The Advent of Lent
We celebrated Epiphany last week. The season of revelation of Christ as Messiah is short this year.
Just four weeks from now we will embark upon the season of Lent.
In our analytics of our website, we noticed that beginning on Christmas Day, our readers were searching for resources for Easter. So we are going to try to provide some resources to help with Easter’s prelude—that mixed-up season of Lent.
Lent is confusing. It is the season of repentance. Didn’t we just go through this a few weeks ago in Advent?
It is also a season of mixed messages. Centuries of tradition have become muddled with modern sensibilities.
Ash Wednesday has always been a puzzle. We routinely read the passage from Matthew which tells us repeatedly to NOT make a show of our repentance and NOT distort our appearance. Then we defy the gospel we have just read and make a show of our repentance and distort our appearance.
Then some well-intentioned theologian came up with the concept of “burying or sealing the Alleluias”—banning the utterance of the traditional word of praise during the season of Lent. This flies in the face of the fact that Lent is structured to observe 40 days of repentance (modeled from Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness) and those 40 days EXCLUDE Sundays. There are NO Sundays in Lent. Every Sunday is reserved for a celebration of Easter. Alleluia!
We never sealed the Alleluias at Redeemer. The custom was unknown to us until we shared a pastor with a neighboring congregation. Their pastor surprised us when he announced during the service that the Alleluias were now sealed.
Our worship service for the next Sunday had already been planned and it was to feature an adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s mournful song Hallelujah—which repeats the Hebrew version of Alleluia countless times in a way entirely appropriate for Lent. (Rules tend to hamper creativity!)
Except for the fact that this was preplanned it would have given the impression that we were defying our pastor, which was in no way our intent. We tabled our plans for a year.
The pastor apologized for making the assumption that this was our custom. No conflict resulted.
But every year since, we have used this song, which retells the story of Christ’s temptation. Here’s a link.