Disciplines of Lent
Rev. Dr. Nathan C.P. Frambach
On Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of the Lenten season, those who gather for worship often hear this invitation: “We begin this holy season by acknowledging our need for repentance and for God’s mercy…As disciples of Jesus, we are called to a discipline that contends against evil and resists whatever leads us away from love of God and neighbor. I invite you, therefore, to the discipline of Lent—self-examination and repentance, prayer and fasting, sacrificial giving and works of love—strengthened by the gifts of word and sacrament.”
These disciplines of Lent—rooted in love—are central to our life with God in Christ. Participating in Christ means precisely these things—caring for those in need, praying, fasting, and love of neighbor. There is arguably nothing more significant to the Christian faith and for Christian life and practice than love—specifically the love of God in Christ Jesus the Lord. In his own life and ministry Jesus loved loving more than he loved anything else and refused to put limits or conditions on that love. In Jesus Christ God comes to us and this whole creation in love, as love, and calls us to share that love in the power of the Holy Spirit.
In his book We Drink from Our Own Wells, Dominican priest and theologian Gustavo Gutierrez writes: “The experience and the idea of the gratuitousness of God’s love are fundamental and of central importance to the Christian life… ‘God first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). Everything starts from there. The gift of God’s love is the source of our being and puts its impress on our lives. We have been made by love and for love. Only by loving, then, can we fulfill ourselves as persons; that is how we respond to the initiative taken by God’s love…God’s love for us is gratuitous; we do not merit it. It is a gift we receive before we exist, or, to be more accurate, a gift in view of which we have been created.”
In “Her Last Conversations,” Saint Therese of Lisieux wrote that “everything is grace…everything is grace because everything is God’s gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events—to the heart that loves, all is well.”
Everything is grace; in Christ we are forgiven and freed to love. Dear siblings in Christ, remember that you are loved, and to Love you shall return.
