Lent: Returning Again

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Weekly Dulin Podcast, a brief weekly reflection from Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Here, we take time to think together about faith, community, and what it means to live as disciples of Jesus in today's world.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's me, James Henry, your pastor, coming to you. If you're watching the moment live on video, on YouTube, or Facebook, or on the website, welcome. Good to see you. And if you're listening on the podcast, good to have you here on the podcast as well.

If you're consuming in both places, welcome in both places. And we encourage you to share these if you find them helpful. We have been working our way through Lent. Just a quick review, just in case this is your first time here. Lent is a forty day season, very selectively chosen forty days, the days, a good number of preparation, long time.

It mirrors the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness. And it's a time of preparation for the season of Easter, the season of new life, the season of celebration of new quality of life, new way of seeing the world that happens in resurrection. And the season of Easter is fifty days long. So we're spending forty days preparing for the fifty days, the great fifty days of Easter. We've talked about the practices of this season before, the things that people let go of and fast from, people that take up things as a part of that.

And I wonder here as we're getting pretty close to halfway around in there on our way to the celebration of Easter, how your practice is going, whatever that practice is, wondering how that happens. I do encourage you when I ask those questions for you to respond to me. Always you can send an email to me at pastordulenchurch dot org. If you want to engage in some of that thought. But how are you doing?

And what questions are rising for you as you seek to realign yourself with perhaps what God is really looking for in your life? The season of Lent is really that time to be intentional, if we can be, about figuring out who we are in the midst of what God is doing in this great big universe that we're a part of because our part matters. If we don't believe anything else about our faith, One of the things that tells us is that human agency, our work matters in this world. Our attitudes about each other matter. The way we approach this life, the attitudes that we bring to the moment, they matter.

The love we let loose into the world, that matters. The other things that we let loose into the world also have a fracturing reality, particularly the negative things. So how are you doing in the midst of all of this? And what questions are rising for you? And I ask it that way because first of all, when I ask how are the practices going, I'm not asking you because I want you to feel guilty if the practices have fallen away or you've failed at it.

Because oftentimes we learn as much about ourselves from failure, about our relationship with God in the midst of failure, as we do when we succeed. Don't think of it as success and failure. Think it more of this is a learning opportunity, an invitation for me to reevaluate. Was this practice helpful to me? It's fallen away now.

Was it helpful to me or did it fall away because it wasn't feeding my soul? What does it say about my relationship with God? What did I learn? And then if you feel so inclined, can re engage that without any sense of this is not about judgment. This is not about feeling guilty or shamed because you weren't able to maintain this.

Much as resolutions at the beginning of your year may fall away two or three weeks in, Please don't use those as opportunities to make yourself feel more guilty about the way you live your life or feel shamed. Let that guiltiness define who you are because that's not what the question is about. Every success and every failure, every practice and missed practice is an opportunity for us to return, to return to ourselves, to return to God, to ask about what that practice is teaching us, was teaching us, could be teaching us in the moment. Lent is a time to learn, and as we learn and ask good questions, we can become more aligned, realigned if you will, with what God imagines for us. We are all made in God's image and God invites us in that image to be aligned, to grow into the likeness that we were born to be.

And that growing often does involve the practices we've chosen or the practices we've learned do not work for us, which we can also learn in the midst of Lent. If you've taken something up and it didn't work, it's not too late to take something else up if that's what you'd like to do. If you've given something up for Lent and at this point you've already started taking that back, the thing you'd given up, it's not too late to give up something else or give that thing up again. And it's okay to say, I learned what I could learn from it, and I don't need to take something up. I don't need to let something go.

Only you can know what you need, And it requires an opportunity to be self reflective and to engage based on that self reflection. Your own awareness of yourself is going to teach you what you need to know. How much do you need to know? What are the things you weren't aware of were your foibles, the things that you tripped over? It's an opportunity to see those things, not so you can beat yourself up about them, but so that you can see you're human too, just like the rest of us.

Tripping up is part of being alive. And when we trip up, we have the opportunity to recognize that we've tripped up, to release that trip up and return. And that beautiful invitation is one that we need to take up. We need to always be aware that we serve and love a God of grace. And by grace, I mean that when God looks at us through the eyes of grace, those mistakes fall away.

That way of seeing us is we are seen through the eyes of God the same way God asks us to see the rest of the world. And that those eyes are loving eyes, accepting eyes, receiving eyes, inviting eyes. God invites us to be ourselves, faults and all, mistakes and all. I'm not saying that the mistakes we make bear no challenge whatsoever for ourselves or for the universe. Oftentimes, of the bigger mistakes in our lives are ones we carry with us for the rest of our lives.

They leave scars. They leave marks. Things that have been done to us, things that we have done, they leave marks. But our God is a healing God, a God of completion, a God who calls us to fullness and is always calling us back to that and is always working with us to bring that healing into our lives. So wherever you are on the journey in the middle of this beautiful season that we're a part of the Lenten season, whether you're finding yourself more and more aligned, you're finding yourself with more and more questions, finding yourself struggling because that thing that you gave up, took up, or that you didn't give up or take up has become more of a focus than you wanted it to.

No matter what it is, each one of those pieces are an invitation for you to look at it and figure it out for yourself. What does it mean? What does it mean? What can it mean to you? Lent is a season to realign.

It's a season to reconnect. Part of that reconnecting is reconnecting with our deepest self so that deepest self can be more deeply connected to the one who has loved you since before you were and now that you are and long after you're gone from this form. You are precious to God. You matter. You matter to the Dulin community.

And whether you realize it or not, these practices that you've taken up, these challenges you've given yourself, the things that you've let go of, have been opportunities and continue to be opportunities for you to grow and become the person God imagines you can be. Lent is a season of gifts and challenges, and they're not always the same, but they're not always that different either. So I invite you, share a question that has arisen for you in this season. I'd love to hear those. Share an answer you've gotten.

Share something you've learned or don't. But certainly take time to take stock for yourself about where you find yourself. Thanks so much for joining us on the Dulin for our Dulin Weekly Moment and the Dulin Weekly Podcast. If this has been meaningful to you, we do encourage you to share it and invite others to it. It's been a delight to be with you.

Until the next time, I wish you all the best.