Using Lent? Using God?

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]