face. Let me start with our calendar.
Liturgical Calendar
Why do we celebrate special days and seasons in the church? Well, the short answer is this: we all have personal calendars that mark birthdays, anniversaries, and special events known only to our families. We all live by a civic calendar that has twelve holidays that determine our vacations and time off. We also have the Hallmark calendar, which monitors our romance and reminds us when to send valentines and spend money on our children or beloved. If we go back in ancient history, God’s ancient people Israel didn’t have a catechism to teach their people; they had seven feasts. Everything that a faithful Jew needed to know, he lived out every single year through these feasts.
So, the ancient church, knowing that we are people that live by a seasonal and civic calendar, made a liturgical calendar so that on certain days each year we walk through the life of Christ. Annually we have the seasons of Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Pentecost, etc. On these days we mark and remember the redemptive work of Jesus in our lives.
I say this to some of my evangelical friends and the usual response is: “Well, I thought we celebrated Christ’s death and resurrection every Sunday, so why do we need to make special days for these things?” Here is what I say to these friends, who are unknowingly liturgical in their personal and civic lives, yet not in their redemptive lives: The reason we set aside days of remembrance, like Christmas and Easter (Ironically, my friends who think Lent is a little much still celebrate the Incarnation and Resurrection with special days!) is because familiarity breeds not contempt but indifference. In other words, we hear about the gospel all the time, and the tendency is for it to lose its wonder. It is for this reason we set aside special days of remembrance and celebration – to restore the wonder!
In essence, when we do this we are doing the same thing we do when we set aside time for our children’s birthdays. I asked Teri on Monday morning what she was up to that day. She told me several things and then said she was going by Bethan’s house to help prepare for our granddaughter Betsy’s first birthday and to talk with her about her own mother’s birthday. My clan will celebrate both of these events this weekend. To get ready for these birthdays, there is much preparation. My women folk will spend hours on flowers, banners, invitations, cakes, and getting the house ready. I will get calls from my boys on what delicious things we will cook, and we will spend hours getting ready to feed masses of people that come to celebrate a small child’s birthday. Why? Why all this? Are we saying that Betsy is special and loved on this one day only? Do we only love Betsy on this one special day? Of course not! But Betsy is one year old, and she is a lot of work. As cute as she is, it takes a lot to keep her rolling. So the reason we make a big deal out of birthdays in my clan is to set aside time to remember – “Our family members are special; they are, in fact, amazing and, lest we take them for granted, we are setting aside this time to honor them.”
This is the logic of Lent, Christmas, and Easter. We set aside days that sort of knock us in the head and say, “Look! Wake-up!” We need this to help recalibrate our hearts to the rhythms of grace.
Lent
Lent — The word Lent comes from a word that means “springtime.” The season of Lent is the 40 days in which we prepare our hearts for Easter. (Sundays don’t count; in the Bible they are always “feast days.”) You say, well, why 40 days?” Short answer — If you prepare like my family does for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations or vacations, don’t you think we should have a good long runway to prepare for celebrating the greatest feast day of all – Easter, Resurrection Sunday!
The season of Lent comes, appropriately, in the springtime, and a good way to look at this time of preparation is like a gardener looking at his garden and beds this time of year. This time of year every year, I spend hours weeding, tilling, cutting, fertilizing, and preparing my beds to receive seed. It is backbreaking, hard, sometimes boring, and often you see little fruit in it. The reason I do this is to prepare for fruit. Lent is much like that. Lent is a time of preparing our hearts and, for this reason, the focus is on repentance. Repentance is turning from our sin and self back to God. We weed sin out of our life, we water new habits, and re-align our hearts with the truth of the gospel. Is this hard? Yes! Is it worth it? Yes, because as Jesus says, “…truth sets us free.” So as you prune and weed sin in your heart this Lenten season, let me give you a few things to think about:
- Self-examination: Lent is when we take inventory of our heart to see what needs to be confessed and forsaken.
- Self-denial: Lent is a time of fasting. For many of us, this is a time we give up things we love, like certain foods or drinks – good things in and of themselves, but things that, when we give them up, remind us that only Jesus can fill the true hunger of our souls.
- Self-giving: Lent is also a time that, as we turn from sin, we turn to our neighbors and think about how we can serve them better. The Prophets often said a “true fast” was to take care of people in the culture who had no cultural power or who added nothing to your reputation.
- Habits of Grace: Lent is a time to turn back to daily and weekly habits of Bible reading, prayer, and engagement in community and worship. You simply can’t say you are serious about Jesus if you neglect the “Habits of Grace.”
So there it is! The whole season of Lent is to help you get more of Jesus! More joy! More freedom! More love for the broken world and people around you! Don’t you want that? At St. Patrick, there is no magic in this, in fact the opposite; this is hard! This is death! This feels like a cross! Death before resurrection. If you are still not convinced, please join us in fasting from something; ask God to be more real and see what happens. You don’t have long, the season of Lent starts today with Ash Wednesday!
Ash Wednesday
We start our Lenten journey as a community at St. Patrick here today with ashes – with death rubbed on our foreheads. Why, pray tell, that? Ashes? Isn’t that medieval? Again, the short answer is this: for birthdays, we have a cake and candles. For anniversaries, we have flowers and pledges of renewal. For the beginning of Lent, we have ashes. Alas, we are not ghosts, but spirits that inhabit bodies and as such we need physical things – signs and symbols to represent or enact things we value. In the Bible, ashes are a sign of repentance, brokenness, mourning. That is why we do this. We come admitting what we know is true – repentance is the only way to our Father in heaven. We are reminded of our mortality with the ashes. We are reminded of what the gospel tells us, “You are a lot worse than you think we are.” And, like in communion, we don’t just say those words, we enact them; but on Ash Wednesday, we wear the mark of our mortality and brokenness on the most visible part of our body – our forehead!
Isn’t this a bit much, you say? Are we not taking this whole “sin” thing a bit too far? Well, here is what I will tell you: the more deeply we believe how broken by sin we are, the sweeter grace will be! So, we end our Ash Wednesday with the body and blood of Jesus and taking into our body His life – life that says the second great truth of the gospel, “You are more loved than you ever dared hope or imagine!”
So this is the journey we start as a community of believers at St. Patrick. It is the way of the cross. What works death in us is also working life in us. Our journey ends at Easter and an empty tomb. It is there that we arrive back where we started and remember that, even in the little deaths Jesus calls us to make in this life, the last word is always joy!