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Blood & Guts Lent [3/12/18]

lent prepare

“Lent is the season of blood and guts and flesh. It is the supremely anti-Gnostic season.” [Peter Leithart*] 


From the very beginning of Christianity there has been a strong tendency for people to “spiritualize” Jesus’ teaching, his mission and particularly the meaning of his resurrection. You no doubt have come in contact with some version of the teaching that the physical world is less important that the spiritual realm and that Jesus’ resurrection has spiritual significance even if it didn’t actually physically happen. The earliest forms of this teaching were called Gnosticism, from the Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis,” because the group claimed to have secret “knowledge” about spiritual truth.


The practices of Lent (particularly fasting, foregoing luxuries and giving to the poor) are actually very mundane. They are not the stuff of a higher spiritual realm, but here and now commitments that have the ability to make you feel hungry, impatient, irritable and frustrated. This is exactly the point. We need to be reminded that if Jesus was not physically resurrected then we are without real hope of defeating death ourselves. 1 Corinthians 15 reminds us that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

The Scripture is very clear that Jesus appeared to his followers in a new physical body exactly for this reason. He said to Thomas: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” (John 20:27).


When we practice a “blood and guts” Lent, as Leithart puts it, we intentionally put ourselves into a situation where hunger pains, less money or inconvenience reminds us that Jesus came in the flesh and felt those things too. We remind ourselves that he came to be like us and like us to suffer because of the brokenness that sin has brought to his creation. Our “blood and guts” Lent will culminate at a Good Friday service (7pm March 30th @ Grace) where we will eat real bread and drink real wine (or grape juice). Our tongues will taste what Jesus and his disciples tasted with their tongues on the night that he was betrayed and then we will be reminded of his very real physical death on a Roman cross the next day from the gospel accounts. It will be a night that we intentionally leave in silence and sadness for what sin, our sin, required. All of this is designed to help us to enter into a very real hope of new life when we wake up and celebrate Jesus’ resurrection on April 1st. This is not a pie in sky sort of message, it is a hope of new life and the restoration of creation that is as real as the hunger pains we feel in our stomachs when our bodies go without food. Jesus’ pain and death were that real, and so was his resurrected body. Our hope of life with him is that real. Blood and guts real.


For your Easter celebrations I invite you to make plans now to join us for:

a family style Good Friday communion and Tenebrae service on March 30th starting at 7pm, then join us for an Easter worship celebration at 10:30am Sunday April 1st
followed by a cookout and family fun in Tahoe Park after the service.
 

* I attended a pastor’s conference several years ago where I was exposed for the first time to the ideas of a guy named Peter Leithart. Since then, Leithart has become one of the most significant influences on the way I think about the celebration of lent and other historic Christian practices. He is a pastor, author and theologian who is currently the president of Theopolis Institute for Biblical, Liturgical, and Cultural Studies . Leithart blogs as Peter J. Leithart and contributes to the journal First Things, which is a great place to get a bigger taste of the way he thinks. The Leithart quote above is a typical example of his thinking: short enough to tweet but the source of a long Lenten reflection in my heart.