Dear all
Our supermarkets seem to leap from one seasonal event to the next, filling their aisles with cards, bottles and mountains of chocolate. Advent was swallowed up by Christmas prep then, after the season of Christmas indulgence, we’re plunged into a marketing blitz for Valentine’s Day to commemorate a 3rd-century Roman who had no interest in little red hearts and fizzy wine. Then, before we know it, the shelves are groaning under the weight of chocolate eggs, giving us a sugar fix in preparation for the first flowers of spring.
No complaints really! Why not bring a little celebration into life when it brings people together and reminds us that we are human. Celebration is important for just this reason.
Just thinking! What if we dared to pause? What if, between the festivals and the gaps when we need to engage with the rest of normal life, we looked deeper into ourselves.
Traditionally, Lent (like Advent) is marked by stripping back the décor and liturgy of our Churches. Clergy are robed in purple and services carry a sombre tone of regret, penitence and talk of discipline in the air. At the Ash Wednesday Service today, with a black ash cross on my forehead, I wondered why we were even singing one of the hymns; the three million verses (or so it felt) of ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’. God knows, some people may like it, but personally I cannot for a moment understand why.
For those of you who don’t already know, Lent reminds us of the 40-day journey that Christ, following his baptism, spends in the wilderness. It echoes, or rather retells the story of Israel’s forty-year wanderings in the wilderness, not as lost tourists, but as broken, previously enslaved groups of hill shepherds, people being formed and recreated into a new, resilient community.
In the journey Jesus makes he enters, not a consecrated sanctuary, but a landscape that illustrates isolation, hunger, temptation and struggle. His journey is not towards comfort, but towards the broken and outcast. Again and again, the Gospels show Jesus seeking out those people that society shuns: the blind, the sick, those condemned and those outside all boundaries of belonging. He doesn’t respond by offering condemnation, but healing not exclusion, and forgiveness. Christ kneels in the dust alongside those who are condemned, lonely, marginalised and rejected, inscribing love and grace when others would write only legalistic judgement in immutable stone.
There is historical rationale for rewriting our proforma for the Lenten ritual. Simon, in one of our family services, made a brief mention of Gregory the Great extending Lent by removing Sundays. Of course, that is why he moved the start of Lent to Ash Wednesday. He reminded us that we are an Easter people, who celebrate the Lord’s day (Sunday) all year round as a day of resurrection. Maybe in Lent therefore, we should cease the curious act of stripping bare our church buildings and banning flowers (yes, I have read the recommendations of Synod and wonder why, in this age, they could not find anything better to talk about).
Maybe on top of chocolate or alcohol or anything else one chooses to randomly give up at Lent, one should abandon indifference to the wilderness that so many other people find themselves in.
Lent encourages us to engage with individuals whose experiences mirror those whom Jesus focused his ministry on, striving to support those facing challenges and fostering an inclusive community. The light present in our faith community should shine through us to those who are so in need of the grace that has been shared with us.
Who, in our streets and villages, carries the weight of exclusion? Who sits alone, unseen or unheard? Who among us struggles for hope, for dignity or for a second chance? The answer is not ‘someone else’s problem.’ Christ’s journey is our invitation, no, our urgent challenge, to practice solidarity as Christ demonstrated solidarity on the cross: to serve the poor, to visit the lonely, to befriend the rejected, to advocate for the marginalised. True faith is not about comfort but courage, about rolling up our sleeves and standing, with integrity, beside those that society forgets.
This is an opportunity for all of us to serve as Christ serves us.
God bless.
Eric