A different kind of Lenten preparation – restoring community in a conflicted world

As we enter Lent, Canon Margo Peckham Clark invites us to consider a different kind of Lenten preparation — one that moves beyond personal repentance toward the healing of community. (Time: 5:32.)

Video Transcript

This is Canon Margo Peckham Clark in the Diocese of Newark. I speak to you today as we stand on the precipice of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of another Lent. We are also in this diocese welcoming our Bishop back from the first part of her sabbatical.

We are told each year that Lent is a time of preparation, and has been since the earliest days of the Christian church. That it is a time of preparation in advance of celebrating the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, and that historically and today, it has been a time for preparing converts for baptism and for the possibility of restoring those who because of quote, unquote, notorious sin, have been separated from the church, from the community. And we’re invited always to have our own time of repentance, reflection, self-examination, prayer, study, fasting, reading and meditating on God’s holy word.

And so it’s very easy to think of Lent as only a time of personal and individual devotion. To think of it as a time as, we are also reminded, where we remember our mortality. And so sometimes it can seem as if it should be a bleak season alongside the solemnity of it. There’s been a lot of jokes in recent years since the pandemic about it being the Lentiest Lent ever on a given year.

And I want to suggest something different to us. It is a time of preparation, and as Christians, we live always in the light of God’s saving love, and we are called to share that love with the world. And so this Lent, what if we focus not only on our own self-examination and renewal in preparation for the season of Easter? What if we focus on that aspect of restoring community? It seems to me that this is so much of what God is calling us to in this time. What does it look like to restore community, and what is our part, each of us in that, and what is our part as the church in that?

It’s not something that’s easy to answer, and like most aspects of the Christian life, it’s something that takes a lifetime to practice and learn, and we cannot always know or see the fruits of our own actions. We live in some way, therefore, always in a time of preparation for God’s kingdom that is both all around us and has not yet come in its fullness, as we say.

Focusing on that idea of the restoration of community and restoring people to community has a lot to do with what’s going on in the world. We know that we are living through a time where there is an epidemic of loneliness, where conflict and disagreement has reached a point where it seems impossible for people to even have civil, simple, everyday conversation. Restoration of community is always at the center of what we do, and we live in a time where the need for that is so heightened.

So think about not only your own life and preparing your own heart – what is your part in restoration of community? What are the things that you can do? What are the things that you can call your church to do? What are the things that you can invite other people in your life to do that are about restoring people to the fullness of community, the community that is made and is sustained by the Holy Spirit, by the love of God at work around us.

It’s a little shift, and I want to submit that it makes a big difference. We all still need to look at our own lives to examine our mortality, and yet, when we look at it with this other component that is always a part of Lent, the restoration of community after sin. It’s something different. It can give us different insight and different ideas about what to do. It can give us other things to pray about. It can give us things to talk about, and God willing, it will strengthen us for the journey of restoring all people to the love of God in Christ Jesus.

God bless you, and I wish you a holy Lent.