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Not for the first time, thinking about Lent has made me reflect on how much of the beauty and art of the Christian life we miss out on as evangelicals in not celebrating the church calendar. It seems that, in running from tradition and perceived staidness, we end up missing out on many of the liturgical contrasts and seasonal dynamics that give the Christian year so much of its beauty and drama. In doing so, I can’t help thinking that we always risk turning out as staid and dry as that which we were trying to avoid, as one Sunday becomes as monotone in its message and feel as the next – we sing the same songs and often ignore the drama of Lent in our sermons and personal reflections. This has to be impoverishing us and resulting in us missing out on a large part of what it is to be human.

For me, the blessing and joy of lent is two fold. First, it is a chance to go with Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. This is a practice that we need to reclaim as evangelicals in every part of our life, not just during Lent: we are chronically bad at creating our own little subcultures and circles and activities and friendship circles (and how true this can be in University, when it is easily very possible to spend every evening doing something Christian Union or Church related), fearing that the dominant culture is evil and corrosive and therefore the best option is to remove ourselves from it, above all from the messy and hurting parts of it out of the fear that it will corrupt us and make us less ‘holy’. Instead, we hang around in Christian circles, go to Christian Bible studies, listen to Christian music, spend our summers going to Christian Bible or Church camps, go to Christian events and endless conferences, occasionally coming out and interacting with the world to evangelise them and persuade people of their need for a saviour for their sins.

I think such an approach fundamentally misses the Biblical concept of mission, however. The call of the church is not to be a group of gospel-believing people withdrawn from the world into our own subculture, occasionally pushing out for a series of events that would take the message of Jesus to the great unwashed masses. Instead, the God of the Bible is constantly presented as the God who is already in every situation. Mission is at the heart of it the action of God. Our job as church is to find out where God is moving and follow him there. It’s not to withdraw from the world in some sort of platonic thought it being totally corrupt and evil, but to live within the broken world, affirming what is good and beautiful about it and then pointing onwards to the source of this beauty (similar to Paul in Acts 17 in his speech to the Areopagus). As a broad generalisation, in fact, it seems that a lot of the time God moves in history, it is to put in good rather than try and eliminate the bad. The ultimate summary of this tendency is found in the incarnation – the coming of the Creator God into the created world to bring healing.

So if we work on the basis that the earth is already full of the glory of God (as Isaiah 6 seems to suggest it is) then, although it is cracked and hurting and full of pain and immeasurable acts of human evil – holocausts, murders, rapes, greed, climate change, injustice, poverty, famine, children dying from preventable diseases – we can go into the world and live without fear, knowing that God is already present in every situation. It means we can begin to imagine and explore what it looks like to follow through Jesus’ desire that we are salt and light in the world – travellers on a road who can help to bring healing and hope to other people who have fallen down along the wayside. It means that people can experience Jesus’ transforming love not through having to come and find him in church but by finding him in the faces and lives of the people who follow him.

Please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying the darkness can’t be very dark, or even that it can be fixed in a few weeks, months or even years. There’s so much pain in the world which seems to just defy healing. For so many people, Christians and non-Christians alike, every day represents a new battle with depression, eating disorders, loneliness or ill health. It represents a constant struggle for survival, walking 3km just to get a days drinking water. It involves being raped daily because they have been trafficked against their will for the gain of others. It involves constantly dodging the bullet or the bomb or the machette. Lent and following Jesus often do not change this – if anything, we often become more aware of the way in which so many forces, illnesses – and people – are involved in dehumanising others and our hearts hurt and cry all the more as we respond to our mission to stand where the world is most in pain. Sometimes, despair seems inevitable as the challenge of Lent, of God in the wilderness, crushes us more than we feel we can withstand.

Yet, Lent also holds promise. It holds the promise of Good Friday, as, out in the distance we spot another figure, also crushed by the weight of dehumanisation and evil. Sometimes, the image fades as the pressures and pain of the now become too strong. But the figure is always there, even if only blurred. It is the figure of the God-man, the creator of the Universe who chose to get involved in creation and allowed himself to be crushed by the evil of creation so that he might identify himself with those who are dehumanised and through whose stripes we can be healed.

Finally, Lent holds the promise that the pain and despair and dehumanisation of the world would not always be so but that after Good Friday would come Easter – the Resurrection. As people who follow the crushed man-God, we are also people who bring the promise of life into the dark places, who bring glimpses of New Creation and Hope into situations where the dominant, all-encompassing experience is of decay and despair. Such glimpses are not triumphalistic or brash – a healing here, an alcoholic who comes off drinks there . . . a marriage in break down that is able to turn the corner . . . a community torn apart by division and violence able to learn to talk to each other and find common causes for peace. Yet in such glimpses, the church bears witness to the fact that the new Kingdom is inaugurated, will come to consummation and is breaking through into the present.

What a much bigger view of a missionary God this is than one who simply requires us to persuade people of their sinfulness from the shelter of our sanctuaries. And what a priviledge – and responsibility – the get involved with this mission of God.

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