What does it mean to repent from the idolatries of our culture? This is certainly one of the central questions of Lent. And here I think we need to learn a lesson from Monasticism. Monasticism has always been a movement within the church universal. A movement of protest. Monasticism has always insisted that, contrary to what many Christians so firmly believe, it is possible to live the way Jesus calls us to live.

The world insists that we must live lives of autonomy, of control, of self-gratification and self-protection. It insists that we must ultimately look out for ourselves (and maybe our spouses, but only to a point). All relationships, all commitments, anything that would hinder us from doing what we must do to fulfill ourselves are provisional. There’s no better reason to move from one place to another than for a better job in our world. And the idea that someone should turn down a lucrative job to stay within a particular community of believers whom might need her is ludicrous and offensive to the modern mind. We want our autonomy and when push comes to shove, we want to be able to fulfill our dreams, whatever they may be.

The witness of the monastics is that we don’t have to live in this world. That Christ has indeed created a real alternative in which we can live in freedom from the tyrannies of our culture. In Christ there is a new space created within which we don’t have to take and grasp for ourselves, because we believe that God’s gifts are “exceedingly, abundantly beyond all that we could ask or imagine.” (Eph. 3:20) In this space we are free to give up our lives to one another for Christ because we have no fear of losing ourselves “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3) In this space we are free to take time, to live free from the desperation and frenzy of our world, because God has given us time in Christ. What monasticism proclaims to us is that we have no need to fear self-denial because God’s gifts flourish in our emptiness. God desires us to be empty vessels through which his fullness may flow. We are free from the roots of possessiveness in our culture that insists that our identity is our possession and that we only live by guarding ourselves, by throwing up walls to keep out what might threaten or diminish us. What Christ tells is that “I am the Vine, you are the branches. Apart from me you can do nothing.” So what then shall we be? Leaves grasping after the wind? Trying to get some sort of life for ourselves that we can control, free from the trunk that is the source of our life. If we do that we may let the wind take us away, but just like the leaf that is blown off of a branch and still looks alive, we will have only the glow of life fading away into nothingness.

Christ, however has created the space within himself for us to be and to live, not as grasping after life, but as giving it away as he has done for us. In Christ we see the truth about God and the world fleshed out for us in the greatest of dramas. Christ holds nothing back of himself, he gives his life away completely, to the fullest. His whole self is expended for others, such that even in his last dying breaths he begs the Father to forgive his murderers. In all of this he holds onto nothing of himself. He gave it all, not to the Father, but to us! And what is the truth about one who lives in that way? Does self-expenditure for the sake of others leave us alone, dark and non-existent, simply echoes in a void? No! This is the truth of resurrection. In Christ we see that this is how flourishing happens, how true life is born, not through control and calculation but through ultimate surrender and trust. Christ expends himself completely, and as the blood and water run from his side on the cross they become a living gushing fountain of life that swallows up death, hate, and sin. Christ’s self-expenditure for us is not the end of him or his abnegation, but his glorious flourishing in the beauty and wonder of the life of the Trinity!

So what does this say to us? Most centrally it says that this space that has been opened up for us to live as Christ has lived is his body, his church. And as his body we live in the pattern of cross and resurrection. We even “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” We live in the same space that Jesus lives in with the Father. A space in which life can be given away without fear. Though of course we still fear. We still tremble like Jesus in Gethsemene sweating drops of blood. The prospect of giving up our lives for one another still strikes fear into our hearts and our autonomy and longings for grasping after our desires remain. And yet, there is this space made, which we can come back to in our weakness to be sustained. The body of Christ, broken on Calvary becomes our common life, where others stand in the thick of it with us and surrender themselves for us, showing us faithfulness, friendship, love and loyalty. Within Christ’s body we see the very hesed of Yahweh made concrete in the faces of our brothers and sisters. Even in the face of our fears and the rearing of sin’s ugly head in our lives, we can rest in the assurance that the mountain of sin is always already overshadowed by an even greater superabundance of redemption. “Where sin increased, Grace abounded all the more. As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”

We are given hope. We are assured by the Spirit that it is possible to live as Christ commands, that any who give up houses or mothers, fathers or brothers, will receive from God and abundance of even greater life. Houses, brothers, sisters and mothers, children and lands, and in the coming age, eternal life. This is the witness that the monastics are to us. They insist that it is true that we can live free. And that is how we see our central vocation as the church being fleshed out. Can we be a living witness, the living proof that life laid down is richer than life grasped after? Can we be the living proof that the denial of self is more nourishing and sustaining that the indulgence of the self?

That is how all this relates to Lent. Lent leads us into the high drama of the Christian year, Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. It is an embodied way of us remembering and participating in Christ’s way of being toward us. It allows us in some small way to follow after the pattern of life laid down, of self denied, of life given to others. That is why practices such as Lent are a central part of what it means for us to be witnesses, for us to be missional. As we participate in Christ’s pattern of laying life down, of denying self we live into the reality that is God’s mission to the world. God’s mission is to unify all things in Christ. To bring about reconciliation, wholeness, shalom. God’s mission is that all would together be drawn into the covenant relationship with himself in which life is freely given one to another where nothing is held back for one’s self.

When we strive to live in that way, in the Lenten patterns of discipline and self-giving, we find our lives being shaped within the mission of God to the world. We become living witnesses to the world of autonomy, of indulgence, of self-gratification and self-protection that there is another way. That through the grace of Christ and the sustaining of the Spirit we can be a different people. We can say no to the powers, we can lay life down and still live. We can give our money away and still trust that God will care for us. We are given a life of ultimate freedom! Freedom not from, but for and in obedience. A life in which we discover that ultimate freedom is life laid down for one another and received as a gift from one another. If we cannot live this way then we have no gospel for the world. Lent is a timeful, embodied, and practical way for us to strive to live in the pattern of Christ’s self-giving. It is a time for us to deny ourselves, trusting that God will take care of us, it is a time
for us to nourish others, trusting that God will nourish us, it is a time to die with Christ, because we believe that we will also live with him.

Lenten time is no mere exercise in giving something up for the sake of personal piety, let alone self-improvement. Lent is a call to us about what it means for us to live as the people of God. A people who freely lay down their lives, who don’t insist on their own way, who live fully for others, trusting in inexhaustible abundance of God’s gifts to take care of anything they need. Lent is a way of living the missional life, as we embody the will of God for the world that Christ has shown us. Being the community of reconciliation, of life laid down, of self given away for others is what God is doing in the world. It is this end that all people are invited into. And thus it is the most missional thing in the world to be this community. To be the cruciform body that truly lives as Christ calls us to. Without that living, embodied reality in which the truth of Christ is shown in our flesh and blood poured out and given to one another, we have no authentic gospel to preach to the world. Our proclamation must be our common life in which, for all our failures we continue to believe that the way of Christ is no mere ideal, but must become the shape of our life as a body. In this season we are invited into a tangible way of learning again how to shape our lives into the cruciform pattern of Christ’ death and resurrection.

In Lent we are invited to learn again what it means to give our lives to one another for the sake of Christ. To learn again that God’s abundance leaves us in freedom to give our lives away without fear. To learn again that we are free to climb the mount of Calvary and join Christ on the cross, sharing his sufferings and awaiting and trusting in the resurrecting love of the Father.