Ash Wednesday/Lent Orientation for 2020

Lent Is about Paying Attention to Your Treasures!

Matt 6.19-21

2 Cor 5.20-6.13

Last season as we approached Lent, I encouraged us to think of Lent as a season of paying attention!  I reminded us that as helpful as giving things up may be, that can still distract us from the reason for Lent. Lent is about paying attention--to God and to ourselves!

We just reflected upon the Transfiguration of Jesus last Sunday (Matt 17). The last words that the Father spoke to us were: "This is my beloved Son in who I am well pleased. Listen to Him!:

Lent is a time to pay attention to those words, and to pay attention to our attentiveness to those words. Are we taking the time to listen to Jesus--what He says about who we are, what He says about what life is all about? It is a time when we are more intentional about what keeps us from listening to his words? What distracts us from knowing who we are and what God wants for our lives? What else garners our attention? What are the ways in which we, like Adam and Eve, try to hide from God? Lent is a season where we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of self-examination--for the sake of paying attention to God and what He is doing in us, through us, and before us. We believe, Lord; help our unbelief!

This year, we focus on one particular word of Jesus to orient us in Lent--”where your treasure is, there your heart will be also; store up for yourselves treasures in heaven". By this, Jesus is inviting us to ask things like, What is it that we truly love? What is it that we truly want and desire? And do those loves concord with what God wants for us, the God who invites us to share in life as it was meant to be. 

So in  these 40 days, let’s strive to become aware of our distractions and how those distractions often re-orient our desires to something less than what God wants for us. Let’s ask ourselves hard things like:

Do I pay attention to God’s promises and commands? Do I even know what they are? What are the words of life that Jesus has given to us?

Am I responding faithfully to Jesus’ call in my life?

Are my cravings, my dreams, my plans and agenda aligned with what God wants for me and this world?

With courage and the same compassion that Jesus shows to us, let’s look at our own feelings of guilt and shame, and draw them into conversation with Jesus’ words. Let’s  face our feelings of inadequacy and loneliness with Jesus’ call to belong. Let’s face our tendency to avoid, to hide, to ignore, and to downplay what God is calling us to; let’s think about the ways in which technology enable us to avoid, hide, ignore and downplay. Let’s face our tendency to numb ourselves from the anxieties of life with food, drink, entertainment, and other forms of distraction. Let’s face the eight destructive passions which wage war against us: gluttony, greed, anger, self-pity, lust, laziness, pretension, and pride. Let’s humble ourselves and seek to acknowledge the ways we find in things other than God and His love for us. 

As Paul says in 2 Cor 6: “Let’s widen our hearts” to want, desire, crave, and love what God loves in the order that He loves them. 

And let’s courageously ask God to pay attention for us and to us, to help us pay attention to our lives!

Search me, O God, and know my heart!

Try me and know my thoughts!

 And see if there be any idolatrous way in me,

  and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psa 139.23-24)

And as we do each year, we ask--why do we do all this? Because we are made for life with God. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  St. Augustine’s Confessions (Lib 1,1-2,2.5,5: CSEL 33, 1-5).

Let’s give up anxiety, and restlessness; petty cravings that disappoint us; let's strive to find rest in God by paying attention to Him and to our lives in relation to him.

Ash Wednesday, 2020