• Please consider joining us for the Light and Life Banquet in support of Care Net of Puget Sound. This is a ministry primarily to teenage girls who are in a frightening, dark hour, and who find at Care Net clinics older women who surround them with the love of Christ and provide answers to their questions. The banquet is Saturday March 29th from 6:30p.m. to 8:30. We have the honor this year of hearing from the president and CEO of Care Net National. RSVP (Friday deadline!) by contacting Laura Ashburn: lashburn@carenetps.org or (253) 383-6033.
• Today, Ash Wednesday, is the first day of Lent, the observation of which is ancient, though not reaching back all the way to the Apostles. The earliest clear, detailed directions for Lent appear to be from Athanasius in his 1st Festal Letter of 329 A.D.
• In that letter he says, “ since we have passed beyond that time of shadows, and no longer perform rites under it, but have turned unto the Lord; ‘for the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty‘ — as we hear the sacred trumpet, no longer slaying a material lamb, but that true Lamb that was slain, even our Lord Jesus Christ… Let us keep the feast… putting far from us pride and deceit, let us take upon us love toward God and towards our neighbor… that we may properly keep the feast, even the month of these new fruits.”
• Though the length and timing of Lent was something of a moving target for 500 years, it included fasting from the beginning, the reason for which I find moving. In a reference to Jesus words in Mark 2:19, that the guests cannot fast “ while the Bridegroom is with them,” Lenten fasting was seen as marking “ the days on which the Bridegroom was taken away from us.” We should let the sacrifice and grief of the Crucifixion sink in, without which the joy of the Resurrection is greatly diminished. Peter isn’t the only one who should be weeping “ bitter tears” (Mt 26:75). It’s our sin as much as his that put Jesus on the Cross.
• Above all, it’s necessary that we keep Christ, as a person and our Savior, central in our keeping of Lent. Reduce him to a symbol or mere object of veneration and you move from faith (personal trust) to mere religion. Though Athanasius is considered a father in the Eastern Orthodox Church, we want just the opposite of the iconography that characterizes Eastern worship; we want the spirit of his original words: “ let us take upon us love toward God… that we may properly keep the feast.”
• Finally, don’t forsake worship in these 40 days. The worship of God, corporate and otherwise, is the most important thing you will do in your lifetime. The culture would have you order your life around you. Don’t force the rocks to cry out (Lk 19:40).