Celebrating Lent

Lent is upon us and soon will be over.

To many this may mean little. Perhaps there are past memories of giving up sodas or chocolate for Lent. Some may recall practicing this season with Catholic faithfulness, foregoing meat, repenting of various pleasures between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Those with more evangelical sympathies, however, traditionally have regarded Lent as another one of those means by which misled people try to earn their own righteousness through various attempts at good works, denying the reality of salvation by faith alone in Jesus Christ.

But what did the church intend when Lent was begun? Not a period for self-mortification, hypocritical piety, and feigned righteousness designed to earn one's salvation. Rather, Lent originated in the church as a time to prepare new believers for their baptism. This occurred when the early church followed the custom of baptizing new believers into its fellowship once a year on Easter. Prior to their baptism, a period was set aside for instruction in the faith; so Lent's original purpose was for the making of disciples.

On Easter, when the church celebrated the resurrection of its Lord, it would also celebrate the baptism of these new believers. In their baptism, they would signify their death to the power of sin, and their call to be risen to new life with Christ who overcame the power of death on the first Easter. Lent, then, emerged as a time when new converts, as well as the whole body of believers, would grow in faithful discipleship.

As the observance of Lent continued in the church's history, it became traditionally characterized by three acts which typify the meaning of this time: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Observing Lent today can begin by understanding the continuing significance of these acts.

Prayer
T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem, "Ash Wednesday":

Where shall the word be found,
where will the word Resound?
Not here, there is not enough silence.

Prayer is attention to God: it places us in a posture of listening, leading us even into the solitude of the wilderness. Moses was led up Mount Sinai and for days struggled to hear the word of the Lord. Elijah was driven to a cave, finding God neither in the wind, not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but finally hearing quietly his voice. John the Baptist left civilized Israel for the desert in order to hear God's word of judgment and hope for that time, preparing the way for Christ. The prophetic vision recorded in Revelation came when its author had been exiled to Patmos.

Jesus was led by the Spirit, we are told, into the wilderness where for forty days he struggled with Satan, who sought in every way to undermine Christ's identity as God's Chosen One. We follow him in the forty days of Lent, embarking into new depths of prayer, which will prepare us, even as it did our Lord, for prophetic mission and ministry.

The prophets could utter "Thus saith the Lord" because they had learned how to listen first to what the Lord was saying. Our times and our minds are crowded with confused babel. The rhetoric of politicians, the advertising of corporations, and the ceaseless saturation of our minds by communications media make true silence and listening before God, much less our neighbor, an anomaly in this technocratic society.

Being a people of prayer means that we must recover this authentic attentiveness to God. It is no wonder that the prophets and saints of old found it essential to retreat physically at times from the self-deceiving social milieu of their day to hear God's word. Such times of retreat are all the more essential for us in rediscovering our true identity as a pilgrim people.

Biblically, prophecy and exile seem connected. As we withdraw ourselves from the confused tumult of daily life in America to listen to God's word, we can discover the deeper truths of our time and receive prophetic insights that are truly given to us. Merton used to say that the self-imposed exile of being a monk enabled one to really get "the scoop of things." So it is that words written on the island of Patmos describe even our own day with discerning clarity.

Therein lies the larger truth: retreat prepares us for mission; a time of exile equips us for engagement; prayer nurtures prophecy. So withdrawal is never seen as an end or as the strategy of one's response to the age. Rather, it is a tactic assumed at times to better prepare us for prophetic ministry and service. Christ's forty days in the wilderness culminated with his appearance in the synagogue inaugurating his ministry with a vision of the jubilee year. We read in Ephesians 6 that the essential nature of our mission involves warfare at spiritual levels. The point of our engagement with the world, then, must be rooted in the wellspring of fervent prayer, intently listening for and to God's word.

All prayer involves a spiritual detachment from the dominating, apparent realities that seem to rule the world in order to confront them through the resurrected power of Jesus Christ. In our existence each day, amidst the tempting delusions and destructive forces around us, we must learn through prayer to "be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might" (Ephesians 6:10). This task cannot be conceived only in individualistic terms. It is with the body of Christ, our fellow believers, that we should learn to be attentive to the voice of Christ, "withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand" (Ephesians 6:13).

Fasting
With shortages in the world's food supply, fasting has been making a comeback in church circles, seen more as a means to reduce consumption than to increase sanctification. That is obviously an improvement over the kind of self-righteous self-denial which Christ condemned.

The point where the lifestyle of the affluent most dramatically contradicts that of the world's poor is what each eats every day. The wealthy monopolize the world's protein, and then consume it with immoral inefficiency and wastefulness. The fundamental secular response is not to hold the affluent responsible for their inordinate consumption but to rather urge the production of additional food while hoping for the "trickle down" of additional earning power to those who are poor. This assumes that the resources for producing food are unrestricted and that food will always go to people on the basis of their money rather than their need. Any guilt the affluent might feel about how much they eat is alleviated.

Biblical thought, however, prohibits such easy rationalizations. The clear admonitions to share with those in need, and to seek justice through the relinquishment of what the rich possess, cast the issue of food and global poverty in terms of maldistribution. Amidst a world of limited resources, it is economic plunder which creates the condition of the hungry, not inadequate production. Changes in our patterns of food consumption are not just symbolic acts of sensitivity but imperatives if true justice is to be established. Fasting will take on a particular political significance then during Lent as a concrete sign of repentance and means of deepening our identification with the plight of the hungry.

The true, spiritual significance of fasting is discovered at other points, however. Through history, fasting has rarely been advocated by Christians on utilitarian grounds in order to feed those who hunger. Rather, its meaning lies in the truth that the deepest hunger in our lives must be the hunger for God.

We can be filled with the power of God's Spirit only to the extent that we have emptied ourselves of ambitions, intentions, and pursuits that center on the demands of the self. Fasting symbolizes this truth. It signifies a willingness to be freed from those powers of death which would enslave us in order to live fully in the liberating power of Christ.

Fasting teaches us that the way of discipleship requires a continual emptying of trust in our own power in order to overcome forces of spiritual destructiveness with the gospel. When Christ encountered a young child possessed by what was identified as an evil spirit, and freed that life from the grip of such power, his disciples asked why they had failed in the same task. He replied that only prayer and fasting can create liberation from such forces (Mark 9).

Fasting can be a sign which impresses on our inner being the truth that spiritual healing, individually and corporately, is linked to the relinquishment of our self-reliance. Placing our dependence ultimately in his grace to sustain and redeem us, we can be given a hunger and thirst for righteousness that infuses our lives and our call to mission.

Almsgiving
Perhaps the most offensive type of self-righteousness is acts of insincere charity done only to enhance one's image, ease one's conscience, or reduce one's taxes. Certainly this is the image of almsgiving which comes to the minds of many. Yet in this traditional and frequently abused practice lies a deeper truth: Lent calls us forth to a greater compassion for and identification with the poor.

True hunger for God results in the giving of ourselves to others. We must not break the connection between our abandonment to Christ and his call to give ourselves to those who suffer from all forms of oppression. Lent can renew us again in grasping this unity of love for God and all humankind. Isaiah proclaims to us this truth in scriptures frequently read during these days:

Is it a fast like this that I require,
a day of mortification such as this,
that a man should bow his head like a bulrush
and make his bed on sackcloth and ashes?
Is not this what I require of you as a fast:
to loose the fetters of injustice,
to untie the knots of the yoke,
to snap every yoke
and set free those who have been crushed?
Is it not sharing your food with the hungry,
taking the homeless poor into your house,
clothing the naked when you meet them
and never evading a duty to your kinsfolk?
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn
and soon you will grow healthy like a wound newly healed;
your own righteousness shall be your vanguard
and the glory of the Lord your rearguard.
Then, if you call, the Lord will answer;
if you cry to him, he will say, "Here I am."
Isaiah 58:5-9

What almsgiving calls the church to in our day is a willingness for its life to be inconvenienced by the needs of the poor. We must learn to make the immensely painful transition from being charitable towards the poor, always on our own terms, to being simply available for and with the poor. Lent should remind us of the biblical linkage between the wealth of a few and oppression. As the church participates in the affluent style of its society, it is complicit in the structures of global injustice which leave the impoverished in misery. In an age of growing scarcity, the Lenten tradition of almsgiving asks the church to be a true servant church of the oppressed by breaking fundamentally with society's addiction to affluence.

This aspect of Lent addresses us as individual believers as well. There is the story of an abbot who, during Lent, asked each of the monks in his monastery to give him a list of all the possessions which were in each of their rooms. He wanted to ensure that there was not any excessive attachment developing, even in that austere environment, to material things.

It would take me, and most of us, all of Lent simply to make up such a list, much less to then examine in earnest authenticity our spiritual detachment from materialism. Such is the depth of our immersion in values which quietly, subtly, and yet persistently place a higher priority on what we possess than on the plight of the dispossessed.

As Lent draws to a close, it leads us to its goal -- to the cross. These days, and how we spend them, should be fixing our gaze on him who abandoned his whole will in faithfulness to God, giving his life totally out of love for all.

This faithfulness led Christ into Jerusalem and into the inevitable confrontation with the pretensions, idolatrous hopes, and self-deceived powers of that day. As Ralph Barber said in a sermon:

When Jesus set out for Jerusalem, he was facing directly into the place where all the pride, all the prejudice, all the power, all the smugness, bigotry, and materialistic cynicism, all the middle-class righteousness of his age was gathered together in concentrated form ... He was deliberately placing himself and his gospel at the mercy of polite respectability as he advanced step by step toward the gate of the Holy City.

Lent must prepare us to enter our Jerusalem. Faithfulness to our Lord will lead us there, surely, if we follow. Ours will be the steps which trod with cautious, almost bewildered apprehension as we wonder, with the disciples, why he beckons us there.

Peter had been with him from the start. He had left all to follow and had seen his Lord transfigured before his eyes. Yet on that night, faced with the stark enmity of the world, and asked three times if he was with the one who had unmasked the corporate delusions of that order, and yet still had given himself up in love rather than violently seize power, Peter said he never knew him.

It could have been you or I or any of us. Frightened, faithless, and fearful, we too would have fled.

That is why we observe Lent.

Wesley Granberg-Michaelson was an associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.