From the Pastor's Pen, July, 2005:

From the Pastor's Pen, February 2008:

“The Color Purple”

I’ll confess right here in the first paragraph of the Pastor’s Pen that I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around Lent this year. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of January with an ugly head cold, and it’s been pretty difficult to wrap my head around much of anything. But I suspect it has more to do with the early date of Easter. This year Easter is almost as early as it can possibly be. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, forty-six days before Easter Sunday, the date of which changes based on the moon (and why Easter is called “a moveable feast”). The forty days (Sundays are not counted as part of Lent because they are considered “little Easters”) are a time for reflection, self-discipline, prayer, study and fasting.

The season of Lent is an amazing time. It may not seem so, with all the emphasis on repentance and self-discipline and Jesus’ sacrifice—but it is. It’s amazing because it calls us to reflection, to spend some time asking questions, meditating on the life of Jesus, as well as his passion, death and resurrection. Lent calls us to some accountability of who we are as Jesus’ disciples, and what it means to follow him.

We echo the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness fasting and being tempted with our own forty days of self-discipline. As Jesus used that time, right after his baptism, to clarify what it meant to be the Son of God, the Messiah, we can use this time to clarify what it means to be who we are, what it means to be a child of God, what it means to live our lives for God.

The liturgical color (the color we use for decoration in worship) for Lent is purple. I like purple—it’s one of my favorite colors! Purple, in the context of the Church, symbolizes penitence—repentance, saying we’re sorry for our sinfulness, striving to live a new life. Purple reminds us, with its darkness and richness and beauty, that life is complex, and while we are beloved children of God, first, last, and always, we are also called to form our lives after the example of Christ. Most of us fall short in that regard. Daily.

We are called to repentance during Lent; reminding ourselves and being reminded of the need to turn toward God, with the example of Christ set before us. Repentance (the biblical Greek word metanoia) means “turning”. We turn from what keeps us apart from God; we turn toward God. That’s why the practice of self-discipline during Lent began—that by “giving something up,” or by sacrificial giving, or by additional time spent in prayer and meditation on scriptures, we intentionally turn aside from self and turn toward God.

That’s why I say that Lent is an amazing time. It can be a challenge. Most of us don’t like giving anything up—time, money, pleasure, leisure. But the call to discipline, for the sake of putting God first, helps us to grow and change. We don’t go through that discipline in order to lose weight, or to save money, or to “be a better person,” though any of those things might happen along the way.

Above all, I think Lent is a call to awareness. Instead of going through our days on automatic pilot, not aware of much of anything, we focus on God’s call to us, God’s claim on us, Christ’s sacrifice for us. We spend time thinking about what it means to be a child of God. We look, really look, at the world, the story of Jesus, and each other, with new eyes. “What would God have me do in this situation?” “How can I live most faithfully?” Even, “Wow! Look at that!” in response to some gift of beauty.

There’s an exchange in Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple between two of the main characters, Shug and Celie. The two women are talking about God, and Shug says something to the effect of “I think it ticks God off when we walk by the color purple and don’t notice it.” Her comment, brief as that, says that something so beautiful and so extravagant a gift of God as the color purple ought not to be overlooked. Neither should so beautiful and extravagant a gift as the life of Jesus. Nor should a gift like the life of faith and the ways we can express it in the Church. We shouldn’t just walk by, or treat it lightly, or ignore it.

Faith matters. The life of Jesus matters. The love of God, which Jesus’ life embodies, matters.

This Lent, may we notice it.

On the Journey with you,

e-mail Pastor Baker-Streevy