Welcome to Lent!
Yes, I know what some of you are thinking. That is, after weeks of Mardi Gras celebrations, with all the bright beads and flying moon pies, swinging tunes and social engagements, the very idea of calling our community to partake in some notion of spiritual discipline seems rather out of touch with our recent reality. How can we talk about prayer and fasting when the King Cake is still in our system? Some are nursing a sore shoulder from throwing all those ‘goodies’ in the street. Some are still waiting for that mysterious headache to subside. Others are already building their revelry plan for next year.
In any case, for most of us, the season of Lent—and especially the immediacy of Ash Wednesday—strikes us as interruption to our usually scheduled programming.
It does for me. Or at least it has before…and for good reason.
As C.S. Lewis often admitted, Christianity is not the religion you want if you want uninterrupted happiness. When asked what kind of religion does give its followers the greatest happiness, Lewis answered, “While it lasts, the religion of worshipping oneself is best.”
Expounding on the religion of the self, Lewis recalled,
“I have an elderly acquaintance of about eighty, who has lived a life of unbroken selfishness and self-admiration from the earliest years, and is, more or less, I regret to say, one of the happiest men I know. From the moral point of view this is very difficult! …As you perhaps know, I haven’t always been a Christian. I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity” (Lewis, God in the Dock, pp. 58-59).
No, the followers of Jesus are not uninterruptedly happy. On the contrary! As Lent reminds us, they are, as Jesus was, “acquainted with grief” (Is. 53:3). To deny ourselves this experience out of self-preservation might temporarily distract us from the tragic truth of our own brokenness and sin, but it also prevents us from the joyous fellowship of a forgiven and reconciled people.
On Ash Wednesday, the invitation is to abruptly lay aside the shiny mask of a self-sufficient life in exchange for the honest imposition of mortality and certain death. This is not a comfortable encounter, but nor does it pretend to be. It does not allow us to pretend either, and that is precisely the point. The time has come to tell the truth.
Repent and believe the gospel. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Whatever It Takes,
Darren
