Worship

Pastoral Letter to the Diocese for the season of Lent, from our Bishops

Pastoral Letter to the Diocese
Lent 2024

Dear Friends,

As we write to you in these early days of Lent, we are conscious of a strange contrast: while we journey through the Lenten desert together, in every corner of Greater Lincolnshire we are seeing signs of flooding.

Waterlogged fields, inaccessible roads and submerged pathways are to be found all around our Diocese, and indeed further afield. While we are usually accustomed to the good regulation and use of water in this part of the country, we now find that it is causing crop and soil damage and threatening our drainage infrastructure.

These images suggest to us the danger of becoming overwhelmed. Perhaps this sense of being physically overwhelmed might also represent for us the many different challenges we are each facing, whether at home, as a nation or across the world.

We see daily in the news the horrors of warfare around the globe, and the extreme  violence which human beings are capable of. At home, we encounter exhaustion in our public services and people in our communities living hand to mouth, still facing a cost-of-living crisis which has not gone away. We, too, can feel threatened by people who appear different from us.

In our churches, might we too speak of that sense of being overwhelmed? We have lived through a time of real change – change which makes us anxious and uncertain. We are more than halfway through the programme of Time To Change Together, and we continue to explore and be challenged by what our churches and our common life as Christians will look like in one year, five or ten years, and beyond.

When we are overwhelmed, we are reminded of the words Jesus spoke to his disciples:

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ (Matthew 11.28)

These are not words to paper over the cracks or dismiss the genuine concerns that we carry. But they are words of invitation and hope. Jesus invites us to share our burdens, our sense of being overwhelmed, with him, in the hope that all these things will be transformed and made new.

Jesus is using the language of the wisdom tradition in the Old Testament. He is opening up the possibility of wisdom for all who follow him. Wisdom is not just for the clever or elite; it is a free-ing up of the hearts and minds of all those who in prayer and worship become temples of the Holy Spirit in which the Father and the Son come to dwell. We can all have knowledge of God through the Messiah in the Spirit’s power. The rest promised is like arriving at an oasis of joy in the desert of our pain and loss.

We will often speak of the season of Lent as a time of self-examination and reflection. Lent can also be a refreshingly honest time when we acknowledge before God all that challenges us, all that holds us back, and all that makes us stumble. It is a time in which we walk humbly with our God and find new hope in our vulnerability and God’s mercy as we approach the Cross.

Lest we turn our Lenten disciplines into a work, we remind you that Sundays do not fall within the forty days and forty nights. Sundays are always the day of Resurrection. Walter Bruggemann writes that ‘Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond productivity’ and elsewhere he writes that ‘it is an act of trust in the God who is confident enough to rest.’

The Sabbath rest is always our opportunity to reflect God’s holiness and the call to abundant life and not scarcity.

This Lent, then, let us be honest with God and with ourselves about the things which threaten to overwhelm us. But let us also remember ‘the hope to which he has called us’ (Ephesians 1.18) and trust that God will journey with us. For we are a people of hope, looking ahead to our celebration of the Resurrection, and the new life which Jesus brings.

+Rowan Williams said in a sermon preached in Jerusalem: ‘We look to the One who is more than a prophet, who has cleared our way not just back to Eden but forward to the new city, the new Jerusalem, in which the nations are healed, and strangers live gratefully together.’ This is how we are called to be signs of resurrection in crucifixion situations.

This letter comes with our prayers for you all: for a holy Lent, a blessed Holy Week and a joyous celebration of Easter.

May the peace of the Lord be always with you.

Please continue to pray for Ukraine

You may like to use this prayer from the Methodist Church