Greetings in the name of the Lord from Faith Presbyterian Church!  It seems like just last week that we put away our Christmas decorations, sang our last words of “Joy to the World,” and celebrated the birth of Jesus.  Now, we blink and turn around and recognize that we are right in the middle of the 40-day season of Lent. 

This 40-day season, which ends the Saturday before Easter Sunday, reminds us of the gospel story of Jesus surviving for 40 days in the wilderness before the beginning of his ministry.  During those days, Jesus fasted and prayed, and he encountered and rejected the sinful temptations of the cunning tempter. 

This season of Lent invites us to take an honest look at ourselves and our world and, through prayer and self-reflection, to recognize our sin.  Lent invites us to join Jesus in the spiritually enriching practice of doing without some of our favorite things on which we feel dependent—caffeine, junk food, television—and to adopt spiritually healthy practices like serious prayer, earnest outreach ministry, meaningful reading and study, honest worship, and (for some) careful fasting. 

So, why spend these weeks dwelling on the somber challenges of sin, brokenness, self-denial, and fasting?  Why not skip all of these potential “downers” and head straight from the joy of Christmas to the celebration of Easter Sunday? 

For one, we cannot know the full joy of new life without recognizing the reality of our old life.  We cannot meaningfully encounter God’s love and divine nature until we recognize and admit our own shortcomings and human nature.  We cannot become the people that God would have us to be until we recognize the people that we are and repent.  As a professor once broke it down, “We can’t get to Sunday [Easter] without first going through Friday [the day of Jesus’ death].” 

As we anticipate the Easter celebration of Christ’s victory over death, Lent invites us to mourn that death and to recognize the ways that we, as individuals and communities, continue to participate in that death.  How do we participate in Christ’s death?  We do so by placing ourselves—our wants, our agendas, our perspectives—at the center of our universe in place of God.  Through the worship services and spiritual practices of Lent, we pray that we can again claim God as the King of our world and the Lord of our lives.