Psalm 25, Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-13
For most of the past 500 years, there was an almost infallible way to tell Catholics from Protestants: the Catholics were the ones who had a cross-shaped smudge of ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday. But, those times are changing. Each year for the past decade, more and more Protestant churches have observed Ash Wednesday, reclaiming a bit of their “little-c” catholic heritage from beyond the turbulent and acrimonious controversies of the Reformation.
One of the more interesting chronicles of this change was penned by Terry Mattingly a few years ago in a column he wrote entitled “Ash Wednesday for Baptists? Why Not?” (http://listserv.episcopalian.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9902&L=virtuosity&D=1&H=1&O=D&P=1390)
Reporting on the first observance of Ash Wednesday at First Baptist Church of Gretna, Virginia, Mattingly gives us this observation by Pastor Glenn Graves: "To tell you the truth, we didn’t do the sign of the cross on the forehead part at first. That kind of thing tends to freak Baptists out, you know? So we just let them stick their own hands down in the urn the first time and get ashes all over themselves."
Pastor Graves made a further comment that I found interesting. He said, "We could do Palm Sunday, but that would open up Holy Week and there you go! … That’s the thing about traditions like that. They all seem to be connected and once you use one of them it’s hard to know where to stop adding things to the calendar."
I think Pastor Graves has a good point there, and in the spirit of connecting the dots in the meaning and significance of special observances in the Christian calendar of worship, I want to connect Ash Wednesday with Lent, since this is our first Sunday in Lent. Like Ash Wednesday, the observance of Lent used to be one of the ways in America that you could tell the difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants. I always thought this was a very parochial point of view. Since the Reformation, Lutherans and Anglican have never stopped observing Ash Wednesday or Lent. Indeed, the early Calvinists did too. And, of course, the Orthodox have never ceased observing both Ash Wednesday and Lent.
If you, like me, came from a church that does not have Lent in its history, it is probably because the history of your cradle faith runs back to the Anabaptists in the 16th century. They discarded the observance of all Christian holy days whatsoever, on the theory that they were innovations by the Catholic Church. To their credit, the Catholic Church of their day was sadly in need of reformation, and it was not always easy to draw lines between what needed to be reformed and what should be retained. The idea seemed to be that the Church should return to the faith and practice of the earliest Christians. But alongside this conviction was a pervasive ignorance of exactly what was the faith and practice of the earliest Christians.
When we examine the earliest evidence of the faith and practice of the earliest Christians we find them observing Lent. Indeed, Lent is a far, far earlier observance in the Church than Ash Wednesday, which dates, as far as we can tell, from the 11th Century. The Didache, however, dates from the first century; and the Apostolic Constitutions from the third century. In addition, we have the diaries of Egeria, a Spanish nun, from the fourth century. All of these early documents testify to the Christian calendar and holy days of those early centuries of the Church. And in these early documents we find abundant and compelling testimony to the observance of Lent. Lent originated in the apostolic age. In fact, The Apostolic Constitutions attribute the observance of Lent to apostolic commandment. We can’t verify that, but we also can’t disprove it. [hat tip for this summary to Kencollins.com]
What, then, is the meaning of this season in the Church’s calendar? Why 40 days? Why 40 days before Easter? It is not difficult to see the meaning of this period in the gospel lesson for this first Sunday in Lent. Jesus has just begun his public ministry. He has presented himself to John the Baptist and has received baptism at his hands. God the Father has just spoken from heaven to declare that Jesus is his true Son, with whom he is well pleased. And then, Mark tells us, the Holy Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil for 40 days and 40 nights.
Why this, do you suppose? If God is well-pleased with Christ, why drive him out into the wilderness to be tempted for 40 days and nights? We have a clue that comes from the duration of the temptation: the number 40. If you do a simply concordance check of that number, you turn up things like the following:
It rained 40 days and nights (Gen. 7:17) at the Flood, that cataclysmic event which God ordained in order to cleanse the earth from the wickedness and pollution of human sin, in preparation for the world that was to follow it.
Moses was forty days on the mountain, eating no food and drinking no water, to receive the Law from God, (Deut. 9:11) in preparation for delivering and teaching that Law to God’s people.
When Moses came down from the mountain with the Law of God written on tablets of stone, he found the people worshiping a golden calf. God’s people had broken covenant with him almost immediately after God announced the covenant and Moses delivered its token in the tables of stone. What did Moses do then? He went back up the mountain to intercede for the people in prayer. And, how long did he do this? For another 40 days and 40 nights, pleading with God to spare his rebellious and foolish people.
The next mention of a period of time connected with the number 40 is the 40 years that Israel was wandering in the wilderness. This period of time – 40 years – had two ends in mind: the death of the generation of Israelites who came out of Egypt, and the birth and maturation of the generation of Israelites who would go into the promised land, to conquer the Canaanites and to inherit the promises made to their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
We go many centuries beyond the wilderness wanderings before we find another period of forty days. In this case, it is a journey to made by the prophet Elijah, a journey of 40 days and nights, in which he was fasting, as he returned to Mt. Sinai, to learn from the Lord what he should do in a time of intense persecution and danger.
These events have been proposed by numerous Bible teachers down through the centuries as the background to Jesus testing in the wilderness for 40 days and nights.
But after this testing of Jesus Christ, there is yet another period of forty days mentioned in the New Testament. Luke tells us that Jesus was teaching the disciples after his resurrection for 40 days (Acts. 1:3) to give them a last time of preparation for a lifetime of ministry in planting the church.
The common theme in all these time references in the Bible to 40 is “preparation” for something that is to follow the period of time that bears the number 40. Often there is fasting involved during this period, but it is not fasting for its own sake. Rather, it is abstention of something for the sake of concentrated attention on something else. For the Biblically literate early Christians, it was a no brainer that the life of Christ contained disciplines and practices which were to be mimicked by his disciples. And these early Christians had no difficulty recognizing in Jesus 40 days in the wilderness a pattern for their own spiritual growth, because they correctly saw Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness as a preparation for his own ministry.
And, so it was, at a very early time, that Christians devoted 40 days prior to the feast of the Resurrection to a time of penitence, preparation, a time of spiritual discipline, out of which their own lives of service to Christ would be strengthened.
How are you observing Lent this year? Let me refer briefly to those various periods of time that bear the number 40 as suggestions for how you might fashion this Lenten season, and future Lenten seasons, for yourself.
Lent could be for you a time of cleansing, as it was during the flood of Noah that lasted 40 days and nights. That period of 40 days wiped the earth clean of human sin. Your Lent might aim to remove the filth of body, soul, or spirit. And would you do such a thing simply to clean up a spiritual stain, so that you could go back to wallowing like a pig in the mire after Easter? Of course, not. God cleansed the earth to prepare the way for the world to follow; and if you set yourself to scouring your own soul of defiling habits of behavior or thought, you do so in preparation for a lifetime beyond the period of cleansing, when your service to Christ and the church less encumbered by the dirt of the past.
Moses was 40 days on the mountain for receiving God’s word. Lots of Lenten disciplines are suggested by this. Simply reading, reading the entire Bible during Lent. It’s not that hard to do. In fact, a great many Lenten disciplines are not difficult. The challenge in them is not their difficulty; rather it is that you should persevere in getting them done. So, grab a Bible, check the number of pages in it, divide by 40, and set yourself to reading it. Or, memorizing portions of it.
Moses was 40 days on the mountain interceding for the people of Israel: What about 40 days of committed, focused, and diligent prayer for someone, or some thing? Jesus commended the widow who kept pestering the unjust judge, so that she finally got what she was praying for. How many of us have prayed to God for something for 40 days in a row? Can you think of something you have prayed for 40 times? or prayed for over a period of time bearing the number 40? What do you think Moses said on the mountain on day number 18 that he had not already said on the previous 17 days? And what do you suppose there was in the next 23 days that was any different?
Elijah journeyed for 40 days to Mt. Sinai, to learn what God wished him to do in a difficult situation. That journey was quite literal, of course, and it had a concrete destination – a going back to where it all began, as it were, but seeking a destination, a direction at a time when things were quite dark and uncertain. It’s entirely significant that it was Mt. Sinai to which Elijah made his journey – the place where Israel’s national identity had begun so many centuries earlier. He wanted to know where to go and what to do.
Most of you know that it was a tiny version of Moses’ and Elijah’s prayers, particularly Elijah’s seeking the Lord at the place of Israel’s beginnings, that led to the founding of this parish. When it became clear that my family would need to depart the Episcopal church in order to maintain any spiritual credibility, set myself to Bible reading and prayer during Lent of 2004. By the end of Lent, I had found confidence to go forth with the founding of a new Anglican parish in our community. St. Athanasius Anglican Church is the fruit of a Lenten discipline of seeking the Lord’s will and the Lord’s blessing.
Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness suggests a world of Lenten goals. But, surely one of the most elementary of them is fasting. Why did Jesus do this? To earn virtue or merit? I don’t think so. Rather, it was to practice, to demonstrate, to acquire an absolute mastery of his own body, a mastery which was painfully tested by the Devil’s temptation to turn stones into bread, something wholly within our Lord’s power to do. Most meditations on Christ’s fasting in the wilderness treat his fast as if it were the cause of his weakness, thus exposing him to the temptation that the Devil. Did it ever occur to you that Christ’s fasting was not a source of weakness, but a source of strength? I believe the fasting made Christ strong, in the same sense that Paul was speaking about in 1 Corinthians 9:27 – But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.
Finally, what about Christ’s teaching the disciples for 40 days prior to his ascension. How about a Lenten goal of reading and outlining one or more of the Christian classics of the past two thousand years. The Holy Spirit has been teaching the saints for centuries and centuries. They wrote down what they have learned. If their lives and their ministries existed – as God word tells us – for the building up of the Body of Christ, why do we to suppose that we don’t need to pay any attention to them at all? And, so, as Christ’s disciples were taught by him for 40 days before he ascended into heaven, we can learn from those disciples during the 40 days of Lent.
Any of these and many more are available to you this Lent, and the Lenten season of next year, and the year after that. And, many of them can (and, probably, should) be pursued at the same time. Lent is an annual season in which we acquire strength through Bible reading, prayer, study, works of mercy and ministry, all of them to advance us and Christ’s church in holiness and rightness for future service. That’s what Christ was doing in the wilderness, and that is what Christians have done for centuries.
The Anabaptists in Europe soon after the beginning of the Reformation had a great influence on the Amish, the Mennonites, Baptists of all sorts and kinds, the Puritans, and the Plymouth Brethren. This is why the Puritans made Christmas illegal in Massachusetts at one time. As Americans spread westward from the eastern seaboard in the 19th century, the established denominations were slow to spread west of the Appalachians, so people who did NOT observe Christian holy days – including Lent – were the ones who pressed against the frontier.
Consequently, most of the religious groups formed in 19th century America lack the observance of Lent.
But, in recent years, Lent has begun to return to Christian communions that had lost them. The restoration quickly began with Easter. Christmas followed in the 19th century, and Advent and Holy Week became widespread among them in the 20th century. Lent is mounting a come-back in the 21st century.
May we all, by the grace of Christ, observe a holy and prosperous Lent this year. May be find grace to identify a spiritual discipline, to set ourselves a spiritual goal, that results in our spiritual strengthening, to the end that all our days after this Lent will be marked by purer service to Christ and His church, a more abundant ministry, and a victorious foretaste of the world to come.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
