This Rector’s Closing Thoughts article was originally published in our Lent 2023 Bellringer.
Lent is upon us. The forty days of Lent are modeled on the Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, preparing himself for ministry. We take these 40 days to prepare ourselves for the central moment of our faith: Easter. Early in the life of the Church, Christians would set aside this time before Easter to prepare themselves with acts of fasting, charity, prayer, and study. In other words, to work on their “holy habits.”
Habits are those things that we do instinctually. A practice becomes a habit when it moves from that intentional part of our brain to the unintentional part of it. Habits are morally neutral: we have good habits and bad habits. Holy habits are those faith practices that we engage in so much that they become second nature. As you approach Lent, I encourage you to take time to examine what holy habits need tending in your life.
A crisis can knock our habits out of us, for good or ill. One of the holy habits the pandemic disrupted was our worship habit. Recently, I have had several conversations with parishioners who have not yet returned to in-person worship or haven’t returned with the same frequency. For some, there are very good reasons why they cannot. Nevertheless, one thing I keep hearing from many folks is that they have “lost the habit.” They miss coming, they want to come, and plan to come soon. If that is similar to your experience, I encourage you to consider coming to church as your Lenten practice this year.
We go to church to nourish our faith, but we also go to church to support others. Your presence matters. Sharon Rodgers put it so beautifully in a sermon nine years that I still think about often. She said, “Oh, but I don’t minister, some of you will say, I just come to church on Sunday morning. Ah, but simply by being here you minister to me, because I come here needing to be part of something larger than who and what I am alone. I need to hear a church full of voices singing praise to God; it’s the only way I can dare to sing out loud myself. I need to hear a church full of people say amen with me. So when you just come to church on Sunday morning, you minister to me, and to everyone else in this place simply by your presence among us.”
Bingham+
