The "Brightness" of Lent

Well, it's almost here: the season of Lent.  For many people this news engenders a great "sigh."  Lent means that I must give up meat or chocolate or television and so on and so on.  For some Lent means not only that I must give up things i enjoy for a season of time, but also, that I must add more to my plate.  I am too busy, and the last thing I need is to add more and more to my already too hectic schedule.  To the news that Lent is at hand, we let out a great big "sigh."

Because of our natural response to the Lenten journey, it is important to ask again that all-too-important question:  "Why Lent?"  As Alexander Schmemann says in his work, Great Lent, "When a man leaves on a journey, he must know where he is going."  So, just where does the journey of Lent take us?  In other words, what is the purpose of the fasting, of the abstinence?  Of the raised intensity for service?  

Part of the reason we climbed the mountain of transfiguration this past Sunday was to answer this question.  The destination ahead is the bright light of divine radiancy, also known as Easter or pascha.  We climbed the mountain and from the high perspective of that mountain were able to look ahead, past the forty days of fasting, to the glorious brightness of Easter.  On that mountain, Jesus was revealed to the disciples, and what the disciples beheld was the glory of the new creation.  For a moment, it was as if the disciples were in that mystical garden once again, where our communion with God began.  It was a glorious site and it was a place where the disciples just wanted to "be."  And "to be" in the divine radiancy that is the presence of the risen Christ is the goal of human existence.  But the Father has something to say first.  The cloud overshadows the disciples and from the cloud the Father says, "This is my beloved...LISTEN TO HIM!  

"Listen to him." This is something the disciples haven't done too awfully well lately in the biblical context.  Peter is able to name Jesus as the Messiah, but he doesn't understand that the way of completing His inauguration as the Messiah is the journey to Golgotha.  Thus, Peter rebukes Jesus when Jesus foretells his Passion.  His focus is still upon human things and not divine things. 

This is PRECISELY why the church endeavors on this journey every year.  Our focus has been so driven by sinful human desires that we cannot truly understand, be truly ready for, the newness of life for which the resurrection flings the gates open wide.  Like the disciples, my life has not been properly oriented.  Alexander Schmemann puts it like this: "If my life is not oriented toward God, not aimed at eternal values, it will inevitably become selfish and self-centered and this means that all other beings will become means of my own self-satisfaction.  If God is not the Lord and Master of my life, then I become my own lord and master--the absolute center of my own world, and I begin to evaluate everything in terms of my needs, my ideas, my desires, and my judgments."  With so much focus on me, how could I possibly enter into the newness of life that only comes about through self-less love embodied in Calvary's cross?  

Everywhere we turn, this selfish orientation that the bible calls sin smacks us in the face.  Media teaches us, as Schmemann rightly identifies, "to be happy, take it easy, follow the broad way." But Christ in the Gospel says: choose the narrow way, fight and suffer, for this is the road to the only genuine happiness."  We need Lent if we are to truly be a sacrament of the Kingdom of God as we live in the age that is passing away.  We have a tendency to blend in so well with the old age that all indications of the new age, of the new creation of which Jesus is the prototype, are no longer identifiable in the world, inviting the world out of the darkness of sin and into the divine light of glory.  But this is the Christian's mission!  Our mission is to allow the beauty of Easter to be revealed through us, Christ's body in the world.  We are to reveal the end that is a beginning, for Easter is the end of the effects of sins curse and the beginning of the new life in Christ, the new creation that knows no end.  Our lives are to be a constant exodus from the Egypt of God's sin-diseased world into the Kingdom already inaugurated in Christ!

 

But, as Schmemann notes, we are too busy, so immersed in our daily preoccupations that we forget and we fail to be Easter people.  Through our forgetfulness our life becomes 'old' again--petty dark, and meaningless.  "A meaningless journey toward a meaningless end."

Thus, Lent is a kind of purgatory.  As Thomas Hopko says, "[Lent] is greeted as the sanctified season consecrated to the total correction, purification and enlightenment of the total person through the fulfillment of the commandments of the crucified God."   The brightness of Lent is the consuming fire that Jesus is: our purgatory here and now.  This fire consumes all that which keeps us from becoming everything God has already called forth into being through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This is what is so great about Lent!  We get to go to the school of repentance.  We walk a forty day journey of intentional transformation.  We seek once again to be the people who came forth from the baptismal font as disciples and witnesses for Christ and His Kingdom; people who are in and for the age that is passing away, but of the new age in Christ Jesus.

All of the discipline of Lent is for the purpose of embracing resurrection more fully than ever before.  If we loose this focus, Lent will loose its meaning and we will just be sad people going through the motions.  But if we live out Lent in repentance and praise with an orientation to the cross and the empty tomb, making room for the Holy Spirit to do a new work in our lives, watch out!  New creation is coming!  With Easter as the goal of Lent, Lent becomes bright with the hope of newness.  Just as a Super Bowl champion looks back on the hard work of preparation in training camp, the pre-season and the regular season and says, "It was worth it all," so will we Christians, at Easter, look back through the Lenten journey and say, "our labor was not in vain!"  Discipline is a good thing.  Let's keep the end which is a beginning in mind as we live the disciplined life this Lent.

As we live together in the season of Lent, my hope is that we will embrace its brightness.  My prayer is that the purgatory fire that Christ is will so consume all that is contrary to the triune God that we will truly become the fullness of what God in Christ has already called us: Easter People.  Amen.