Ambiva-Lent

Why Lent?  Why this attention to one day over another?  Aren't all days the same, holy and good and gifts from God?  Isn't this a Catholic thing?  Rites and rituals make us Presbys nervous and maybe just a little sanctimonious.  We're enlightened.  Literally.  We are not burdened with such nonsense and Papist mummery.  We have freedom in Christ who did not command us to keep a holy time of fasting and prayer before his second birthday.  Jesus didn't say it, I believe it, that settles it (or did he?  Matt 6:16-19, Matt 9:15).  And you'd be perfectly justified to hold that opinion and if any man of us does, as i once myself did, let no one judge him for he believes this to the honor of God.  Amen.

But he may want to stop reading now.  Because i'm either going to confuse him or annoy the sanctimony out of him.

For those who don't remember we were all one church once, katholikos: universal, embracing all that was holy and true.  So whether you like it or not, the Presbyterian bloodlines run back through the Catholic church, for they are Christ's bloodlines.  Christ is not divided.  He still has but one Body.  He didn't put down the church for a thousand years and then pick it back up again when Luther nailed his thesis to the Wittenburg church.  He has been bringing it up like his son whom He loves.  And that son has been setting aside forty days before Resurrection Sunday since before the time of Irenaeus, only two hundred years after the first birth of Christ and two hundred years before the council Nicaea nailed down our credal doctrines, the hills the church would die for and upon.  For those inclined to disagreement, Lent is not one of those hills and so we can be katholikos, unified even with two ideas about it in one church.  Jesus is big enough. 

But why do it at all?  Tradition is not a good enough reason, on this i agree with the Repel-Lent crowd.  To do something simply because it's what we do is not worshiping the Father in spirit and truth.  It is works based religion and that simply will not do.  You can not do this to please God.  You can, of yourself, do absolutely nothing to please God.  All of your religion, whether it includes Lent or vehemently opposes it, is nothing but menstrual soaked rags.  (Isaiah 64:6 and while we're at it, Isaiah 1)

But it pleased God to do all that was necessary to bring you into His Holy Presence through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.  And that is something worth celebrating!  And that is what Easter's all about Charlie Brown!  Second birth!  Resurrection!  Death defeated!  Sin defeated!  The veil torn in two!  The Holy of Holies our new true home which Easter says loud and clear a day is coming when we leave behind this temporal kingdom and march singing and praising into that one!  Why would we NOT want to start that journey now?  Why would we not prepare our hearts to meet His?  Why would we not leave behind the things of this world, even temporarily (fasting), to focus the eyes of our minds, our hearts and even to discipline our bodies which can either bear us along or hold us back and distract us from the narrow path that leads through the constricted but oh-so-generously-open gate of Jesus!

Well, why would we not?  What's holding us back?

Author's/Artist's bio i wroted for something else but seemed to fit here too...

Washed ashore in the macadam deserts and aluminum wastes suburban desertification had taken from the Great Dismal Swamp in the commonwealth of Virginia, the child that would later be known as Shane Cooper wasn’t so much raised as babysat in oppressively Machiavellian soap opera filled or library-silent-but-for-the-single-ticking-clock extra rooms of apathetic hausfraus.  One way he found to survive was to draw.  It was quiet, which pleased the hausfraus and it allowed him to imagine better stories than the one he was living.  

In the days when King Michael ruled Pop and Reagan governed America, Shane came to the verdant forests and pastoral farmlands that had been scraped away in suburban desertification to make way for the macadam deserts and vinyl wastes of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.   There he was taught that people who like to draw silly cartoons and comic book characters might be able to make a living as architects.  So instead he got married, had kids, settled down in a moldy, dilapidated, uninsulated former summer cottage and learned to build, repair and renovate the McMansions that make up the suburban wastes.  But when time permits, he still likes to draw and write stories and he’s desperately trying to learn to love the story he’s living.