Lent Talk 1, 12 March 2025
On this page:
Matt’s Picture which captures the themes of the talk
Summary of the talk
The Full talk.
Matt’s Picture
SUMMARY: Lent Talk 1: What Are We Doing and Why?
Main Theme
Lent is a season of spiritual discipline, not as a means of earning God’s favor but as a way of reorienting ourselves toward His story. The talk explores how spiritual practices like prayer, Scripture reading, and fasting help us remember who we are and what God has done for us.
Elevator Pitch
Lent isn’t about self-denial for its own sake—it’s about saying “no” to distractions so we can say “yes” to a deeper connection with God. This talk introduces the purpose of Lent, linking it to the biblical themes of redemption, gratitude, and moral formation. Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore different spiritual disciplines that help us grow in love for God and others.
Breakdown of the Talk
1. The Purpose of Lent
Lent is about remembering: remembering God’s work in history, in our lives, and in the world.
Our spiritual practices don’t earn us favor with God but help us live in gratitude for His redemption.
Abstinence is not about suffering but about training ourselves to be spiritually mature.
2. Biblical Foundations
The two greatest commandments—love God and love your neighbor—are not about emotions but about action.
The entire biblical narrative is framed around the idea that we are a rescued people called to live accordingly.
3. Spiritual Practices We’ll Explore
Scripture Reading – Not just for emotional inspiration, but to place ourselves in God’s story.
Prayer – Not just for asking things of God, but as a means of anchoring ourselves in His plan.
Service – Loving our neighbors through acts of kindness and justice.
Deep Vulnerable Community – Practicing honesty, accountability, and shared faith.
Personalized Spiritual Disciplines – What works for one may not work for another (e.g., reading theology vs. experiencing nature).
4. Historical Context of Lent
Early Christians saw resisting temptation as a core spiritual task, especially during persecution.
The tradition of Lenten fasting comes from ancient practices of preparing for baptism.
The medieval Catholic Church established Friday fasting traditions that persist in some communities today.
5. A Modern Approach to Lent
Think of Lent like an annual performance review in a job you love: it’s a time to reflect, grow, and refine.
It’s not about guilt or shame but about recognizing our participation in a broken world and intentionally growing in faith.
The discipline of saying “no” to certain things (e.g., indulgences, distractions) helps us mature spiritually, just as athletes train their bodies.
6. Practical Takeaways
Lent is about remembering and realigning with God’s work.
The number “40” (as in 40 days of Lent) represents a significant period of preparation in Scripture.
Sundays are traditionally feast days, but personal discipline matters more than strict rule-following.
Final Thought
Lent is an invitation, not an obligation. The goal isn’t perfection but intentional growth—finding the practices that help you stay grounded in God’s story and live as His redeemed people. Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive deeper into these spiritual disciplines and how they shape our faith.
The Full TALK
A record of our first talk - part direct transcript, part slightly edited, and (blame the technology!) some parts missed altogether.
Take away lines:
Abstinence in Lent is about what we can say ‘no’ to, in order that we can say ‘yes’ to something else.
Our observances / practices don’t ‘make God like us more’.
We don’t read the Bible to have an emotional experience, but to better understand our part in God’s story.
We don’t pray primarily to have God answer us, but to anchor ourselves in God’s plan.
Text of the talk:
Recall from our Advent talks the two greatest commandments:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart
Love your neighbour as yourself.
These are not intended as about our emotional ‘feelings’ of love – they’re actually not interested in what we call ‘love’ - but simply as instructions, commands; as moral formation and pointers to social action for what it means to be ‘God’s holy people’. And in particular it’s all to be understood in the context of ‘you were brought out (rescued) from exile for this – so live in gratitude like this.’ This is why Jesus says ‘all of the law and the prophets hang upon these two commandments’: in fact no matter where you pick up your scriptures – Torah, the Prophets - what they talk about endlessly is either ‘we’ve forgotten God’s salvation and we’ve living as if it didn't happen’ or ‘we’re immoral people and that is not fitting to God's redemption, God's salvation, out of Egypt’. [It’s never just ‘you should be good’: it’s always ‘you should be good because you are a redeemed/saved/rescued people’.]
So tonight we’ll talk about what is Lent and why do we do it; then we’ll spend some weeks looking at how to love God, and spiritual practices that help bring us into the story of God's past, present and future work for us: as we say in our creed ‘for us and for our salvation’.
We’ll look specifically at the spiritual practices of Scripture Reading and Prayer (one week each): then under the rubric of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ we’ll look as the spiritual practice of Service and the spiritual practise of what we’ll call ‘Deep Vulnerable Community’. Then in our final week we'll broaden the understanding of ‘what are spiritual practices’ and open up a ‘grab bag’ in the sense that anything that you do - very literally anything that you do that places you in the story of God's redemptive work in Jesus and calls forth for you what it means for you to be a morally formed socially active person - that for you then becomes a spiritual discipline a spiritual practice. For me personally that's reading high-end theology: all the really boring textbooks that most people can't stand, those are spiritually nourishing to me. Some people go out on a hill and they watch a sunset and they feel that communion with God that draws them into that place. That's not me - so we're all going to be different and we create this space for intentionality: what are the things that you do on purpose that place you back in that story (God’s story).
For those who were in congregations last Sunday where they read Deuteronomy 26.1-11, the core of this reading was ‘Do not forget’. So what are the things, the practices, that you would do on a daily basis, a regular basis, that place you back into the story so that we do not, you do not forget, God's work in Jesus - so that again you come back out of that practice remembering who you are and what God's claim upon your life is.
So that will be the next kind of five weeks of spiritual practices - some very traditional, some not, and the encouragement is for you to find out what works in your spirit. Because at the end of the day we don't do these things to tick them off a list – ‘yep I did this and I did that and I did the other’ - but rather ‘these are the spiritual practices that we do that remind us who we are, remind us of our name, remind us of the claim that God places upon us. Does that make sense? Cool!
In the early church they saw a primary task of those were ‘in Christ’ as ‘resisting the devil’. Persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, and other persecution, made it obvious that Christians were suffering; and that suffering was seen as part of the task of ‘resisting the devil’. But once Christianity under Constantine became acceptable, and then the official state religion, people didn’t suffer in the same way. So in order to be seen to be still fighting the battle, abstaining became an a established mode of spiritual formation. Some went into the desert; some adopted very ascetic lifestyles indeed.
Prior to baptism, particularly, people would enter into a period of preparation – particularly fasting from rich food. ‘Rich’ would mean no fish eggs or dairy products; basically bread and not a whole lot of fruit.
Hence the mediaeval catholic practice or observance. And continuing today, depending on how hard-core the Catholic communities can be – like still on Friday. I grew up in a catholic city in America and that meant Friday night was fish night, even if you weren’t catholic.
What we can do is treat Lent as a metaphor for an annual performance review in a job: not a job that you hate but one that you love. In a job that you love, you go in and your supervisor says ‘you're up to scratch, you’re so great, we’re so much better when you are here; and there are still some things that you're not doing yet How about we talk about that and see where you want to be?’
What Lent gives us is an opportunity to take six weeks over it – a decent length of time, not a rush - to allow it to be true that ‘we recognise we are personally complicit in the creation of our fallen and corrupted world in which we live - the reason why is because of me’ - and we have an opportunity to do that in an emotional and spiritual environment that nurtures. It’s not about guilt - we can very quickly go to ‘worm that I am, horrible human …’ but that's not the fact, that's not true. I am an active creation: I want to know Christ… (Philippians 3.10, next Sunday’s reading.)
Another perspective is that ‘giving in’ is not good, and ‘the flesh’ needs to be informed clearly that it does not have a voice. ‘Concupiscence’ is a strong word here (and not just about sex), referring to that ‘giving in’. You just have to say ‘no’ to be an elite dancer. Or to succeed at university you know you can’t just go out whenever you want: you have to live with an intention to become more than you are right now. It's called growth and it's called maturity: this is what fasting is like. These are the things that we learn to do so that we may be people fitting the gospel, so that we might live under our loving God.
Some Detailed Points:
Where does the word Lent come from? From Mediaeval / Norman England, and it relates to the word root length / lengthen – particularly as it reflects the lengthening of the days in springtime. (Obviously inappropriate in the Southern Hemisphere.)
Why is Lent 40 days? There’s a connection with ‘Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days’, And why was Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days? There’s a pattern with Moses at Sinai for 40 days before he receives the 10 Commandments – this notion of 40 days in the wilderness as a season of preparation is an echoing theme that runs through the scriptures. So the notion that Matthew in his gospel would say that Jesus enters the wilderness for 40 days would be understood by all good Jewish listeners. But ’40 days’ isn’t meant to be taken literally – it basically means ‘a long time, a time long enough to be serious about something’.
Isn’t Lent really 46 days? It’s 46 days from Ash Wednesday – but the traditional understanding is ‘Sundays are feast days no matter what’, so abstinence doesn’t need to be followed on Sundays. That said, I stick with it precisely because I know that if I take one day off I'll end up taking 38 days off.