Home Again and Lenten Meditation

The Great Lent Begins

William Faulkner once pondered: “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” As I laid in hotel beds, delighted in the home of others in these past weeks, still, it was the thought of my place, my abode, that kept me going to one thing after another. When I am gone for too long, even amid sophisticated spaces, fancy dinners, and cocktails I can’t pronounce, I long for that little space. The idea that I would return to those well-worn carpets and those familiar faces made me crystalize my priorities. My backyard—showing proofs of children's weaponry, dirt, bricks, and life—is a place of safety for me. It’s good to be home.

It’s especially good to be home on Shrove Tuesday, where our congregation gathered to remind ourselves that we are a mortal, feasting people. We ate and delighted in food, God’s mercy to hungry souls.

But today, we enter into Lent...the great Lent.

As a Reformed Protestant, I am committed to the Church Calendar, not because I want to be a slave to it, but because I know its inevitability. We all follow some calendar. The question is, which calendar? I ask that question because Protestantism is grounded in a Trinitarian view of the world. In its best expression, it does not isolate ideas, acting as a divorced corpus. It brings ideas together to form a coherent system. If that is our religion, then certain questions are inevitable, and therefore the question of time is inevitable. We are bound to bring time into harmony.

I suggest that Lent is highly Trinitarian. As the Trinity is a communion of love, so Lent provides a means to express that love to one another in the community. Lent makes sense of time. Where sins are confronted and battled, you find a vigorous Trinitarian community and vision. Lent is a service to the community by giving us a season of determined war against sin for the sake of the body.

It offers a vision of history that undergirds the biblical history and reflects the normal routines, liturgies, and rituals of human beings. Lent is a form of restructuring our lives. All Christians need to re-balance areas where there is disproportionate indifference. We all undergo a Psalmic journey of lamentation and feasting. Lent draws us into this journey.

In essence, Lent reveals the God who suffers in the Person of Jesus Christ. God's image-bearers are formed from the dust of a fallen Adam to the glorification of the risen Final Adam. To disconnect Lent from the Church Calendar is to disparage history and human coherence.

This Lenten-tide, I aim to offer brief meditations daily to ground us in our Trinitarian faith. May your Lent be merry!

~Pastor Brito

A Lenten Devotional, day 1

The Lenten Season begins today. Are you ready for all the treasures ahead? Are you ready to take up the cross with greater zeal in all your doings and then to Easter with all your being? This is a blessed journey of 40 days. The words of Psalm 1 summarize this journey:

Blessed is the one

who does not walk in step with the wicked

or stand in the way that sinners take

or sit in the company of mockers…

Lent is to face those words once again with renewed vigor and insight. Lent is a season to re-examine what it looks like to walk in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:16) and what it means to put on the armor of God (Eph. 6:10-19) against the flames of the evil one. Lent is to receive the benediction of God amid the rejection of the lures of men.

Blessings come when we turn away from enticement and folly and walk with the righteous rather than the mockers. The mockers lust for self-fulfillment, but the righteous live for the sake of blessing others.

Our tables of fellowship and halls of communion speak much about our lives. Where do we sit? Where do we stand? Are we sitting around a company of law-keepers? Are we standing with blessed ones or those who despise the blessings of Yahweh?

Lent is a journey to grace where our walking, standing, and sitting gauges our interest in the life of faith. It is not an easy journey. It cuts us for forty long days. It allows us to bleed in ways we have not bled before, to mourn in ways we have not mourned before. Are we prepared to mourn and lose that thing we so cherish? the sins that entangle us (Heb. 12:1)?

Lent takes us through that journey where we ponder sin’s place in our lives and begin demolishing its presence and power in our daily walk. Lent is a blessed journey, and only the blessed ones can walk faithfully to the resurrection city.

Prayer: O Lord, prepare me to embrace this journey with great longing this season. Do not allow my heart to wander into different journeys but to walk in the way of truth, to see your cross as the reason for my service and your death as the reason for my life. Make me whole and cause me to see wondrous things in your law, for you are the truly blessed One of God, Christ our Lord, Amen.

Hymn: Not What My Hands Have Done