SignPosts, A Lenten Journey Introduction

Lent is a time of journey. Whenever we start a trip, we have a clear starting point (usually that is home) and a destination: appointment, work, school, vacation place, a favorite fishing hole, winter or summer home. Lent is like that trip, it starts from the home of our personal, mortal awareness on Ash Wednesday and takes us to the re-creation place of resurrection living.

Unlike geographical trips, Lent is a spiritual journey, a time of re-commitment to our faith practices proclaiming God’s gift of salvation that frees us from sin, death, and the devil, leading us on paths and through perils yet unknown. This journey of vulnerable living begins with remembering our human mortality and God’s choice of vulnerability. In choosing to enter fully into our lives, God’s Word, Jesus the Christ, accepts the limitation of life, that is death, in order to give us a welcomed home in God’s presence forever.

As we leave our physical places of comfort, we mark ourselves with the symbol of mortality, the cross of ashes, marking who and whose we are, preparing ourselves for this Lenten journey. In this same worship time, we will be assured of Christ’s presence with us as we receive his body and blood shed for the forgiveness of all people. During this journey time, we may learn about sacrificial living. Most of all, I hope that we will more fully know our identity wholeness that ultimately is not and cannot be our own doing, rather it is a gift that comes from God’s love alone, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, in the gift and continued presence of the Holy Spirit.

It is not a journey made alone. In Christ, we travel in God’s presence and with the community of all the saints. The Lenten journey lasts for forty days, but even those days are not without reminders of where we are going beyond them. For along side the forty days of Lent are the Sundays of the resurrection, little Easters, leading to the celebration of the great Easter Day. This means that Lent has additional days of Easter reflection surrounding it making it forty-six days long.

Even Easter is not the final destination. Easter is more than a day; it is a season. It consists of a week of weeks culminating in the birthday of the church’s ministry to the world—Pentecost.

Most of us do not travel in order to discover new life and creation. Although there are some who will know the benefit of the journey in baptism, most of us make this pilgrimage as a reminder to ourselves that we have already received this baptismal gift.

With this said, I hope that you will join me on this journey. It will be a car trip; we will be thinking about our cars as places of meditation and reflection. Prayer and community worship will be our fuel; the Scripture readings will be the map; and the Psalms will be our signposts along the way to the cross and beyond.

Peter