We are blessed to hear such well-crafted and well-executed sermons each week. I was both challenged and inspired by Dr. Brown’s sermon this past Sunday, The Road to Jerusalem. He talked about the road we all must travel with Jesus during Lent. It’s not a trouble-free road but one we must walk if we are to grow spiritually.

Just as Jesus’ own journey to Jerusalem wasn’t an easy one, we too will face challenges and bumps along our own Lenten roads. This often happens as the Spirit woos us to embrace our weaknesses. As scary as this sounds, we are not to despair. This forty-day pilgrimage of self-discovery provides us with the time and space to become more vulnerable with, and thus closer to, an ever-loving and all-embracing God.

In her book, The Circles of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year, Kimberlee Conway Ireton, says:

Lent is a time to reckon with the reality of the darkness. We do so with hope because the season ends in Easter, in resurrection, in new life. But we can be raised to new life only if we have first died to the old one. That is the challenge and the gift of Lent.

Indeed, this is the point of Lent! We can only be raised to new life if we first surrender to God. So what does this mean?

Martin L. Smith, in his Lenten book, A Season for the Spirit, talks about “surrender” as the “laying down of resistance to the One who loves me infinitely more than I can guess, the One who is more on my side than I am myself.” Many contemplate what they should give up for Lent or in some cases, what they should give away. For Smith, Lent is a time to give up “control itself.” By giving up control we experience true freedom:

Lent is about the freedom that is gained only through exposure to truth. And “What is truth?” Pilate’s question is partially answered by unpacking the Greek word aletheia, which we translate as truth. The word literally means “unhiddenness.” Truth is not a thing, it is rather an event. Truth happens to us when the coverings of illusion are stripped away and what is real emerges into the open. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). The truth we are promised if we live the demands of this season consists not in new furniture for the mind but in exposure to the reality of God’s presence in ourselves and the world. The Spirit promises to bring us into truth by stripping away some more of the insulation and barriers that have separated us from living contact with reality—the reality of God, of God’s world, and of our true selves.

What are you holding onto that you know you need to let go of? Is it power? Perhaps it’s an unforgiving heart or a grudge? Maybe you’re overwhelmed with worry? During Lent, may you find yourself empowered to lay your resistance down and turn it over to God.

Spirit of truth, you know us intimately, you alone know what barriers to truth in us are ready to come down now so that we can enter more freely into the reality of God than ever before. Give us perseverance in our prayer and reflection day by day this Lent so that when the time is ready these barriers may give way. Amen.