Lent begins in two weeks, if you can believe it. As we are invited in the Ash Wednesday rite to observe a Holy Lent, I am asking you to do the same. Lent is the season of the church in which we, with great intention, pay attention to ourselves as individuals and as community. We call it a penitential season because we take time to recognize that we are in some way or another complicit with the sin that exists in our world. We have over the years, even over the centuries made this penitence a highly personal, highly individual enterprise. I would like to suggest that more emphasis needs to be placed on the penitence of the community as a whole in which we live and move and have our being, even beyond the church, and recognize that the change that comes through such examination does not apply only to us as faithful people, but that the change also applies to the sinful structures of our world that would shame and abase our neighbor. In other words our imaginative turning towards the Good has profound ramifications for the world. In the ancient world (in the world of scripture) sin is most often looked at as the embedded force in the world that corrupts the powerful and oppresses a people; a force that bears shame and violence. That is why we use the confession in our liturgy from Enriching our Worship that says “forgive us for the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf.”
So our penitence has relevance to us and to our world. I invite you during the course of this Lenten season to seek our sacred relevance and acknowledge anything that would impede such relevance. This Lent we will begin with a Taize service each Wednesday evening. Taize is a beautifully reflective service of song, scripture and prayer (one parishioner called it yoga for the brain). The service will be followed by a meal, and then conversation. We are still planning what these conversations will be, but all of this is designed to help us center on this community here gathered that is called “to have a bearing on or a connection to the matter(s) at hand.” That is the definition of relevancy. If you buy my preferred definition of prayer as “the art of paying attention”, then it follows that through prayer, artfully paying attention, we gain the potential to discover more about ourselves and our relevancy to the world we serve.
During Lent we prepare for a world continually being made new. We prepare in short to live resurrection lives. That takes imagination, courage, discipline and commitment… and hard work. I invite you into a holy season of preparation, because the world lies waiting.
