(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Be Purple, originally shared on February 18, 2021. It was the ninety-first video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Yesterday
was Ash Wednesday. Most people marked it in their homes or in their cars. They
missed seeing the color of the season: purple, unless there was a flash of it
on their pastor’s stole. How purple are you?
You may have heard that you only get out of
something what you’re willing to put into it. Today, we’re going to see how,
during Lent, you get much more.
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Easter
Cycle. The Easter Cycle, like the Christmas Cycle, begins with a season of
preparation, a season of the event itself, and a season of reflection on the
event.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, the
season of preparation for Easter, lasting 40 days.
Forty days is a significant number in the
Bible. It is the number of days that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah fasted in the wilderness
during which Jesus was tempted by the devil, a text most churches will read
this coming Sunday.
It’s the number of years that the nation of Israel
wandered in the wilderness after being liberated from slavery in Egypt.
It’s the number of days between Jesus’ resurrection
and ascension,
It’s the number of years that Saul, David, and Solomon
reigned over Israel, and more.
Ash Wednesday is the day that the new season
of Lent gets its color: purple.
Ash Wednesday can be the beginning of a new
life for you, or deepening a renewal of a life you have already been given in
Jesus Christ.
The question is, “How purple are you?”
Lent is a wildly misunderstood season.
Lent is a season when some people give up something,
as a sacrifice like that of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.
It can include giving up something that we
are doing that is bad for us, like smoking, or overeating, or being sedentary, or
alcohol, or the materialism of retail therapy, and so on. Or it can be giving
up something we that like, like Diet-coke or chocolate. That’s what Mardi Gras
used to be about. “Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday”. It started as the
day when people would give up using fat for Lent. The Tuesday before Ash
Wednesday was the day to use it all up. Then it became a day to cook
extravagant meals with the fat. Then it became a day to party. Then it became a
day for entertainment. Then it became a pretty much secular day for debauchery.
Other people don’t subtract, but add
something like, being a more generous giver, spending more time in prayer and
Bible study, doing God’s will for the poor, contacting the isolated, reconciling
with relatives and friends, and so on.
What Lent is not is something we do to impress
people or to “virtue signal”. All we can do in Lent is act in response to and
in gratitude for what God has already done for us. It’s a time to focus on that
and be renewed or to deepen our shade of purple.
The Gospel reading for Ash
Wednesday is from two sections in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 6th
chapter, starting at the 1st verse:
The coronavirus is now in
decline, but it’s still bad. But, this is still 2021 so something else seems to
have thrown a wrench into the works and, today, it’s the weather. The uncharacteristic
cold that has gripped Texas and points east have put people in a very dangerous
place. People are gathering wherever they can find heat. They are unable to get
to vaccination centers. And the dangerous road conditions have stopped new
deliveries of that vaccine.
Here, our weather is fine and temperatures
might get in to the 80’s. But, as one of the local newspersons said on TV this
morning, this is not the time to gloat. People aren’t just uncomfortable. There
is some real suffering in Texas and beyond.
And here, large gatherings are
still taking place, people are still walking around without masks or practicing
social distancing, and we still haven’t felt the full force of people’s
indifference to practicing safer behavior on St. Valentine’s Day.
There is good news today,
however. Remember the flu? I read this morning in “Morning Brew” online that,
as of last week, the CDC reported that there have been 165 flu-related hospitalizations
in the whole country since last October. In the previous flue season, there
were 400,000. “Flue has been essentially nonexistent,” infections disease
expert Dr. William Schaffner told NPR.”
Why? Because all of our efforts to fight the coronavirus. Reducing
hospitalizations from the flu wasn’t an end in itself, but a byproduct. Like
the good works we do in Lent. They are not the purpose of Christianity, but a
result of it.
The color purple that we use as the color for Lent is significant.
It’s the color of the robe that the Roman soldiers threw around Jesus
while thy were torturing him before his crucifixion. It was their way of
mocking the claim that he was a king. That was when they placed a crown made of
thorns on his head (John 19:1-5).
Purple could only be worn by the royals and the uber rich in Jesus’s
day. It was made from crushed seashells that could only be found in the right
conditions in a few areas. It was very expensive and never faded.
It’s the color of the dye sold by Lydia, in wealth woman who became an fervent
early Christian, the first to be baptized with European waters, and provided
hospitality and possibly a place for community worship in her home.
In popular culture, The Color Purple is a book by Alice Walker that
became a Broadway play and a movie with Oprah Winfrey.
On the other end of the spectrum, it’s the color of Barney, the purple
dinosaur.
It is also the color of rain in an enormously popular song by the artist
Prince. And that brings us back to Lent.
Lent is a time not for Purple Rain, but for Purple Reign.
It is the time to come to the reign of God.
It is a time to deepen the shade of purple from pastel pink to deep
purple, to color our behavior with the blood of Jesus, to live in response to
God’s gift for us on the cross, to take away distractions and give time to the
shaping of our true selves as servants of God, redeemed by Jesus, and shaped by
Living Water, the ongoing personal presence of the power God in the person of
the Holy Spirit.
Lent isn’t about what you do. It’s about who you are in Jesus Christ. It’s
about the gift of God’s grace at the cross, the power of the Holy Spirit to
make of us a new creation, God’s people, born again. It’s about a time of focus,
meditation and growth, a time when we get so much more than we give, because
God’s presence is so much more that we can ask or imagine.
The color purple is expensive. Lent leads us to a reminder of just how
expensive it was at the cross and, in Lent, we respond by living in response to
the love and presence of God for the sake of others and sharing our faith with
others generously and at some cost. And, like the love of God, it never fades.
This season, this 40 days, this Lent, wherever and whatever you are: be purple. And, if you are already purple, pray that God would make of you a darker shade.
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