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“O Lord, this holy season of Lent is passing quickly. I entered into it with fear, but also with great expectations. I hoped for a great breakthrough, a powerful conversion, a real change of heart; I wanted Easter to be a day so full of light that not even a trace of darkness would be left in my soul.” Henri Nouwen.
We are headed quickly toward the fifth Sunday of Lent – there are only six of them! That means Palm Sunday is just over a week away. Holy week is rolling in soon and Easter will be here before you know it. I feel as though I have barely entered into this season of Lent! Which is why Henri Nouwen’s statement that he was not ready for Easter resonated with me. Does sit resonate with you? I know I have more Lent-like work to do. I have further to go in exploring my culpability in sin. I have not identified those places where “Spiritual Junk Food” have crowded out a good diet of God’s love and grace. I have more wresting to do with what it means to die to myself before I can really know what it means to experience resurrection power. How does time go so fast?
I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. Every day seems to go by quicker than I want it to. Here I am writing article as time runs out on my Thursday afternoon when I told Debbie this was definitely going out on Tuesday. I sent her a text as she was coming into the office saying, “We will be sending out a ‘Church Family Email’ today. It’s been too long since we have updated our Prayer for 5.” Yet on Thursday it is still not in your hands! Time goes too fast. Distractions come along. Time is wasted. Time moves faster than our best intentions.
We have work to do to get ready for Easter. If we are careful, it will be swallowed up with our own busy-ness! We will miss this opportunity to engage with Lent. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. And the better news is that even if we are unable to find the rhythms of Lent, the meaning of Easter will still be the same. Jesus has risen from the dead and in him we have new life. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do the hard work. It is not an excuse to exercise cheap grace. But it is true. Easter is coming… the tomb will be empty… we will proclaim the Good News. But, just reminding us of that Good News should invite us to ready ourselves for that day!
Nouwen prayed that, during these last couple of weeks of Lent, God would do the work that God wanted to do. Can we join him in this prayer? “I pray that these last [two] weeks, in which you invite me to enter more fully into the mystery of your passion, will bring me a greater desire to follow you on the way that you create for me and to accept the cross that you give to me. Let me die to the desire to choose my own way and select my own desire… Be with me tomorrow and in the days to come, and let me experience your gentle presence. Amen”
At this point it might even be better for us (and for the church) to start asking what this Easter will mean for us. Maybe it is not about what we can do during Lent, but what we expect God to do in and through us after Lent. Easter is a promise of new life, of a new hope, of a new way of abundant living. What can we ready ourselves to do during the Easter season? If Lent is about dying to self, Easter is about living in Christ. Spend some time this week thinking about what it will mean for you to live for Christ in this new season.
I encourage you to make a choice now about what you will do during the season of Easter. It is not a season shaped by confession, repentance and death. It is a time of life. What will new life look like at GTCC? That is the Easter season. Stop thinking about what you are going to do during Lent and start imagining what God is going to do through us during Easter!!
