The Rhythms of Lent

Welcome to the weekly Dulin Podcast, a ministry of Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. Each week, we share a short reflection on faith and life in community, exploring how God's grace moves among us and through us. We're glad you're here.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's me, James Henry, your pastor, and it's time for another of the Dulen Weekly Moments or Dulen Weekly Podcast, depending upon which you're consuming right now. It's good to be with you today. We have entered into the season of Lent. We talked about it last week certainly, and we also looked at it on Ash Wednesday.

We sort of skipped over it as we finished off the Lord's Prayer this past Sunday, but that will be sort of the focus all the way up from now until Easter. So today, I thought I would talk to you a little bit about the rhythms of Lent. First, I'm going to start with the bigger picture of the church. I've mentioned this before, but the church really has a several seasons throughout the year that it uses to kind of keep a rhythm, a balance in our lives. And it's cyclical because we as people need to be reminded of things.

So, are two major feast related seasons, miracle related seasons if you want to, and those are Christmas and Easter. The incarnation and the resurrection right there in those two embodied, and their seasons. The Christmas season is twelve days, the Easter season is fifty days, and it ends with Pentecost, which is the last day of the Easter season. Then they have preparation seasons that prepare for them. So, at Christmas time, we have the season of Advent, which is a preparation for the Christmas season.

It's a season unto itself. And then in preparation for Easter, we have Lent, and that's where we are right now, in the Lenten season. This past Sunday was the first Sunday in Lent. Now, they're cyclical because they invite a rhythm. The preparation seasons I think of as checking our timing or our rhythm in life, and especially so in the Lenten season.

Our lives are filled with rhythms. Now, if we're being honest with each other, we would like to be in control of the rhythms of our lives. We'd like for it to be a constant beat that we have some say in, and we do have some say in. But the truth is sometimes the rhythms of our lives are chaotic. Things happen that interrupt the flow that we were expecting in life.

Sometimes it's small things, and sometimes it's big things. So, if rhythm is a part of living, and oftentimes here, particularly if you're watching from Northern Virginia, maybe wherever you're watching from, but I know here in Northern Virginia, it's busy. We are busy. The rhythm is like a constant pound, pound, pound, pound, pound, pound, pound, And what I like to think of Lent as, I've told you that I think of it as kind of a realignment, an opportunity to step back and ask what is misaligned with God in my life? And maybe one of those things that might be misaligned that you could bring back into some kind of alignment, if you will, is the rhythm of your life.

What I think Lent invites us to do, one of the things, there are lots of things, but one of the things is to pay attention, pay attention to the rhythm of our lives. What's going on? What do I let drive my daily interactions with the world in which I live, with the people whom I love and know and care about? What are the things that keep pressing me, pressing me, pressing me forward. And how is that rhythm affecting my own personal life, my own spiritual life, my sense of connection to the world, to God and to those whom I love, as well as to neighbors I don't yet know or love.

You know, the rhythm can get you. But Lent is an opportunity to maybe take a step back and say, what are the rhythms of my life? And which of the rhythms of my life are feeding me? Perhaps one of your rhythms is to attend in person or online our worship experience in life, and that's a rhythm. Once a week, every one hundred and sixty seven hours or so, we one hundred and sixty eight hours or so, we have worship.

And that worship is built around connecting with God, connecting more deeply with ourselves through prayer, through hymns, through studying scripture together, sometimes through the sacraments, that rhythm is a part of our lives. And once a week, we take a step back and we engage. Now, it may be that because you watch it online, you can't be there in person, you can't watch it. Part of the reason why you're watching it is you can't be there at 10:00 on a Sunday morning and so you're watching it some other time in the week. I think it's a wonderful rhythm to watch it whenever you do.

So, whether you're in person or online and however often you are, that matters. Maybe something that's becoming a part of the rhythm of your life, not to be self serving, but is these weekly dueling moments, whether you're listening on the podcast or watching live. That's becoming maybe a part of your rhythm. You sort of expect that you're going to hear this coming up and it helps keep you grounded, centered, open to what's happening in the world. But what are the other rhythms of your life?

Perhaps you get up at a certain time every day. You eat breakfast at a certain time. You shower, shave, go to work at a certain time every day, you have other kinds of rhythms that fit your life. This, again, is an opportunity to step back and say, what are, first of all, what are the rhythms of my life? What seems to be driving the train, so to speak?

Which of the rhythms of my life are feeding me, uplifting me, strengthening me? Which of them have simply become a habit that I need to reevaluate to see if they're continuing to feed spirit, if they're continuing to uplift the community in which I live? It's an opportunity to just say, what are the rhythms and how do those rhythms impact you? How do they impact the people around you? So, Lent can become a time, and we talked about this too, when we change our rhythms, when we try some different rhythms.

You might have added something to your rhythmic life. I suggested a possibility, since we've just finished studying together the Lord's Prayer, that perhaps if you don't pray it every day that you add it intentionally to your everyday life and pray it in whatever version you choose to pray it, that you practice it. Pray it slowly, pray it openly, see how that impacts you for the next well, there's no longer forty days, but for the forty days of Lent, try that out. See how that rhythm impacts you. Another thing we do often in Lent is a subtractive.

Instead of adding something, we take something away. Often, we're fasting from something particular that we like or that's a part of our lives. We're fasting from social media. We're fasting from chocolate or sweets or beer or whatever it happens to be. We're fasting from that thing in our lives and that affects our rhythm.

I once had a good friend whose rhythm was often having a couple of beers every day when they came home from work. No judgment on that, but that rhythm changed when they gave up beer for Lent. And they began to question how important beer had become as part of their living. And so they set it aside for those forty days, and then at the end of forty days, they reevaluated their relationship to that beer. It became a new way of seeing their rhythm and realized that maybe they wanted to change that rhythm.

So, the opportunity to try on things, to take off things, and to know it's a forty day period of time, after which you can evaluate, hey, do I really want to take that back up? Do I really want to set that back down? Or is this something that has become a part of who I am and really matters to me now? Maybe you'll have prayed the Lord's prayer every day and you'll think, I want to keep doing that because it makes a difference. Maybe you'll have tried it and it didn't speak to you in the same way that silent meditation does or yoga or whatever other practice you might have, in which case, great, you can set that back down.

Several years ago, before I came to Dolan, before the pandemic in 2019 actually, I was studying Centering Prayer, had become certified, and so I said during the season of Lent, let's try Tuesday Night Centering Prayer. In person, we gathered and it became something that people said, let's keep this. Can we keep this as a part of our work together? So, Tuesday night, Centering Prayer happened at 7PM, seven to right, 07:45, something like that. We would gather in a space and do centering prayer together.

That lasted all the way into the pandemic. And then in the pandemic, we tried it online and it fizzled out. It was no longer the right season for centering prayer in an online version, so we set that aside. But during that time when we tried it out for six weeks, the six weeks of Lent, people really became engaged and kept trying it. So all I'm saying to you is find out what the rhythms of your life are.

Maybe try some different rhythms. Learn to ride with the chaotic rhythms of it all. Just catch your breath and pay attention. That can be something that rhythmically becomes a part of your life too. When you start to notice yourself rushing, rushing, rushing, that rhythm, that's a moment maybe to slow down and stop.

I don't know. Lent invites a lot of things and one of them is examine the rhythm of your life. What is feeding your relationship with God and with the rest of us and with all that is? And what is detracting? And are there ways to change that rhythm?

Now's the time to give it a try. So those are my thoughts here in this Lenten season for you. I wish you all the best in discovering your rhythms and in finding a way forward and perhaps realigning or more deeply aligning yourself with what God's hope is for you. Until the next time I see you, I wish you all the very best.