BLOG. 2/13/13: CRUISING MINDLESSLY, THOUGH SINCERELY, THROUGH LENT
Ah, today is Ash Wednesday. Driving down the boulevard many churches are festooned with purple banners, or crosses draped with purple, heralding the Lenten season. I find myself wondering how many of the thousands driving down the same boulevard care, or even have a clue what that is all about other than it’s some weird thing that church people get into every year.
But the more pressing question to me is: How many of the folk inside the church even have a clue except that its something we do between Epiphany and Easter, and we’re supposed to be penitent and contrite, and give up something to indicate our self-denial and contrition?
Mindlessness is an omnipresent affliction in all too much of religious Christianity. We do things because, somehow, that’s what we do in church.
Maybe it’s because of my Scottish Presbyterian and Puritan roots in which Christmas and Easter were not special days, but that Christ’s incarnation, life, ministry, sufferings, death and resurrection were insistent upon us every time we gathered—every Sabbath is Christmas and every Sabbath is Easter. Of course, that all got lost somewhere along the way, but I am still influenced by that rich legacy.
Humility, self-denial, contrition, confession … those are always wholesome disciplines when they lead us to true freedom in Christ.
But there’s a bigger picture that is so tragically ignored in all too much of the church’s self-understanding: that picture has to do with the cosmic impact of what Christ came to be and to do. What is ignored so frequently is: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (I John 3:8).
Yes, there was a cosmic rebellion and the whole creation was defiled (and taken captive) and we are complicit in that treason. God’s design in Christ was to invade his own creation, expose Satan’s darkness, and to destroy his power and the effects of his rebellion at the cross. Jesus came to storm the gates of hell. Christmas and Easter only take on their awesome cosmic meaning in the light of that purpose. Paul, in Ephesians, is consumed with the very reality that in Christ “the mystery hidden for ages” is revealed in the unsearchable riches of who Christ is and what he did.
We only truly understand what is behind the scenes when Herod seeks to destroy this one in the massacre of the innocents. We only understand Satan’s motives as he seeks to tempt Jesus away from the cross in that early encounter and those temptations in the wilderness. Jesus’ ministry of healing and exorcisms take on significance when we see in them his undoing Satan’s destructive reign.
Should we be penitent? Should we be contrite? Should we confess our sins? Absolutely, but only as a healthy discipline of coming again into a dynamic relationship with God and with his beautiful purpose in creating us in his own image.
Lenten pageantry without this profound awareness of the cosmic redemption, that liberation from the dominion of darkness and the glorious liberty of the children of God that comes through faith in Jesus and his great deliverance …. is hollow. Jesus came to reconcile heaven and earth by his cross, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is our every day, every month, every season calling and joy. That is or faith and hour hope.
Think about it! I mean, really think about it. Don’t do Lent mindlessly. OK?
