LOVE & UNLOVE IN LENT, week 1

Lent begins and ends in love

Love endures with patience and serenity, love is kind and thoughtful, and is not jealous or envious; love does not brag and is not proud or arrogant. It is not rude; it is not self-seeking, it is not touchy, or fretful or resentful; it does not take into account a wrong endured. It does not rejoice at injustice, but rejoices when right and truth prevail.

Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything without weakening.

Love never dies.

Despite what you may have been told, Lent was not intended to be a time of meditating our wretchedness. Nor were the disciplines of Lent, such as fasting, intended as penance for our wretchedness. In the early church, baptisms happened on Easter eve., so the liturgical season we now know as Lent is modeled on the weeks of preparation new Christians entered for baptism.. Forty days was just the final stretch of three years of training in the ways of the church!

It occurs to me that the timeline for entry into the church was reversed from that of Jesus, who began his public ministry in baptism. From there, he was sent immediately into the desert for forty days of fasting to prepare for his three years of teaching, healing, and, ultimately, public crucifixion. The baptism candidates of the early church entered into cross-shaped fonts not only for the spiritual meaning of dying and being raised with Christ, but as Christianity faced persecution, a vivid symbol that their entry into the faith might also be their death sentence. Like Jesus, they "loved not their lives even unto death.”¹

And so Lent’s purpose is to reshape us in a love greater than death, a love that never dies.

Theologian Julie Canlis wrote: “The early church… believed the secret to Jesus’ strength in the desert came from the event right before: his baptism in the Jordan River.” Jesus entered the desert with his father's words ringing in his ears: “This is my Beloved.” And, we, too enter the wilderness of these forty days knowing we have been given the same blessing.

How does that work in practice? Canlis writes: