26 February 2020 - turn back to me

Today's Readings

(Audio)

For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin,
so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

Lent is so easy to do poorly. We are all too ready to beat ourselves up and make ourselves feel bad. We often begin in the flesh, attempting or planning to attempt so many lofty-sounding goals. Jesus is inviting us to something else. He is inviting us to allow ourselves to be stripped of those things which we do or possess apart from him so that we can live more fully our identity as sons and daughters united to him. Lent is not ultimately about incremental change of habits. It is about becoming more and more the righteousness of God in Christ.

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.

The prophet Joel makes it sound as though we are supposed to beat ourselves up. But this may not be what he intends. The fasting, the weeping, and the mourning, none of these are things we work up in ourselves. They are a consequence of the grace of repentance. We turn back to our first love. We do so by foregoing the things which distract us. The sorrow is sorrow that we have kept our beloved waiting so long with so little to show for it. The sorrow may be part of the path of these forty days but it is not the destination.

For gracious and merciful is he,
slow to anger, rich in kindness,
and relenting in punishment.
Perhaps he will again relent
and leave behind him a blessing,
Offerings and libations
for the LORD, your God.

We must be very careful in our approach to Lent that we are being led by the Spirit and not by our sense of how others will see us. Even when we don't tell them our penances we still often imagine how they would think of us if they knew. We still imagine what we do more from a human perspective of pride than from God's perspective.

But when you give alms,
do not let your left hand know what your right is doing,
so that your almsgiving may be secret.

To the degree possible, let us approach Lent relying on the Spirit and not on our own understanding (see Proverbs 3:5). The degree to which we are able to let God work silently and secretly within us (we know not how!) is the degree to which we finally receive our reward. We do begin Lent with concrete choices made to place the LORD first in our lives. But we must live Lent by allowing the LORD to work within these choices. If we try to stick to them rigidly as blueprints whereby we gauge our own success and merit we'll miss great opportunities for grace.

Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.