Lent

Lent is the season of forty days (excluding Sundays) leading up to the passion week and Easter. The church calendar starts this season with Ash Wednesday as the start of the Lenten journey of forty weekdays (Monday through Saturday) that takes the church to the eve of Easter. Ash Wednesday emphasizes a dual encounter: we confront our own mortality and confess our sin before God within the community of faith. Lent begins with dust and ashes and some churches impose ash marks on the forehead during a special service on that day. We start this time of intensive preparation for baptism or realigning our lives with the vows of the baptismal covenant acknowledging our human limitations. We remember we are dust and to dust we will return. Our efforts in this life will one day be reduced to ashes. And in the meantime, we have deeply ingrained habits marked by sin, stained by selfishness, and helpless in our own efforts to change them. Lent is about corporate penitence and facing our mortality leading in the call to repentance and reconciliation. We confess and turn away from our sinfulness through confession and pardon. Two actions—1. embracing our mortality and 2. acknowledging and turning from our sin—are the heart of this season.

The Lent Season is a season of testing our spiritual health and readiness for the end of our life in this world or the second coming of Christ. We are all familiar with the “tests of the emergency broadcast system” that pop up unexpectedly on television and the radio. Recently we had a fake ‘real’ nuclear emergency test happened in Hawaii. That one was awful. It frightened a lot of people unnecessarily. Tests are interruptions. But we know they are necessary. It is necessary to be prepared to take action in the case of an emergency.

While ther is no signal an imminent return of the Lord (for no one knows the day or the hour of his return, not the angels in heaven or even the Son, but only the Father), it does serve as an annual test of our emergency response systems as disciples of Jesus Christ. The annual call to observe a holy Lent by self–examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self–denial; by reading and meditating on God's Holy Word, and by marking a right beginning of repentance by receiving a mark of our mortal nature is a reminder that we need to live as people who are prepared to stand before our Lord at any time, even as early as this very day.

Time Flies and Life is too short – count our days and also make our days count. Many metaphors are used in literature to describe life's brevity. It is a dream, a swift runner, a mist, a puff of smoke, a shadow, a gesture in the air, a sentence written in the sand, a bird flying in one window of a house and out another. Another symbolic description was suggested by a friend of mine who said that the short dash between the dates of birth and death on tombstones represents the brief span of one's life. When we were children, time loitered. But as we get closer to the end of our lives, time moves with increasing swiftness, like water swirling down a drain. In childhood we measured our age in small increments. "I'm 6 1/2," we would say, for it seemed to take so long to get older. Now we have no time for such childishness. Who claims to be 60 1/2? It's good to ponder the brevity of life now and then. Life is too short to treat it carelessly. In Psalm 90, after describing the shortness of life, Moses prayed, "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (v.12). To make the most of our earthly existence, we must lose ourselves in the will of God (1 Peter 4:2). This we can do even when time is running out. It's never too late to give ourselves totally to God.

Every moment is precious. We never know when our time on earth will come to an end. And so we must do all that we can with our lives, with each second and minute and hour and day that our Lord grants us, to live in the way that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has taught us to live. As Christians, our call is to seek to please not the people around us, but the God who made us. Matthew tells us that the way to do this is to “not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21-24).