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Voices of Faith

What is Lent All About?
The Rev. Dr. Robert Hansel

The whole church-Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant-enters this week into that annual period of devotional frenzy we call LENT.

The forty days from Ash Wednesday through Easter is considered an especially holy time. Traditionally it has been thought of as a time of preparation for Easter, a time in which Christians seek to purify themselves by partaking of extra helpings of sacrifice, self-denial, and spiritual discipline.

Lent is seen as a time to be "extra good." The idea here is to try to make yourself more worthy of the great gift of eternal life which God gives us through the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Day.

The way most people have come to think of Lent, I suppose, is that it is a kind of spiritual "shape up and slim down" exercise.

The way it works is that each of us is supposed to identify some particular excess that gives us a lot of pleasure. Then we try to give that very thing up for the next forty days, hoping that God will notice and think better of us. After all, why wouldn't he (or she)?

The assumption is that we'll be better, more spiritual people by learning about and exercising our willpower over our typical enslavement to earthly, material appetites.

And, of course, the only problem is that it doesn't work. We may wind up hungrier, smarter, or with lower cholesterol but it's a given that, with all our well-intentioned efforts, we have not produced the slightest change in our relationship with God.

If you have tried to observe Lent this way and found it, year after year, as fruitless as a bunch of broken New Year's resolutions, you need to change your understanding.

This view of Lent is based on a false assumption: that you can overcome sin and failure by trying harder; that the opposite of sin is "being good" or "doing right." That is certainly not the Biblical view.

Instead, sin is seen as a matter of DISTANCE or SEPARATION. It is a state of being apart from God, living out of harmony or out of unity with the One who is the only truth and meaning there is to life.

That condition is the real problem, and the bad behaviors we typically think of as sins are actually the symptoms. There's only one "cure" and it's not being "good."

The cure is receiving the reconciliation that only Jesus Christ can give to us as a free gift of grace. But you need to acknowledge and accept it.

You see, sin's authentic opposite is simply Faith--being fully committed to, trusting, and living in-synch with God everyday because you're grateful and you want to say thanks. Living thankfully leads to right actions.

The point is this: Every single one of us is always and already loved absolutely, profoundly, and unconditionally by the God who created us and who knows us better than we know ourselves.

Lent is a time to discover anew that great Truth and its reality for you. Far from giving up something, how about taking on something? How about opening your mind and your heart to the presence of God?

Living with God at your center will teach you all you need to know about Thanks-living. If you can do that, Lent will be a time of total personal transformation and Easter this year will truly be something very, very special indeed.

Faithfully,
Bob Hansel

From THE CHRONICLE, February 10, 2002, the newsletter of Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee. Copyright ©2002 Calvary Episcopal Church

 


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