lent
with an eye toward easter
I’ve always been too serious for my own good.
An “old soul,” I can remember childhood teachers calling me.
I’m prone to light melancholy, and Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible because what is the meaning of life anyway?
I love songs in minor keys and Gregorian-sounding liturgies that don’t resolve.
I take a sick delight in the somber liturgical seasons of Advent and Lent.
I’m not good at prayer or fasting, but I like the idea of both. I’m not good at the faithful waiting and hopeful anticipation Advent calls us to, but I know I need them and the joy they usher in.
I’m not good at the discipline or self-denial of Lent, but I’m naturally great at contrition and sorrow. Guilt and grief are my chief emotions.
(Whether growing up Lutheran made me this way or whether I was made to grow up Lutheran is a question I can’t answer, but the answer is probably just “yes.”)
So here we are on Shrove Tuesday, as I knew it as a child, sticky with pancake syrup in my church’s fellowship hall.
Maybe some of you grew up with the tradition too—a relic from when people once used this Tuesday to eat up the fats and sugar they’d deny themselves in the following 40 days leading up to Easter.
Maybe for you it’s Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday,” and maybe you never knew that this holiday was connected to Lent at all. Or maybe you’re more practicing than I am, firmly focused on fasting and self-discipline, on reflection and contrition for the next 40 days.
In the Lutheran church of my smalltown childhood, we ate our Tuesday pancakes, and we imposed ashes the next day—two church nights in a row!
Lent was the only time a Lutheran kid went to church on Wednesdays just like the Baptists. But we weren’t intense about Lent or fasting. I’ll never forget how our Lenten services were preceded by a meal of soup. It was meant to be meager, in the spirit of self-denial, but try telling that to Southern ladies planning a potluck.
When I got to Confirmation age we were encouraged to take on some sort of mild Lenten fast—maybe give up soda or sweet tea, maybe meat or desserts, though most of us weren’t committed enough to fast from entire food groups.
My peer group in high school, though, was made up of a lot of kids who were serious beyond our ages, and so we liked to observe Lent. It was a thing. I remember lamenting in my teenage years that Lent and Girl Scout cookie season coincide, since chocolate was typically my vice of choice to give up.
And so, here I am, a few decades removed from that childhood, thinking about Lent beginning tomorrow. Wondering if giving up anything would make much of an impact, in my spirit or in the world. Wondering if I could go full-on boycott of all the corporations contributing to oppression and death in this world—but what, dare I ask, would even be left that isn’t tainted?
I’m wondering if what I need right now if 40 days of fasting or 40 days of more intentional prayer or 40 days of penance and melancholy.
Or if what I really need is 40 days of Easter.
I started listening to my playlist of songs about resurrection yesterday. I pulled up my favorite sermon1 about the resurrection and listened to it while I ran errands and sat in the school pick up line.
I feel an intense need right now for believing that resurrection is real, that Jesus is risen, that He reigns.
Because, even if there is nothing new under the sun2, it sure feels to me like this is most hopeless the world around me has ever been.
My life is still fine—which just adds to the dissonance, and stirs up my ever-present guilt without much sense of what penance I could pay to help—but the world around me feels the most broken and fragile that it ever has been. I am grieved by the suffering in so many lives here and around the globe, grieved that all indicators point to that suffering being multiplied rather than soothed in the coming days.
I know it’s not true that things are the worst they’ve ever been; surely times have been just as bad, have been worse. But in my lifetime, I have never been so scared, never been so sad about the state of the world.
So do I need Lent when that’s how I’m already feeling?
Maybe. Maybe I need to join with the saints over the generations in remembering that life is not meaningless, but it can feel like it.
Bullies win. Evil prospers. Violence reigns.
We’re all guilty as sin in all of it. And yet, maddeningly, the ones who are the guiltiest have the most to show for it.
Kingdoms rise and fall. And the democracy that has always protected me (though heaven knows it has not always protected others) isn’t immune to the destruction that our bids for Babel inevitably lead us to.
Maybe Lent is a time to remember all of this, not shy away from it.
But then again, this serious old soul is never very far from the grief and guilt that this world is broken, that I’m complicit in that brokenness, and that I can’t possibly do enough to change any of that.
So maybe I’m gonna treat this Lent a little bit more like Advent, with an eye ever on the joy of Easter. I need it.
Like bread, like water, like breath, I need to believe in the resurrection of Christ.
Not for some far-off salvation in heaven but for salvation here and now.
Not just for some sort of cosmic debt-settlement redemption with God but for redemption here and now that takes what is broken and restores it, makes it new, gives it life.
I need the resurrection of Christ to be true because if it is, then the corrupt and vain kingdoms of this world do not have the final word.
The true King is the suffering servant, the wounded healer who takes the worst this world has to offer, endures it, and dies but rises again.
And in His rising gives a glimpse of what is to come and what already is.
No government, no religious institution, not even death itself has the ultimate authority. Jesus overcame them all—not by violence or by might but by self-sacrifice and co-suffering and love.
The resurrection of Jesus testifies to what we want to be true, the themes of all our superhero movies and rom-coms:
The good guy wins.
Love wins.
Even the worst of humanity, even death itself cannot defeat love. Now and forever.
That’s the hope I want to celebrate this Easter, the hope I cling to this Lent.
Do normal people have favorite sermons? See also: I am too serious and an old soul.
Thanks, Ecclesiastes.