What is Lent?

 

Lent is now in its second week, and I wonder what we might make of this long and loosely defined season of the Church Year?

We discussed this at our Life and Faith group yesterday evening.  It soon became apparent, at least with those of us who grew up in non-conformist churches, that Lent hardly figured at all in our youth.

One of my predecessors at AFC, The Revd Neville Clark, helped change all that in Baptist churches.  For he belonged to a somewhat eccentric group of ministers called The Cassock Club, who introduced more liturgical worship into the British Baptist tradition during the 1950’s.  Alas, their impact was rather short lived, yet one of their lasting legacies would be that many Baptist congregations at least give a nod and a wink to Advent and Lent today.

So, over the next six weeks or so I’ll be wearing a purple stole (the liturgical colour for Lent), and we’ll sing hymns from the Holy Week and Passiontide section of the hymn book.  More than that, as we travel with the lectionary, we’ll reflect on the stories of Jesus as he made his way from Galilee to Jerusalem and The Cross.

In recent years there’s been a helpful idea that, rather than simply giving something up for Lent, we might take something up which is positive and helpful to others.

And, as one of our Life and Faith group so helpfully said, Lent is that annual opportunity to do some serious thinking about personal faith.

 For me, the most important question Lent asks is: Who was Jesus?  It’s a crucial question and well worth spending six weeks pondering.

History teaches us...

 

Yesterday it was my privilege to lead the Free Church service at St Alban’s Cathedral.  As I looked around the impressive architecture, I remembered our first visit there as a guide told us that some of the stones from a former pagan temple had been incorporated into the building of the Abbey.

The past always influences the present.  We simply don’t live in chronological
isolation because what happened yesterday, the way we thought and lived back then, has a bearing on what’s going on in our lives today.

As we pour over recent news stories of invasions, conflicts and political upheaval we may indeed have a sense of DeJa’Vu; we’ve surely been here before and, of course, we have.

I’m sometimes surprised to hear people speak of current events as if they were the worst of all time.  Any casual appreciation of history would see that a hundred years ago our world was also struggling after pandemic, stood on the brink of war, and was collapsing under the Great Depression.

Of course, the past doesn’t solve the problems of today.  It may not even offer the right solutions because of the nuisances of every generation.

Yet the past can comfort us, reminding us that we have been here before and survived, and perhaps in some situations even thrived.

The past can inform us as we stand at the fork in the road, yet we must make our own decisions on what way to take.

That’s where the bible stories we hear at church and read at home can be our guide and compass.  For they speak, even thousands of years after first being penned, of issues that are still relevant.  These narratives are both helpful and comforting.  Yet, after reading them we have to make up our own minds about the directions and decisions we take.

Next week we will enter Lent and be reminded of, what we Christians believe is, the greatest story ever told.  The stories of Jesus can be our guide as we stand at all the crossroads of life.

Blog holiday next week.