No God, Only Religion (The First Sunday of Lent...)

And so this is Easter.

Well, Lent - the first Sunday thereof, as you'll know if you're Anglican, or Catholic. If you're neither, I'm not sure if you're missing out or not. You certainly won't experience the purple robes, and you won't be told that you should be giving something up for the next forty days - although, in reality, you should have already started, since Lent began last Wednesday, after Pancake/Shrove Tuesday (celebrated at my, notably secular, school).

Normally, I like to prepare myself for Easter, although little really can prepare you for it. For me, Easter has always been about grace, something that there's little we can do to prepare for, or make ourselves worthy of. So how do you prepare? Most Protestant denominations make little deal out of the lead-up to Easter. I remember churches sometimes celebrating Palm Sunday when I was a child. I also remember celebrating Passover with family and friends twice when I was about ten and eleven. The rest of the time, the lead-up to Easter has traditionally involved counting down the days until holidays begin. I'm sure it should mean more. I always WANT it to mean more, but the thought of what Easter really means, and how little I deserve it all, tends to be one of the more difficult parts of my faith to address. I believe in it, my life depends on it, and yet...it's so much easier to thank God for parking spaces, good days at school and nice times spent with friends than it is to thank Him for dying for our sins.

So I suppose I can see the merit in Lent. It makes us prepare. It makes us stop and think about God's sacrifice, even if only in the amazing inadequacy of our own sacrifices. Going forty days without chocolate isn't going to earn us salvation. But Jesus giving everything up for us just might. Perhaps, in humbling ourselves in this small way, we can come to understand that little bit more what sacrifice means. And we'll certainly be reminded of how weak we are. If we can only just make it through a Lent without chocolate, or coffee, or buying CDs, then it can remind us, I suppose, of how dependent we are upon God's grace.

But Lent, in and of itself, can be particularly meaningless. The sacrifice becomes an end in itself. We feel that, in giving something up, we are ourselves triumphing over our own bodies, our own fleshly weakness - which was exactly the attitude that Easter should serve to overcome. If forty days of deprivation can earn salvation, why exactly did Jesus need to die? Is His death and resurrection only effective when accompanied by our piety, albeit only forty days of piety?

I'm surrounded, at work, by religious people - people who come from Catholic and Orthodox traditions. I have complete respect for these traditions - something that occasionally separates me from my fellow evangelicals - and believe that they are an expression of a desire for God that evangelicals should be working with, not against. But I do know that, in both traditions, ritual so often takes the place of relationship. Any faith tradition that becomes more about religion than about God obscures the real issue. I know people who will observe Lent, but possibly won't talk to God at all during the working week - and I know that this isn't okay.

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to give anything up for Lent. The few things I'm considering are mostly things I've gone without for the last week or so anyway, so officially starting a few days later won't hurt. I've never observed Lent before, and am not sure why I feel any differently about it this year. Perhaps it's all the "religious" people around me who are challenging me to think about it. Certainly the talk at my church this morning (somewhere in between low and high church on the Anglican spectrum) has challenged me. But mostly, I think I just want to prepare properly for Easter this year. I want to be focused on what Easter really means. Religious tradition, where it helps you focus on the truth, can only be a good thing. Religion that distracts from the truth has become completely self-serving and is of no use to a relational God.

So, no decisions today. Just a reflection, and a prayer, that this Lent, I might prepare properly. Let's see how it goes.