A path to renewal

Four weeks after the groundhog, with ten days until Spring, we are looking ahead to warmer days with buds and blooms. Along the way we entered the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Typically, the season of Lent is sober and restrained in its approach to life, at about the same time that we are ready to be free of winter.

The sobriety is related to the remembrance that the world is our first home, but, though created and called good, it is a place that sin and evil have corrupted. We are born into it but are ever at odds with it because we are made for far more than it offers. It is fading, but we are made for eternity.

Knowledge of the difference comes to us by the word and actions of a loving God—the same God who created all that is. The original lie is that God wants to find us wrong and keep us down. This idea, a product of sin and evil, is meant to keep us from discovering God and finding hope.

God’s rebuttal came as a human male, and to the surprise of all, he allowed himself to die. Though fully engaged in life on earth, yet he resisted its temptation to use the world for personal gain. In contrast, he submitted to the power of the evil of the world and used it against itself. He became a substitute sacrifice and an atoning offering.

God accepted that submission in faith and used it to reveal that God does not want death and separation for humans, but life and relationship. And this, not because God benefits, but because humans are then fulfilled in creation. In this knowledge, we are offered an exodus from the evil of the world, and an entrance into life as it was intended, both abundant and everlasting.

So, the seriousness of Lent comes from an awareness of the way that Christ Jesus lived, the things he suffered, that though horrible, he did them out of God’s love for the world. What an awesome gift of love! We are not made to be kept down, but to be raised up, and to be returned to relationship with the God who gives life and invites us to live.

The seriousness of Lent also comes from recognition that evil battles within us, that the world has connections in us and we in it. Following struggle, we recognize that we are not able to break free on our own, but we recognize the hope that follows the resurrection.

God accepted Jesus’ faith by raising him from death to life, and we understand that the same faith will bring for us a new life. The power is not held only for someday but begins to be available to us the moment we believe that we are made for life in God.

Spring is a time for new life. Lent is one of the ways that we pursue renewal.