The Essence of Lent

What is Lent about, anyway? During my next six sermons, I plan to discuss various aspects of Lent that are meaningful to many people. In this first one, I want to start at the beginning. What, at its basis, is Lent all about?

A wild-eyed man wearing tattered clothing, holding a crudely carved wooden staff, standing in the wilderness screaming, “Repent! Repent!” That’s the image that comes to mind when John the Baptist pops up in a scripture reading. And if we can believe Matthew’s description in his gospel, that’s pretty much on target (Matthew 3:1-12). John the Baptist was apparently much more like the hellfire-and-damnation preachers who frequent late-night TV than he was like a typical Protestant preacher who stands in the pulpit on Sunday morning and doesn’t do much screaming and hollering at all. Somebody like me, for instance. I don’t see myself as a John the Baptist type. Except that this morning, I’m going to preach the very same message that John the Baptist preached (although I’ll be considerably quieter about it). We all need to repent, every single one of us, in bigger or smaller ways. Today is the first Sunday in Lent; and Lent is all about repentance!

But maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse. Before I start yelling “Repent!” I should tell you what that means. Does repenting mean being sorry for something you did? Well, yes, that’s the start of repentance; but it’s only a start. Does repenting, then, mean not only being sorry for something you did, but also asking for forgiveness? Yes, that’s another part of repenting; but it’s still not the whole story. Repentance is really very simple. Repentance means “turning around.” To repent means to stop doing one thing and to start doing something else! The Old Testament prophets talked about repentance in terms of “returning to God” – taking a good look at the ways that we have wandered away from God, and then going in a different direction. But it’s the same thing, in the end. When we repent, we change the direction of our lives.

A piece of advice that always makes me laugh comes from the great baseball sage Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” I imagine that not too many preachers use that quote on Sunday morning, but it’s a perfect description of repentance. When our lives come to a fork in the road, we should take a good look as far as we can down both sides of that fork to see which way leads to God. It will probably be the one that is less traveled. That’s because it’s not very popular to realize that our lives aren’t going the way they should be going, and taking a different path because of it. Roads that lead to comfort or popularity or wealth are far more popular than the ones that lead to God. But, like Robert Frost describes in his famous poem, taking the road less-traveled may make all the difference! Now, I’m not saying that you have to change everything about your life in order to repent. Roads go off in all kinds of different directions. Some do, indeed, lead back the way we came; while for others, just a slight turn will do. But all of them require some adjustments on our part. Imagine for a moment that you decide to drive to Dayton. What would happen if you got on a road, headed south, and decided that you didn’t need to steer the car anymore? That’s not a pretty picture, is it? You’d be in a ditch – or worse – in less than 5 minutes! We do something like that when we head out on our spiritual journeys and never make any corrections! We end up in the ditch.

What does that look like on a practical basis? Well, it starts with the realization that we’re doing something wrong. Maybe we’re having trouble loving someone else. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Just realizing that we’ve lost some of the love that we used to have is the start of repentance. That’s followed by being sorry for it. Scriptures tell us that God is grieved when we wander away; and we should be grieved, too. If you don’t care that you don’t love – well, then, there are bigger problems that you need to deal with as a Christian! But being sorry isn’t the end of repentance. An apology to God is in order; and maybe an apology to your neighbor; and the prayer that God might help you to love again. God’s pretty good about helping with prayers like that. Finally, do something about it! What that is will depend on the particular situation in which you find yourself. Where spiritual lives are concerned, one size never fits all.

That, my friends, is the essence of Lent. Repent! Make a change! Return to God! If you don’t know what how to go about that, pray about it. I guarantee that God will answer you. You may hear something that you don’t want to hear; you may be called to travel a road that you really don’t want to travel; but the reward will be a renewed relationship with God and a renewed life! Repentance isn’t a punishment – it’s an opportunity! We have never gone so far on a road that it is impossible to leave it and start again. What a blessing that is! Thanks be to God!