The Invitation to Lent

Lent starts today, and after glancing at the newsfeed this week, it couldn’t have had better timing. Ukraine, Texas laws, verdict on verdict, angry instagram rants, and in my personal and work life there have been several unexpected cancer diagnoses affecting people I know and love. My kid is teething. My dad is still dead. I’m tired. 

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Lent before. Maybe it’s been a part of a tradition that you left behind. Maybe it’s been something you’ve never heard about until now. Maybe it’s a normal rhythm, a part of the liturgical calendar you know and love. For many in the context I find myself in currently, Lent is a buzzword that is tied with traditions of legalism and not encouraged to be used for fear of keeping people on the outside by using “christianese” language. For many in the evangelical church, Lent is something we turn our ears from because we pass it off as something old and stale and not necessary. 

But I would actually say, maybe this year, Lent is exactly what the evangelical church needs.

Here is why.

I can’t even keep track of the amount of people I’ve talked to who feel like they are going through a spiritually dry season. I’ve talked to many who haven’t been invited to reflect on the events in their lives that have formed them spiritually. I’ve also lamented the amount of people (it’s not a large number) who know what practices and habits actually have an influence on their beliefs about God, themselves, and what it looks like to love their neighbor in practice. 

We (evangelicals) are a people so focused on the moment of salvation, so focused on “making disciples”, that we have forgotten the practices, the habits, the moments God invites us into by the power of the Holy Spirit that actually transform us into the image of Christ. For a people who hold the bible in supreme authority, whose primary doctrine is centered around Christ’s death and resurrection, and who highly value sharing the gospel, we are people who have proven that we can do and say and even believe all those things but we often don’t seek to be transformed by those beliefs. We often make it ourselves or bring others to a moment of salvation, but what about the long obedience that calls our lives to be transformed slowly and surely by the Holy Spirit? 

Especially in this cultural moment, I believe we are being called to transformation even more. Lent is a season that calls us to repentance, to ponder our mortality and sinfulness, to stand in solidarity with the dying and rising of Christ. We evangelicals love talking about sinfulness. We love calling others to repent of their moral failures. We love talking about how we are dirty sinners covered by God’s grace. 

What if we took this next forty days as a church to repent of our own sin, individually and  dare I say, collectively? What if we evaluated systemically the sins of our nation’s past, and even though it wasn’t our fault, we took responsibility, and remembered that we are dust? What if we remembered our own conversion, salvation, and accepted-Jesus-as-Lord-and-Savior moments and actually allowed the Holy Spirit to transform us, this side of our conversion? What if the kingdom of heaven was a reality, not just something we get to go to when we die? 

Lent invites us, as people who hold dearly to scripture and to the Jesus who died and rose, to be transformed by both of them. Lent invites us to believe the words of scripture with our entire beings, and to actually meet God in those words. What if we read scripture these next forty days, not to be able to apply to our lives but simply to meet God there? What if we saw ourselves not as the heroes in every story but as the enemy or the villain or the ones who persecuted Jesus? How would that transform how we saw ourselves, others, and how we see God? What if we invited the crucified and suffering Jesus to teach us something about solidarity with the suffering? What if that suffering would transform how we view the marginalized, the ones who we believe don’t have a place in our lives or in our church? 

What if prayer was more than just petitioning to God? What if we prayed simply to commune with God? What if our prayers were a word, or even a breath? What if we ceased from what often feels like the performative nature of evangelicalism this Lent and let ourselves be dust before the living, breathing Jesus? What if prayer was an invitation to reflection on what's pulling our attentions and desires from the living and breathing Spirit of God?

What if we remembered, our own daily dying and rising with Christ? What if our faith and the waters of our baptisms,  would help us remember that we too have continued work to do. Not to perform, or to please, or to pacify a wrathful God, but to trust that the Jesus who we’ve all decided to commit our lives to invites us, always, every day, to a life of transformation. 

What if Lent was an invitation to just start again? To start over? To continue? To share in the gospel together as a family of God? To remember who we are and whose we are. 

What if, church and people of God, we accepted that invitation?