The Posture of Lent
“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” - Book of Common Prayer, p. 218
Over the last several weeks, our worship services have begun in a rather unusual way; that is, we begin our worship by adopting a slightly different body posture at the beginning of our worship services during the Lenten season. In place of standing in front of Christ’s table for the entirety of the entrance rite, we begin with an acknowledgement that it is the Lord who forgives our sins, which leads us to kneel before that same table for the recitation of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words) and the confession of sin. It is fitting that our body posture changes in our own corporate recognition of it being Christ who is able to work in us the very forgiveness that we seek. The celebratory tones of our worship are replaced with a humility of approaching the throne of Christ in preparation for our own celebrations of the Resurrection in coming weeks.
The very nature of worship last week was a shape that helped us to turn more towards Easter than towards Ash Wednesday. It seems that the combination of the penitential order complete with confession and leading into the collect helped us to enter even more fully a posture of yearning for forgiveness, for being made whole, for knowing the depths of God’s mercy at work in our lives. The posture of worship invited us deeper along the path of reconciliation as we journeyed Lent and as we prepared to turn towards the joy of Easter.
Thus, the words of the collect invited us to recognize our own need to have God at work in our lives. We prayed, as a body, that God would protect from the very things that would damage the body or that would assault and hurt the soul. Our prayer was a prayer of relying upon the very mercy of God that has colored the whole of the Lenten season this year. We were invited to kneel in God’s presence and to seek the mercy we need in order to begin to fathom the beauty of Christ’s resurrection. And, we did this without skipping fully over the season of Lent but by remaining within it as we sought to continue the journey of forgiveness and reconciliation that is on offer. The shape of our worship refused to click the fast forward button; instead, it slowed us down and invited us to hear the truth that we need to hear: that we need God at work in our lives if we are to escape the very things that would harm us.
And while we pray for God to defend us from these harmful things, it is also important for us to recognize that the defense that we have from these harmful things, which we might understand as being part of sin, is the relationship that we have with God. The defense that we pray for is made real in the ways that we continue to nurture our own relationship with God and tend to our interior lives. In other words, the ways that we have tended to our prayer lives, to our spiritual walk with and toward God, is the very thing that will grant us the defense for which we have prayed.
In the medieval church, one of the central teachings was that grace perfects nature rather than destroying or replacing. Grace works within us to achieve more than we could ask or imagine, and it is how we nurture our relationship with God that we are able to recognize the ways that grace is operating in our lives to perfect our nature into the fullness of who God is speaking into being this very moment. The Lenten journey is one that draws us closer to God in Christ, and it will mean that we will have to continue to travel the Lenten road, which will take us through death, if we wish to know the light of all life.
And so, we pray for God to journey with us and to protect us from those things which may hurt the body and assault the soul. And even in making that prayer, we can recognize that this journey is going to lead us to the cross and to the pain of the crucifixion, but it is necessary that we travel that road if we also want to know the glory of the resurrection.
In Christ,
Hunter+
