Lenten Meditation

Monday afternoon I got home from a quick road trip to speak to the core group of Chelsea Presbyterian Church in Chelsea, Alabama. This is one of our church plants and it was very encouraging. I got home dead tired, knowing that Addison would be waiting for me and that crashing was not even a possibility. Sure enough, she met me at the door with a welcome that was even more exuberant than I could have imagined and, before I even had time to greet Teri, she had me by the hand, telling me we were going outside to swing. It has been so cold and muddy as of late that this has been impossible. The warm weather and sunshine were calling to her little three-year-old soul! After talking to Teri and telling her I was home, off I went, led by a little girl whose soul was singing opera and who was talking so fast I couldn’t keep up.As we made our way from swing to trampoline to “her park” in the back of the yard, I began to “see” my place again for the first time in a while. For months, my mower has been stowed; my equipment for weeding and watering have remained untouched. I noticed things that for months had not bothered me. There were mole tunnels everywhere. After everything died off in the fall, I declared a truce with these devilish creatures and left them alone. I noticed the vineyard looked like a bad hair day—a tangle of unruly and, as I know from experience, unproductive vine. The asparagus bed is just dead canes, used up and laid over in surrender to exhaustion and cold. The beds behind my house are fallow, most of the vegetable plants from last year are gone, but a few weeds and leaves remind me that in order for there to be new life here there is a lot of work to do.All this death and disarray is as it should be. Time out of mind, there is seed time and harvest. There are seasons to be fruitful and times to lay fallow. God established these conditions and, without my help, has kept this glorious dance going since creation. But something stirs in me so that what has not bothered me for months now starts to create a thirst and hunger within me. I know what it is and what makes me “see” this for the first time again. It is presence of color where before it was just drab grays and browns. There are the buttercups in various places around the yard, and they have come out of hiding and are strutting their stuff. In the front of my house, there is a slash of yellow as the forsythia is blooming. The narcissus have also made their way up out of the cold dead earth. All of these early bloomers are a foretaste and reminder of spring and new life! As I look at my blueberries, tulip magnolia, and the trees in my yard, I see they are ripe with bud and itching to break out and join the parade.I see this every year and it is still a wonder to me. My yard is both a window into the heart of God and also a reminder that I am a worker of the restoration! Yes, God must be playful. As Robert Capon points out in The Supper of the Lamb, God didn’t make just one flower but an infinite number of flowers. He didn’t make one kind of meat to eat but many. Economy of scale doesn’t seem to be the way of the Creator, but abundance. “…he relishes the elegant superfluity, the unnecessary variety of the world.” So, amidst this abundance around me, I feel the tug to enter this wonder laid before me, this chaos of stuff, and to bring some kind of order to it.The next month and a half will be all about weeding, cleaning out, cutting out, clearing out and preparation. It is a Lenten exercise. It is hard work but necessary. For my gardens to provide abundance, this is the work to which I am called for a season. It is no accident that the season of Lent, which we are about to enter before we celebrate Easter, corresponds with what we see around us. Death before resurrection. It is written into the bones of creation, and spiritually we know this as well. And so, we enter a period in our church called Lent where we essentially weed out, cut out, and prune the excess and unnecessary in our lives to make room for new life in Jesus. I was eating with Fred Williams today and we talked about this and how often we had to “fast” or deny ourselves things so that we could better focus on hard things in our lives. He said, “Why do you think God gave Israel a yearly round of feast and fast? To continually remind Israel of true and necessary things.”Human nature is no different now than it was three thousand years ago. We forget. We have to continually be reminded of who we are in Jesus. We live in a cultural liturgy that says you are your abundance and your leisure. The gospel says death before resurrection. The gospel says, “My life for yours.” The gospel says, “Behold the Lamb!” Turn your eyes from yourself—“Look in wonder and live!” And because we are the kind of folk that continually need to “remember,” once a year we have a season of forty days, before we celebrate the resurrection on Easter morning, where we take time to examine ourselves and root out old habits and patterns of life that are not contributing to the abundant life Jesus died to give us.So on “Ash Wednesday” we will gather as a people to do what the people of God have done since time immortal. To ponder afresh that we are but dust, and it is only by the grace of God that we are children God sings opera over because of the work of Jesus. Lent is about that, remembering we are sinners, but only so we can see more clearly that we are adopted, loved, and celebrated by the Creator of the world. Glory!