Dear Northside
Here we are in March. We have had a busy January and February, but it has been good. Highlights for me have been our Elders and Church Council Retreats and the “Ministry Leadership Gathering” yesterday. Getting our leaders together and aligned with the church theme for the year. We celebrated KidzCan and Taste of the Nations. The baptism service last Sunday was very encouraging. What was your highlight? Please let us know.
I was given the keys to my new Honda CRV this week. Thank you to everyone who made this possible.
We are 2 weeks into Lent. Last week, I listed a few reasons why Lent is useful to us as disciples of Jesus. This week I list a warning…
There’s a version of Lent that makes you a worse person. Not because the practices are bad. Not because prayer, fasting, and reflection are wrong. But because it’s entirely possible to spend forty days focused on your own spiritual refinement while the world outside your prayer closet continues to burn – and to come out the other side feeling better about yourself.
Lent has always carried three pillars: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The tradition is ancient, rooted in the desert fathers and the early church’s preparation for baptism. For most of Christian history, these three practices were understood as inseparable. You couldn’t fast without giving what you didn’t eat to someone who was hungry.
Somewhere along the way, we kept the prayer and the fasting and quietly let the almsgiving become optional. We turned Lent into a self-improvement project dressed in sackcloth.
Give up coffee, social media or chocolate. Journal more. Read a devotional. Attend one extra service.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these practices individually. But when Lent becomes exclusively about you, when it becomes a kind of spiritual renovation project focused entirely on your own soul, something essential gets lost. Something prophetic goes quiet.
Isaiah knew this problem long before we had Lent.
“Is this the fast I have chosen?” God asks through the prophet. “To bow one’s head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?”
The people were fasting faithfully. Observing the rituals. They were confused about why God wasn’t pleased. The answer is almost uncomfortable in its directness: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?”
God wasn’t impressed with their spiritual disciplines because their spiritual disciplines had become a way to feel close to God, without being accountable to God’s actual concerns. This is the trap.
Lent was never designed to make us better individuals. It was designed to make us a different kind of people – the kind whose practices reshape not just their inner life but their shared life, whose fasting is connected to someone else’s hunger, whose prayer leads somewhere beyond personal peace.
That’s a harder Lent. It’s also a more honest one.
God bless, Pastor Gary