Return to me with all your heart, with
fasting, with weeping, and with morning;
–Joel 2:12

Lent began this week on Ash Wednesday. It is a season of 40 days, not counting Sundays, which ends on Holy Saturday. Thee word Lent comes from the Anglo-Saxon world lencten, which means “spring.”

The season is a preparation for celebrating Easter. Historically, Lent began as a period of fasting and preparation for baptism by converts and then became a time for penance by all Christians. Somber colors such as purple or ash gray and rough-textured cloth are used in this season. For a long time, the Christian tradition discouraged scheduling weddings or any other joyous celebrations during the season of Lent.

While some Orthodox Christians still maintain this practice, it has largely fallen by the way side. Perhaps it seemed too rigid or was inconvenient. I suspect that part of the reason the Lenten tradition became more lax is that our mood as individuals is often contrary to the prescribed mood of the liturgical season.
The season of Lent calls for introspection, solemn reflection, repentance, and mourning. Yet if you just welcomed a baby into the family, got a promotion, or are celebrating an engagement, it would be easy to feel out of step with the more somber mood of worship.

Conversely, the mood during the seven weeks after Easter is especially celebratory as we focus on the good news of the Resurrection. Yet many individuals might be struggling with grief and depression and feel out of step with the joyous tone of worship.

For Christians, worship is both individual and corporate. We hold these in tension. Each one of us is offering individual worship to God and we come fully expecting to be personally transformed as God meets us in the particularities of our current life circumstances.

Yet, worship also encompasses much more than individual experience. We remember that we are woven together, members of one body, participating in something larger than ourselves. We come to worship even when we don’t think we need it or don’t feel like it because we remember that God has given us gifts to be used for the greater benefit of the community of which we are a part. We come because others need us to be there for them.

We come to worship even when our mood and circumstances do not match that which is being observed in a particular season. I like to think of it as practice. During Lent, we practice the disciplines of repentance and mourning even when we are personally celebrating.
Then, when we do encounter some period of bad news (and notice that I said when, not if), we will be equipped with resources to cope and respond with hope because we have practiced and acquired the rich resources of our faith.
“The Secrets of Our Lives” is the theme for our Lenten Worship. We are inviting you to participate in a community art project. If you missed the Ash Wednesday service, we will distribute the materials and instructions again on the first Sunday of Lent and then have them available in the church foyer throughout the season. We are asking you to identify some aspect of your life that you would like to offer to God for healing, forgiveness or transformation as a reflection of your desire to feel more authentic and free so that you can be the person and live the life that God intends for you. We are asking you to write that “secret” on one side of a 5 x 7 card and decorate it in any way that supports and heightens the message. We provide envelopes so that your submission can be anonymous and confidential. We will be posting the secrets in the sanctuary and including them in our worship in various ways.

You will notice some changes in our worship during the season of Lent. While routine is comforting and keeps us oriented, changing our routine makes us alert and can rouse us from complacency.

Changing the way we do things can create a receptive mind and heart as questions are generated about why we do or don’t do certain things. New insights and perspective are gleaned as we are stirred to be more mindful about worship.

Each Sunday during Lent, we will engage in a longer period of silent prayer instead of our normal unison prayer of confession. We’ll offer suggestions for how to engage in this silence for it is not a passive time for daydreaming, but an active time of prayer inviting a highly disciplined mind. We will celebrate Holy Communion each week as was practiced in earlier days of our tradition. Our hymns and liturgy will omit Alleluia’s and Hallelujahs as we have packed them away until Easter Sunday. I trust that you will find this season a rich time of spiritual growth.

Walking with you as we follow Jesus,

Debra