Bishop’s Lent message 2022

Lent Reflection

This Lent is different from any other Lents I have experienced. Traditionally Lent is a period of mourning and grief. No candles to be lit in the Church. The white altarpieces are changed with black clothing. The Gloria is not sung in the liturgy. And we sing the full old litany instead for the usual intercessory prayers. Lent is time for the litany – starting with the kyrie eleison.

When we now enter Lent, churches all over Europe and around the world are filled with grief. A European nation has just been overrun by its neighbour’s military force. All the deaths, all the suffering and all the pain.

Kyrie eleison

It is a horrifying threat to the core values of our democracy – for the values we have tried to create after the end of the second WW 76 years ago.

Kyrie eleison

On Ash Wednesday, this year, we read from Isaiah 58:

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:

to loose the chains of injustice

and untie the cords of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free

and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry

and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—

when you see the naked, to clothe them,

and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Kyrie eleison

It is, to be sure, a challenging Lent period we are facing.

Then we enter the Easter Week culminating in the death of Jesus, brutally murdered by the Roman occupying force, only interested in keeping their own power position.

Kyrie eleison

But we all know that the story did not end when the grave was closed – it continued with the women meeting the resurrected Christ. That story has changed our history.

Praise be to God!

The problem is to translate this story into our grief! Evil, pain, violence, brute power – has not ceased to exist. But we have also experienced a new age of Love, Grace and Hope. I saw it as a future dream;

We know as a living hope from the resurrection of Jesus,

Then your light will break forth like the dawn,and your healing will quickly appear;then your righteousness will go before you,and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. (Is 58:8)

We still do not know how, we do not know when.

But we know that nothing, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39)

Amen

+ Tor B Jørgensen

Bishop of the LCiGB

2 March 2022, London