The season of Lent is the forty days and nights leading to Holy Week and Easter. It is a sacred time of preparation to receive the gift of renewed life and soul we find through the experience of journeying with Christ through death into resurrected life.

Lent is a time when we have the invitation as part of this preparation to practice letting go of something that gets in the way with our connection with God, and committing to what deepens our connection with God.

In Lent we are invited, we are challenged

to release what our souls need us to release

to receive what our souls need us to receive

to recommit to that to which our souls need us to recommit 

for our souls to cast off what is dead and deadening and come alive more fully and truly as children of the Living God.

Traditionally Lent is a period of fasting – fasting from meat or abstaining from alcohol or sweets. But as the prophets and Jesus himself warned over and over again, any prescribed religious fast can easily become rote or just a show of self-righteousness. Instead, we need to be sincere in our spiritual practices that they are motivated by our desire to say “Yes” ever more deeply to God’s call on our lives.

So, I advocate to take a creative and authentic approach to finding a Lenten practice, and having positive Lenten practices in addition to abstinence Lenten practices. So that any “No” we say is for the sake of the “Yes” we say to God’s call on our lives, that our commitment to that “Yes” to God is informing whatever it is we practice saying “No” to.

When it comes to our recommitment to God, there are always “Yeses” and always “Noes.” That’s what is clear from the story of Jesus’ baptism. Jesus opened himself fully to God and sincerely said “Yes” to God’s “Yes” to him, and what happens next? The Holy Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he must practice saying “No.” In his case he must say “No” to how our appetites can become obsessions that pull us away from God. Jesus must say “No” to the temptation for power, to be the big boss over others, a corruption of God’s holy purpose for one’s life. And Jesus must say “No” to the temptation to use God for one’s own ends, for what we can get from God as a selfish transaction.

Every time Jesus says “No” he is clear about his “Yes.” He is sincere in letting God be God, out of love, and letting God call him to the deeper purpose of his life, for the sake of the higher purpose God has for all life.

It’s all a practice of “Yes” and a practice of “No.”

When it comes to Lenten practices I advocate for each of us to prayerfully discern for ourselves what that practice of “Yes” and that practice of “No” needs to look like for where we are right now and sincerely discern how God is calling us right now.

Your “Yeses” and “Noes” may be similar to what Jesus practiced in the desert. It may be different. It may mean something traditional like abstaining from alcohol and replacing it with the practice of simple daily prayers. It may be different.

For myself, in case it’s helpful for you to hear, I’ll share with you some of the Lenten practices that I’ve prayerfully discerned for myself the past several years.

One Lent when I prayed about it, it was clear to me I was checking in with social media much more often that I was checking in with God, and that habit wasn’t helping me at all be the best version of myself or to truly connect with others or with God in a good way. So for 4o days I unplugged from social media and every time I felt the urge I simply prayed “God, Here I am!” Another Lent when I prayed about it, it was clear to me I had a knot of grievance and guilt in my heart. So I made a list and throughout the 40 days, I apologized to some people I had hurt along the way, and extended forgiveness to some people who had done harm to me along the way. That was a powerful one – I really discovered Jesus’ wisdom about the deep connection between experiences of being forgiven and of forgiving others. Another Lent when I prayed about it, I realized I had a moral frustration, there were some deep values of mine that I had been needing to put into action in response to real human need. So, for that Lent I began to get involved with a group that was living out those values with some integrity.

The point is that it’s between each of us and God, when we are honest to God, what the particular Lenten commitment is to which we are being called here and now.

So, how is it with your soul?

What do you need to release?

How do you need to repent?

In what ways is God calling you to renew?

To what are you called to commit? To recommit?

What is your “Yes,” and what is your “No”?

For the sake of your relationship with God?

For the sake of your relationship with Jesus and with the Holy Spirit?

For the sake of your own vitality and purpose?

For the sake of your capacity to love and be loved,

For the sake of what the wider community and wider world is needing from you?

What is your “Yes,” and what is your “No”?

This Lenten invitation is an invitation for the sake of mercy

An opportunity to grow in God’s Grace and to share God’s Grace

As manifest through Jesus.

You are each a precious gift from our living God. At every age and stage of our lives, in whatever season of abundance or scarcity, crisis or peace, God has a call on our lives to “Come Alive.” I sincerely pray that we each and all find ways of saying “Yes, God, Here I am.”

Delivered Sunday, March 9, 2025, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg

Image by Gold Media from Pixabay