Growing up Baptist, I grew up unfamiliar with the ancient Christian practice of Lent. For me, living in predominately Roman Catholic Baton Rouge, LA, Lent meant Mardi Gras was coming and hearing my Roman Catholic schoolmates talk about what they would give up. It all seemed mysterious and mechanical to my young ears.
But then I served a Baptist church who had a tradition of practicing the discipline of Lent, and I realized what I had been missing.
Lent is a spiritual discipline. Like all disciplines, whether you observe or practice Lent is a choice, and it is not an easy choice.
To practice Lent is to admit you are a failure, you are broken, and you have sinned in the most important relationship you can have and that is your relationship with God.
Lent means reading Psalm 51 and being honest that David’s song describes you, too.
Lent means you are ready to be honest with God and others about how human beings really are: we are sinners in need of grace.
Lent means embracing humility and repentance. In the cultural soup of celebrity, professional sports, and political power, we are offered for emulation people who model arrogance and pride, who detest losers, and who have deluded themselves into thinking they are successful by their own hands. Lent challenges us to admit our brokenness and, through the grace of God, moves us toward being made over into the likeness of Jesus, who allowed himself to be broken out of love for the world who broke him.
Lent does something else, too. It brings us face-to-face with our mortality and need for God alone.
A few years ago on a Wednesday, in preparation for our church's midweek prayer gathering, I knelt to open my guitar case and reach for my guitar, when I was overwhelmed by the thought that the day will come when I will not be able to do that for I will no longer be on earth to do it. That is a sobering and vertigo-inducing truth. Lent tells you you are ashes and dust and only God is God.
If you are ready to come face to face with God, if you are ready to be transformed to be more like Jesus, or even just hoping or wanting to hope to get ready, then you are ready for the practice that is Lent.
Grace and peace,
Bob Guffey
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