“Ugh!!!  Ash Wednesday? Lent?  Really?  Do we really have to?  It all sounds too depressing and somber to me.  Acknowledgment of my mortality? Confession of my sin? Repentance, contrition, penitence?

“ I’m really not in to all that!  I really don’t like to hear about that kind of stuff. Suffering, mourning, fasting, ‘from dust you came and to dust you will return”—I can do without that in my life.  Besides it’s a contradiction of my faith! My faith is upbeat.  My faith is about life, not death.  My faith is about forgiveness, not sin.  My faith is about glory, not suffering.”

“And not only is it a contradiction of my faith, it is a contradiction of the world around me. The winter solstice is past. The days are getting longer. The sun shines a little brighter. Birds are beginning to sing again. I’m ready for some Spring! I’m ready for some new life!  I’m just not in the mood for the somber melancholy of Lent.”

“I tend to prefer some of these young preachers that  I have been watching on TV lately.  They tell me how to find power and success. They tell me how to feel good. That’s what I need. So you can have your Lenten services!”

The truth is that these forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter are among the most counter-cultural and subversive in the church year. Confession of sin, repentance, penitence, contrition, the focus upon suffering, sacrifice and death, honesty about our own mortality—these are all matters that do not come naturally for us. We live in a success-worshiping, power seeking, feel-good culture. And Lent moves us an entirely different direction. It contradicts everything that our culture promotes.

Lent is primarily about the truth of our sin.  Sin that is so much a part of who we are that no matter how hard we try, there’s just no way to avoid it.  We can skip the Ash Wednesday service and the whole season of Lent and listen to those feel good preachers every day, but we cannot hide from the truth.

Yet, there is good news. And it is the greatest contradiction of all

As the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Rome, though our sin was serious, in Christ, “grace abounded.” Our misdeeds are abundant, and our sin is boundless.  Yet, as Paul says:  in Christ mercy is abundant, and grace is boundless!

To the unrighteous has been given righteousness. We could not get good enough for God, so God in Christ made us good through revealing his saving love for us.  We could not do right by God, so God in Christ did right by us.

Instead of distancing God’s self from us for our failure to be good, loved us into relationship with God. This is the great, wonderful contradiction of the cross, the great contradiction of Lent upon which rests our hope in life and in death.