The Lenten Season made me uncomfortable all of my young adult life. As a well-trained evangelical, it was a practice I knew very little about and yet, once a year it snuck up on me when sooty foreheads showed up at the mall or the bank and interrupted my perfectly secular day. It made me feel like I was a foreigner in my own backyard. After all, I have a deeply personal relationship with Jesus, and no one told me I needed to have an ashy cross brushed on my face to prove it. No one told me I should fast for 40 days to show Jesus how sorry I am. I was raised a Latina fundamentalist, I said sorry everyday.
Sure I knew about Lent. I knew that it was a season of repentance leading up to Easter when people give up eating meat or dairy or Starbucks Extra Cold-Foam Lattes. The problem I had with it was the people who never mentioned Jesus or faith any other time of the year suddenly felt this moral obligation to give something up for God. Like “WTH, I have to give up Diet-Coke for forty freaking days.” It just didn’t make sense to me. It seemed to me it had to do more with religion than relationship.
I knew all the arguments against it, too. It was frowned upon by my Church of Christ (Iglesia de Cristo) upbringing because it appeared to negate the daily grace given to us by God. It looked like a man-made tradition unnecessarily imposed on the masses. Formal spiritual practices like liturgical readings, predetermined fasts and other ceremonial acts make the chests of low church people tighten a bit. It’s hard to fill up when you're holding your breath.
After all, aren’t these the things that the Reformation forefathers fought to break free from? Freedom in Christ liberates us from manmade rules, traditions and antiquated laws. Christianity that is stripped down to a naked Christ seems so…so…raw and humiliatingly simple. Can following Jesus be as easy as looking at his face and asking Him to remember you in paradise? ( Luke 23:40).
I think this simplicity is what the Reformers were seeking and good or bad, the baby got thrown out with the bath water. Collective acts of repentance and sacred practices that the early church fathers agreed were important to observe were obliterated from many new denominations that formed following the years after the Reformation.
500 years later a good protestant girl like me is left to wonder why I should celebrate Advent or Lent or Epiphany other than the fact that they sound kind of edgy and cool to someone raised on bible study, water troughs and stale crackers.
Looking back, I realize that my spiritual antennae went up around Lent because I was afraid. I was afraid of any denomination that didn’t align with the practices to which I was accustomed. I remember the first time I stepped into a full blown rock concert at a baptist church (they called it worship). The little puritan woman inside my 20 year-old self shook her fists wondering how God could hear the heart of worship over the clamoring drums? And yet I kept moving forward with curiosity. Seeing people lift their hands and sway their bodies felt dangerous to me…like the first time I brought raw milk home from a local farm. It turns out, like the milk, this new dangerous thing would nourish my body and soul in a new way. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but I leaned in.
The older I get, the more I see that we have this ecumenical smorgasbord that we get to take and eat IF we want. You may be thinking that it just doesn’t feel right to ask a Southern Baptist to partake in a tradition that has nothing to do with them. It feels kind of like ladling marinara sauce over a chicken fajita taco–it just doesn’t work. My question is–have you tried ladling marinara sauce over chicken wrapped up in a warm flour tortilla? It may not make traditional sense, but take a bite and you might be surprised how good the fusion of flavors are.
The reason I write this is because I hear a lot of fear in today’s Church and I think the world has picked up on it. How are we supposed to love the world when we don’t even demonstrate that we love each other?
We've not heard each other’s hearts and stories and taken time to lean in and learn about why things are done a certain way in some denominations and religious orders. It starts to make sense even if you don’t agree 100%. Instead of coming in with heightened spiritual antennae, I’m learning to develop a posture of wonder. Instead of asking “what is wrong with this way of doing things?”, I ask myself, “Where do I see God in these things?” because where God is, good is.
Could it be that God is doing a new thing by reminding us of the old things like Lent and other spiritual practices? They seem to be making their way to the forefront of leadership talk and I wonder if we should stop and take time to learn about it.
Just as God has weaved His Absolute Sovereignty throughout all of history through broken people, in spite of horrific fumbles and blurred victories, could He be fermenting a new batch of wine that brings in the Old World with the New? Is He preparing new wineskins in our hearts?
God-I hope so. The American Church has lost 40 million people in the last 25 years. Do you hear this? “More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First and Second Great Awakenings AND Billy Graham campaigns combined!” (The Great Dechurching).
Perhaps it’s time to come together and say “God, come and do this new thing among your people and let your people be MY people (even if on the surface they don’t look like my people).”
Today, I am an observer of Lent. I embrace that millions of people around the world take this time to seek Jesus; the pious, the devout, the secular and those who might simply be Jesus curious. Some of us will just ditch the Diet Coke, others will take time to reflect and pray and others will partake because it’s embedded in their family legacy. The point is that it is a sacredly held space to lean into the Lenten Season of reflection and preparation for Easter. It represents the steep downward fall of death and leads to the highest high the world has ever known.
When we willingly walk through Lent, we make an honest attempt to taste a teeny tiny sampling of the sacrifice Jesus endured. It’s us saying, “Okay God. I’m going to get a little uncomfortable here not because I’m trying to earn favor or check off a religious box, but because I desperately want what you have; the anointing of gladness beyond anything or anyone that has ever lived. (Hebrews 1:9)
For the joy set before Him, Jesus chose to endure the cross. (Hebrews 2:12)
What was this joy?
It was the joy of being united with His Heavenly Father in the eternal presence of all of us who look him in the face and ask to join him in paradise. His face looks blurry now, even though some of us seem to think we got the better angle, but his beautiful, passionate face is there for all who dare to look. It’s there for the hemorrhaging woman and the rich young ruler and the Ethiopian official. His face can be held by the most religious zealot and by the most suspicious Samaritan woman.
Lent is a mystical invitation for ALL to travel back in time and walk with Jesus as he sets his face towards Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). He asks me today, “Will you follow me and see what is on the other side?”
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