Theologically we say that Lent, developed during the time of the early Church, was a time of preparation before baptism – which happened at Easter. It was a serious teaching and training, the word catechism comes from what they called it. Sometimes it laster year or more. They were serious about knowing who Jesus was and what following him as Teacher, Lord and Master meant for people – not just theologically, or academically – but in the nitty gritty of their daily lives in the Roman Empire.
It’s ironic that what they trained for and then did, is what we often find so challenging either because we don’t know enough, don’t have the appropriate words to use in our secular society, or feel inadequate and timid based upon the negative experiences we’ve had.
Tom Long, a famous American preaching professor and pastor writes about this conundrum in a book on testimony:
The Christian way of life is really just ordinary human life – being born, living together in community, working, having children, caring for the sick and elderly, eating and drinking, encountering strangers, worshipping, and dying – but all of it refracted through the lens of Jesus Christ, the true human being. Think, for instance, about the very basic human need for a rhythm of restorative rest and meaningful work. All human beings sleep and rise; all human beings have a rhythm of repose and activity, resting laboring. We all need something to do with our labor that counts, and we all need good rest so that we can get up and do it. Christians are no different. We too rise and wake, rest and labor. Can it be that our relationship to Jesus Christ shapes how we do something so elemental as going to bed and rising to engage the day? …
As “the Way,” [the first name given to those that followed the teachings of Jesus] then, Christianity does not desire to be a sect, a narrow little way of being super pious. Instead, Christians want to live together the kind of life they believe God wants all people to live. The Christian community wants to shine like a lamp on a stand and to say to all who will hear, “Look! this is how to be joyfully alive as beings.” As the second-century theologian Irenaeus put it, “The glory of God is humanity fully alive.” Christians do not want to set up a sharp division between “us” and t”them” – we’re Christians and you’re not. Rather, Christians want to live int he way that God created all human beings to live, and we believe we can see how to do this by paying attention to the one human being who never failed to life this way: Jesus. To strive to live a fully human life, to live life patterned after Jesus, is the way of Christian faith, and we are “people of the Way.” “In the middle of winter,” writes Elaine Pagel, “St. Francis called out to an almond tree, ‘Speak to me of God!’ and the almond tree brake into bloom. It comes alive. There is no other way of witnessing to God but by aliveness.”
As you go through the day today be mindful of what you do that’s “normal” or quotidian for you. Where, when and how can you be fully alive – reflecting the life that God gives us in Jesus – in those moments? Can you identify a daily moment or rhythm in which you might be more present to others, and reflectively refracting the life you know in Christ?