The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent,
and believe in the good news. [Jesus; Mark 1:15]
Sometimes, I
wonder if the season of Lent has become yet another wonderful gift that we tend
to grab hold of with our grubby little hands and curve in on ourselves to make
it all about us. And by pulling it so
tightly to ourselves, I wonder if we squeeze the very life out of it.
Think about it: we
tend to focus on what we give up (like
chocolate or some other thing in which we usually take delight) or what we take up (like more worship services
or more time at the soup kitchen or more prayer). We talk about our sin, our repentance. We take these forty days to focus on my purpose, the state of my spiritual life, breaking my bad habits and disciplining myself into new and better habits.
Borrowing from St. Augustine, Martin Luther
called this “incurvatus in se,” curved in on oneself. In his lectures on the biblical book of Romans
he says that our nature is so deeply curved in upon itself that we turn the
finest gifts of God into something just for ourselves and hoard them. Indeed, Luther
says, we use God to achieve our aims. [Martin Luther, Lectures
on Romans, Kindle location 6745]
It’s no wonder an
old friend of mine often ends his emails during this season with “Have a
miserable Lent!”
The truth is, if
Lent is only about us, our sin, our struggles, our habits, then we are – and
will be – miserable people. There is no hope in that, nothing to pull us out of
our inward, downward spiral, no power within us to set us free. Left to
ourselves these forty days, we may find ourselves crawling into Easter laden
with despair rather than lifted with resurrection joy.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of
God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
Notice that here,
at the very beginning of his public ministry, Jesus does not say something
like:
Thank goodness you all have finally
disciplined yourselves enough, given up enough, added enough devotion and
service to your days, turned away from enough sin that God is finally convinced
that you are ready for God’s reign.
No! Jesus just
shows up as God’s son, in the power
of God’s Spirit, at God’s appointed time to announce the
nearness of God’s kingdom and to
invite folks to simply pay attention and trust that God is up to something new and good.
Repent, and believe the good news!
Repentance is,
first and foremost, less about turning our own lives around and more about
being opened to the newness God brings near in Jesus. It’s about welcoming the
reign of God, trusting it and letting it shape us and our days. To repent is to
let go of our white-knuckled grip on trying to be good, to get it right, to be
what we’re afraid we are not.
In that letting
go and trusting the good news of God’s nearness, we are set free from that
inward curve and are turned outward to true and abundant life. And we are moved
to share it as freely as we have received it.
The disciplines
of Lent are not bad or wrongheaded in and of themselves. They can be ways in
which God works in us to open our hearts and hands to welcome and share God’s
reign. But the good news, the best news, is that Lent begins and ends not with
us, but with God.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of
God has come near.
So Jesus says at
the beginning of these forty days. And then he walks the talk all the way to
Jerusalem, through the cross and out of an empty tomb, for us and for the world.
Repent and believe this good news!
May your Lenten
way be scattered with the wonder of the God who draws near long before you take
the first step!
[You may listen to Bill's recording of this piece through the Indiana-Kentucky Synod website: http://www.iksynod.org. Click here: IN-KY Synod Lenten Podcast]
[You may listen to Bill's recording of this piece through the Indiana-Kentucky Synod website: http://www.iksynod.org. Click here: IN-KY Synod Lenten Podcast]
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