Initiating Lent
The Lent season starts this Wednesday, going from March 5th until April 17th. I didn’t grow up practicing Lent and honestly until my late teens had no idea what it was. One time while downtown I saw people walking around with gray ash marks on their heads and got slightly freaked out. The person I talked to about it didn’t laugh too hard at me.
I’m very excited to be observing Lent this year with our church in Lincoln Park. We are calling the season, Initiating Lent.
The idea for what we’re doing comes from this section of N.T. Wright’s, Surprised by Hope:
“…if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative. Of course you have to weed the garden from time to time; sometimes the ground-ivy may need serious digging before you can get it out. That’s Lent for you. But you don’t want just to get the garden back to being simply a neat bed of blank earth. Easter is the time to sow new seeds and to plant out a few cuttings. If Calvary means putting to death things in your life that need killing off if you are to flourish as a Christian and as a truly human being, then Easter should mean planting, watering and training up things in your life (personal and corporate) that ought to be blossoming, filling the garden with color and perfume, and in due course bearing fruit. The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving.”
For some Lent is usually just the obligatory “What can I give up this year?” There isn’t really an emphasis or goal of anything deeper than marking off a proverbial checklist. What if the thing you gave up this year is that sense of obligation? Or even better, what if the thing given up is the absence of spiritual practices or focus?
In Initiating Lent we’re asking everyone to ask what practices they can incorporate into their daily rhythm over Lent, practices that will foster a focus and intimacy with Jesus. On Sunday we passed out a simple handout that gives various suggestions on how people can participate with Initiating Lent. You can download it HERE. It gives many excellent suggestions of things you can do through Lent or it might help spark your own ideas.
If you participate in Initiating Lent, whatever practice/ritual/activity you choose to do should stretch you, be committed to, and have Jesus (not obligation) as your focus. For myself, I’ll be committing to the Water challenge and the 40 Days of Creation (listed in the handout), as well as some focused reading/journaling.
What creative ideas do you have for making Lent more meaningful and Jesus focused?
