Lent and Holy Week are tightly integrated and some of the most significant days in the Church year— Passion (Palm) Sunday, Maundy (Holy) Thursday, and Good Friday—come in Holy Week. The five full weeks of Lent, then, serve as an important preparation for Holy Week.

Lent is about the whole of our faith, intended to teach us about Jesus and his public life, from his baptism in the Jordan, to his crucifixion and death on Golgotha, and finally to his burial in the tomb. Lent reminds us that we must live with both darkness and light and to be people who see and remember the story of Jesus. In our seeing and remembering, we inhabit the Lenten space of both/and: the place of the darkness of the crucifixion and the light of the Resurrection. 

The Lenten season with its stories of Jesus in scripture and the exhortations of the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms also incorporates the lessons of the holy people offered to us in the Lectionary. This past Sunday (April 10), Palm Sunday, was also the day when the church honored William Law (1686-1761), a priest in the Church of England. Law wrote a book in 1728 entitled, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, in which one finds the following:

If we are to follow Christ, it must be in our common way of spending every day. If we are to live unto Christ at any time or in any place, we are to live unto him in all times and in all places. If we are to use anything as the gift of God, we are to use everything as his gift.

Law is describing a condition in which God is all and is in every time and place in our lives.  This is the heart of Lent.

For weeks, we have been urged to follow Christ anew on his way to Jerusalem and his execution. Following Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, a journey we have come to know through our praying—our thinking, speaking, and living in God’s presence--helps us recognize that out of the darkness of Jesus’s passion and crucifixion, comes the light of his Resurrection.  We have known this the whole time of Lent, just as William Law knew it in 1728.

After two years of the pandemic, and with more still to come, the world of Lent 2022 is unsettled and broken: dissembling, fraudulent, angry, violent, inhumane, frightened, and often clueless. If we add the horrors of Ukraine, the dark reality is even darker. All of us have learned, once again, that we must live with darkness, as we must strive to live in the gift of God’s light. As Christians, we profess to follow Christ, and this means that we have a greater responsibility to address the darkness, and the reality of evil. It is one thing to acknowledge the evil and it is quite another thing to do something about it.

The wondrous mystery of Lent is that its last day, Holy Saturday, is meant to be a day of silent reflection on what we know has happened- the passion and death of Jesus-and what we know is the often-dark reality of the world, especially now. The light we seek will not come unless we look honestly at where we stand in our witness to our Christianity and to the world. On this very last day of Lent, we are called to assess our Lenten journey and to ask what we have done to fight the darkness. Have we followed Jesus and committed ourselves to bring his light to the darkness? Can we realize that battling the darkness, while our responsibility, is not the same thing as spreading the light of Christ, also our responsibility? And we must live with both.

As we offer our own efforts to brightening the light that comes with the Resurrection, we can find both solace and strength in a prayer from Howard Thurman. He has it right.

        Lord, open unto me.

        Open unto me—light for my darkness.

        Open unto me –courage for my fear.

        Open unto me --hope for my despair.

        Open unto me—peace for my turmoil.

        Open unto me—joy for my sorrow.

        Open unto me—strength for my weakness.

        Open unto me—wisdom for my confusion.

        Open unto me—forgiveness for my sins.

        Open unto me—love for my hates.

        Open unto me—thy Self for myself.

        Lord, Lord, open unto me!

        Amen.

                    From Prayers from the Heart, Richard Foster, (editor)

 — Father Peter

Please note: Saint Stephen's will be closed for Easter Week so there will be no blog post on Friday, April 22. The Friday blog will reappear on Friday, April 29 with a new series of Easter season postings.