Honestly, the whole concept of penitence doesn’t make much sense to many people today. At most, people may remember “it’s a Lent thing,” or think medieval monks, but for most oldline mainlines or under-sixties, it’s a shrug. In the scientific age, and with the mindset most of us have, abjectly casting ourselves before God in sorrow and to make deep existential amends is hard to grasp. If you don’t imagine God as some sort of austere “ancient of days” judging every moment of your life, the idea of a formal apology to God doesn’t make sense. Or if you don’t have a very personal relationship with Christ in the sense that you imagine a tear of sadness running down Jesus’ face because you hurt his feelings for you, you don’t get the undertones of betrayal at work behind penitence. If you imagine God as a less personal “entity” or in Paul Tillich’s “ground of being,” this Lenten discipline makes no sense. So “prayers of penitence” seem quaint and irrelevant to most people I know, since they presuppose breaking God’s laws or God’s heart.
Still, I’d like you to consider the significant value of those quaint concepts in how that attitude of penitence helps us personally. It is good for us to undertake the internal spiritual work represented by penitence even if our understanding of the Holy Other is less personifiable. It is good for us occasionally (like once a year for forty days?) to review our progress through life, assess our results against our deeply held values, recognize our shortcomings against our own hopes, against our community-held norms, against the ideals described by our faith, against the ideals held up in scripture, and to resolve to do better and to map out a path to do a better job loving our neighbors, serving God, and being the best people we can be. That intention to live better and the sketching of a plan to actually do things better are part of the spiritual discipline that is penitence and not just feeling sorta bad and mumbling an insubstantial “oops, sorry,” toward the sky. Lent is long enough to diminish bad habits and establish healthy and holy habits-- habits that benefit others and benefit our selves.
It is on this last point-- follow through-- that most of us must further confess lackluster performance. Bridging the gap from spiritual to practical, from intention to actual, is the truly difficult part of Lenten disciplines. It takes work, and most of us are so busy working on other things that minding the state of our soul falls by the wayside. Yet millennia of Lenten spiritual practice tell us that the effort to mind our spirits and to correlate our behavior with our faith genuinely improves our lives. When our internal intentions and external expressions line up, we are happier, healthier, more centered, and more able to make a positive difference in the lives around us. Identifying, confessing, repenting of our shortcomings, resolving to act more congruently with our faith, and making specific concrete actions to demonstrate our faith is a hard but satisfying Lenten practice. I encourage you to follow that ancient tradition of penitence and re-engagement in the world, even if its taking on only two or one small, simple new habit. “Taking on” is a far different way to observe Lent than giving up. Give it a try.
Prayer works… particularly if you work at it!
In Christ,
David
Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Hebrew Bible Exodus 20:1-17
From the Epistles I Corinthians 1:18-25
From the Gospels John 2:13-22
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