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| A member congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America | ||
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March As I have described it in another article in the newsletter, the season of Lent is a forty day period, not including Sundays, beginning on Ash Wednesday and concluding on Easter eve. The forty days of Lent were suggested by the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism. Traditionally, Lent has been a time for Christians to turn toward God anew and seek to deepen their faith and devotion. But how exactly do we do that? Well, one author has proposed that we follow the example of Jesus. He writes, “… Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.” That’s how: by taking a good look at who we are. And yet how do we come to know who we really are? The same author suggests that we try answering questions such as these: * Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you the happiest to remember? * If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why? * When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore? * If you only had one last message to leave a handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in 25 words or less? * If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it? * Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for? To try to answer these questions, the author says, is to begin to hear something not only of who we are but of both what we are becoming and what we are failing to become. Our answers will tell us much about our faith, devotion, what we value, how much we are shaped by the Gospel, the selves we are and the selves we seek to be. And to help each of us answer these questions for ourselves, our Mid-week Lenten services will focus on them. Each Wednesday evening in Lent we will raise one of these questions and think about possible answers. The services, however, will not give answers -- each of us can only do that for ourselves. Of course, trying to answer these questions in all honesty is not easy and we may not like some of the answers we hear ourselves give, but then Lent is not supposed to be an easy time. The important thing is to remember what comes at the end of Lent: Easter, Hope. Joy. And that’s what can come out of our struggle within ourselves as to who we are and what we still need to become, what we believe and what we give ourselves to: hope, joy, a whole new kind of self in the power of the resurrected Christ!
God be with you, Jeff
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