Lenten Meditation #4

Prepare for You

(Matthew 26:17)

Okay Rachel, I’m back in play. Still recovering from all the activities of your visit. During one of our discussions, you and your delightful friends wondered why your church, like many evangelical churches, doesn’t honor Lenten Season, or the Christian Calendar in general.

We mumbled around about how our Puritan forbearers, throwing all things Roman Catholic to the wind, didn’t even celebrate Christmas or Easter—it’s not in the Bible. Besides, they come from pagan festal celebrations. That’s why Easter jumps around so—something about the first Sunday after the first full moon following the northern spring equinox. It even sounds pagan, doesn’t it?  But, spring… that works doesn’t it? Like Christmas following the winter solstice with each day getting brighter. It’s true, none of it, calendar wise and festal wise, is in the Bible. It’s all very human—very northern hemisphere, very Western Culture.

Which brings us to tradition. Can tradition be good? I think so. We need not give it revelatory status, as if it came from Saini. Like all things human, it can be misused. Our different forms of worshipping our same Triune God vary from people to people, church to church. That’s okay. There’s much diversity of expression in our one Gospel. Maybe our various forms of worship is something like the clothes we wear. There’s the naked us—the naked Gospel; but, in order to go public, it needs to be clothed. Just as we have different fashion, so too, our expressions of worship. We end up wearing the coverings that suit us. Maybe our different forms of worship are something like that.

The church I was raised in and ended up pastoring, was like your church. The fulness of the Christian Calendar came to me later. It had to do with the early days of growing our church. I was bothered by how important my personality was to the life and growth of the church. It was too heavy a burden to bear. While reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, I noticed how he dated his letters from prison by the Christian Calendar—like 4^th week of Lent. In prison, he was living according to a different calendar. So, by and by, the Calendar began to have its way with me. By following it, I felt I was getting the focus off me and my ideas, and onto the big ideas of the Christian Calendar that has its own way of keeping us focused on the fullness of Christ. We gather on Sunday morning, not because Leron has a few ideas about this or that, but because it is the beginning of Holy Week when we celebrate how Jesus enter Jerusalem and made his way to the Temple.