Lent 2016

This is not a part of the series of blogs that I am writing for Holy Week. This is the result of a question that I psted on Facebook some weeks ago about how people related to Lent. The resulting sermon was preached at St John's on the 3rd Sunday in Lent. Many thanks to all who responded in any way.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been on a journey and I want to share the journey with you. It began, and maybe ended, with a paragraph from Bishop Richard Holloway’s Autobiography ‘Leaving Alexandria’.  In the early part of his ministry he received a scholarship which allowed him to travel from Scotland to the United States for a month on a study tour. He had 3 free days in New York and set out to see the city on foot. At one point, tucked away behind Broadway, he came across a small community of Ukrainian migrants. He recounts ‘Sitting in the middle of the square were scores of old Ukrainians, women in black dresses with scarves around their heads, and old men in black suits leaning on sticks. No one spoke. They sat there, out of place and out of time, in silence, waiting….. They themselves did not belong here. Exiled was the word, a word that always hurts me. Maybe the pain I found in the word had more to do with me than the Old Ukrainians. A fear of finding myself in the wrong place? Not quite. A fear of being cast out of a good place a place of abiding. Closer. Or maybe it was the prospective sorrow of the thought of dying in the wrong place.’ (End of quote)

We are all exiles. We are all in the wrong place and suffer the sense of separation from our true place, our home. This sense of separation is particularly poignant during Lent. Year after year we feel a greater sense of distance between who we are and who we are called to be as the people of God. Yet what we do, at this time, to attempt to traverse the canyon between who we are and who we want to be, to travel home, seems pitiful, trivial. We give up sugar in our tea and switch to sweetened coffee instead, we stop eating chocolate for a time, perhaps we join a stimulating study group for all the right reasons but then discover that the material on which it is based is woefully inadequate.

So I was drawn to thinking, is it all worthwhile, this annual indulgence in the trivial in a vain attempt to bridge this impossible gap? Should we just abandon the whole futile exercise? After all, it doesn’t even make a lot of sense here in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are all wrong.

But then something stopped me. What if, despite all my reservations, people, whether church attenders or otherwise, still valued these 40 days set apart by the church as a special time of reflection, as I do? Perhaps, I thought, I should know what I am talking about before lobbing hand grenades from the trenches at something that might still be seen as valuable. But how was I to discover public opinion on an esoteric and specialised subject as the community reaction to a specific church season. I realised that time was short and resources were meagre for any sophisticated broad-ranging statistically valid research. Beside which, I had never heard of anyone being crazy enough to hand over to the community the power to make a difference to the content of a sermon. And I had no idea about how to go about it.

When one is stuck with a problem, I have learned over the years that the solution often lies with the Grumpy Old Men. There are about 50 blokes on my distribution list coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and I knew that they would willingly join in my unusual task – or at least would not be offended by my unusual quest for information. They have come to expect the unusual from me. And they certainly came good. I sent them all an email which asked the simple question ‘What do you think Lent is about?’ My Social Surveys advisor who I consulted much later than I should have told me that this was a much too open ended question but it didn’t seem to matter and the response from them was much higher than I expected and their responses were outstanding – deeply thought through and personal. In addition, it generated some extraordinarily interesting and useful dialogue between us.

But that, in some ways, is a fairly undifferentiated group from whom to seek a response. Their responses were excellent but the community was not diverse enough. Then I remembered that our son Phil, a leading researcher in mental health, had, a few years ago, used Facebook as a mechanism to obtain responses to a high quality survey of mental health. He has done this again recently. Perhaps you participated in the earlier survey. I wondered what would happen if I posted the question that I put to the Grumpy Old Men on Facebook. For me, that was outrageously risky behaviour, especially when our daughter Alison coached me in the art of sharing the question publically when my normal fairly limited action on Facebook is to exchange posts with family and close friends. Of course, my question was much too open- ended to be a useful mechanism to collect statistically valid responses from a wide population. But that was not the point of the exercise.

Over the past week, my Facebook post has been shared far more widely than I ever expected and has been viewed by over a 1000 people I think. Unfortunately it is not possible to discover how many views there have been on Facebook unlike other Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn. I made it possible to respond publically by placing a comment on the Facebook post or privately by sending an email to an address specially set up for the purpose. Both response mechanisms were used. In the end there were not a large number of responses – I didn’t expect that there would be- but those I received were gold. And in the end, I realized that the number of responses to the question on Facebook didn’t really matter. What really mattered was that over 1000 people from around the world paused and thought about Lent. And for me, that was really something.

But there were results and they are worth sharing. Unfortunately I can’t quote from them all. But with a little bit of categorization I can quote enough so that you will get the flavour.

First, there were a small number of responses which were a little flippant and funny. One of those simply read, ‘Lent is the past tense of lend’. When I recovered from a combination of rolling my eyes and laughing, it made me wonder what this word ‘Lent’ means. It turns out that Lent is a shortened version of ‘Lenten’ which means ‘lengthening’. That refers to the fact that as winter changes to spring in the Northern Hemisphere the days begin to lengthen. As I mentioned earlier, that is not relevant to us in the Southern Hemisphere where autumn means our days begin to shorten. However as one of the respondents said ‘I think that Lent in late summer / early autumn always helps such contemplative thoughts’. For some of us, Lent works well where ever we are in the world.

There was a group of regular Church attenders for whom Lent doesn’t mean a great deal. That was because they came from a tradition that is more non-conformist in nature for whom Lent is not part of their religious culture. I suppose that that was my experience when I was growing up in the Methodist Church. One respondent wrote ‘we observe Easter but do not partake in Lenten studies. So lent is not significant to me.’

The largest group of respondents were those who attend church regularly and have what I would term a traditional view of Lent. A couple of quotes will suffice. ‘For me Lent is a time of preparation, appreciating again Jesus teaching on the way to Jerusalem. Anticipation of Holy Week and the grim certainty of the cross- with the glimmer of Easter to come’.

Another said ‘For me Lent is a period of preparation for the sadness and quiet of Good Friday, and then comes the relief and reassurance of finding that the Lord has risen from the Tomb. It is a way of asking us to show discipline; to show that we can give thought, consideration and helpfulness to others less fortunate then ourselves.’

Finally there was a small but interesting group of respondents who had been regular church attenders but no longer did so. I was very pleased to receive these responses. Here is just one of them. ‘So Lent was a pretty solemn time growing up in my family. Even though I am no longer religious I think that the themes of self-sacrifice and reflection about how we can lead a better life in serving others and the community as a whole are still very valid for someone leading a secular life. And the yearly passing of Lent reminds me to reflect on these themes.’

When I received this response from a total stranger it made me realize that this process had been incredibly valuable and I have been greatly humbled by all of the responses.

What do these responses have in common? What do we learn about the season of Lent from them? Most, not all, present a common theme. It is to do with the journey. It may simply be the journey through the forty days of Lent to the Cross and the resurrection of Jesus. Or it may be more complex like the journey back in time to a world of meaning which inspires a model of life for now. This sense of journey which is almost palpable during the season of Lent is one that we all share. Like the Ukrainians in Richard Holloway’s story we are all exiles seeking to return home. Our journey, though is not an earthly one and the home which we seek is a heavenly on. The season of Lent reminds us that we journey together towards meaning, towards truth, towards God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. May Jesus be near to you as you journey during Lent and always and be your guide to your heavenly home.