Lent: Reclaiming Sacred Time
What a week it is. Super Bowl Sunday followed by Lincoln’s Birthday, followed by Fat Tuesday, followed by Valentine’s Day, which this year just so happens to coincide with Ash Wednesday. What’s a person to do?
On Sunday, The Morning—a daily email from the New York Times—called the Super Bowl “a national holiday.” And it’s not hyperbole. It was expected that 50% of Americans would watch the game, a percentage likely helped by a certain pop superstar who just so happens to date an NFL player.
Sometimes the influence of our American secular calendar can seem like a little much. A first instinct may be to laugh at the ridiculousness of all the special months and days that are acknowledged and celebrated. Because every day is set aside for something, it ends up as mere background noise, drained of all significance. Another reaction may be to recognize just how much of our time and schedules are tuned to purely secular holidays.
People have said to me (maybe jokingly?) not to expect many people at the Ash Wednesday Service this year since its Valentine’s Day. They may be right. Hallmark exerts more pull than 1500 years of Christian practice. Although these people clearly don’t remember the jokes I shared last time Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day coincided (it was 2018 in case you were wondering).
City Church has never made a huge deal out of Lent. It’s not a practice found in the Bible and therefore its observance is not required for Christians. But Lent is a season in the church’s liturgical calendar that can help us reclaim sacred time, help us live lives directed towards the one true God rather than the many secular gods that vie for our attention. That’s our hope for how we will approach Lent this year.
Since the start of January we’ve been talking about rival kingdoms at City Church, because that’s a main theme in the book of Exodus. The Exodus narrative shows us both how Israel is taken out of Egypt and how the influence of Egypt is taken out of Israel. The same double exodus takes place in the lives of Christians today. We are taken out of the kingdom of sin and darkness and sin and darkness are increasingly taken out of us.
So this Lent, I want to encourage you to resist the prevailing empire of our culture this Lent. I want you to push back on every manifestation of the rival kingdoms that would steal your affection and allegiance away from God—our Creator, Sustainer, and Friend.
Here are three ways to do that:
Prayer
Prayer—both individual and corporate—is a classic Christian discipline that pushes back on the empire of the world. Prayer orients our hearts to the true King rather than impostors. Prayer places us in a posture of dependence rather than independence, an idea which is anathema within the prevailing kingdom. You could commit to praying for 5 minutes or 10 minutes each day this Lent. Or you could follow the challenge from last year when we suggested adding one minute of prayer each day of Lent. Start with a 1 minute prayer on Ash Wednesday and end with 45 minutes of daily prayer by Easter.
Sabbath
Set aside Sundays as the one day in seven when you rest, fully giving yourself to worship of God and fellowship with his people. This, of course, means showing up at worship, but it also means making decisions on Sunday (and the rest of the week) that allow you to receive Sunday as a gift of God’s grace; a day when you remember that your value flows out of your being not your doing.
Worship
In addition to our Sunday worship, beginning February 21st, we will host a short and simple prayer service in the City Church offices on Wednesdays at noon. We encourage you to come over your lunch break to sing a few songs, read Scripture, and pray together. Rather than eating out or listening to a podcast or running errands over your lunch break, we invite you to organize your life around a shared sacred rhythm. We know it won’t be feasible for everyone, but we hope some of you will join us for our midweek prayer services on Wednesdays during Lent.
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Part of me feels silly for trying to push back against the prevailing empire, especially against the secular calendar that rules in the kingdom of this world. Surely a little church in Richmond won’t be able to resist the inertia of the fast-moving train of Western culture. Will it make a difference? Maybe not. But it might just make a difference in our hearts and in our lives. That itself is enough.