Lenten Devotional (1): The Case for Lent
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.
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 prepared to take up the cross with greater zeal in all your words and deeds? This is a blessed journey of 40 days rooted in the 40-day wilderness experience of Jesus after his baptism. Jesus reconstitutes the fast. The minimal fasts of the Old Testament are reinterpreted in light of the great fast of the New.
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. Our Lord did not fast alone. He was protected by the Father and armed with strength.
We enter this journey equipped.
As the Psalmist promises, 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 to bless 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? Our Lord did not walk with the ungodly, even amid hunger; he did not make deals with sinners, even amid suffering.
Lent is a journey to grace where our walking, standing, and sitting gauge 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 repent 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 because the Blessed One has gone before us.
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.
Notations
Bucey and Tipton's little book, "Unfolding Redemption,” is a sweet gem. I admire these guys’ work. Check out their podcast. The booklet traces the unfolding of redemption in popular categories. It is a perfect layman’s introduction to a misunderstood distinction between the historia salutis and the ordo salutis. They argue that Reformed theology has applied the historia salutis (history of salvation) exclusively to what Jesus did in his life, death, and resurrection.
However, we can broaden our understanding of the historia salutis by acknowledging the ways the Son of God was at work through his word and spirit, both before and after his time on earth as incarnate (11).
In sum, the historia salutis is not confined to aspects or phases of Jesus’ life but encompasses all of redemptive history from Moses to the Apocalypse.
Barth argues that you can’t find God “in the psychological labyrinth of our religious experiences” (137). That’s some stunning use of language! He argues that if we consider our mood reliable, we will fail to trust God as the objective reality. Barth was a precient critic of pietism, even though his solutions did not absolve his own case.
A quote from the book:
Athanasius’ On The Incarnation observes that Christ’s embodiment was because he loved human beings. (Sec. 4)., but many turned to corruption and acted against nature itself (Sec. 5). Christ comes to save sinners in his body.
Our consistory is reading through Leithart’s Theopolitan Vision. He argues in chapter one that there is a perception that liturgy is “murdered by vain repetition” (001) and that there is a case to be made that traditional forms provide the ground for the burial. But Leithart says that his re-conversion to liturgical forms stemmed from the biblical patterns. If the Bible is the liturgical paradigm, he argues that kneeling to receive communion is an “odd posture if you’re eating a celebratory meal” (003). Sorry, but not sorry, Lutherans!
Season 5, Episode 1 of the Perspectivalist Podcast is out and ready to rumble with some new music from George Reed. And don’t forget every episode is now available for free. Nothing is behind a paywall.
Blessed Lent,
Uriesou Brito