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Message from Pastor Michelson

re-Lent

By Pastor Lowell Michelson

I don’t like romantic comedies. I was caught off guard when I was drawn to one of the most popular romantic comedies of 2004, 50 First Dates. The synopsis for the film says this:

Henry (Adam Sandler) lives… a sweet life with no strings attached… until he meets Lucy (Drew Barrymore). He and Lucy hit it off from the get-go, but the next day she acts like she doesn’t know him… Lucy has short-term memory loss so every night all memory of her day is erased. But a man in love will go to any lengths to win over the girl of his dreams, and if that means having to find imaginative ways of doing it over again every day, then Henry’s up for the challenge.

Memory loss is no laughing matter. Lent is not funny, either. This six-week period leading up to Good Friday and Easter is a romantic comedy of sorts, though. Like Lucy, we have short-term memory loss that robs us of the benefits of a lasting relationship with God. We hear time and time again about a loving God who is pursuing us, but our minds are elsewhere. We can’t recall the goodness that God has given us, or the constant love and affection that God has for us. We quickly forget, but God continues to seek new and different ways to help us remember our relationship.

One of the Bible verses that we hear in worship during this season says, “Return to the Lord, your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2.13) This is a beautiful word, relent: to become less severe, harsh, or strict usually from reasons of humanity. In the original Biblical language, relent is the same word for repent, which speaks of having a change of heart, a turning around.

The season of Lent also finds us in Henry’s character. We are invited to pursue God through Lenten disciplines — repentance, fasting, prayer, and works of love. These are some of the ways that we can explore a deepening of our relationship with God. In this switch of roles, God takes on Lucy qualities and has a sort of holy amnesia that is a tremendous gift to us, as our sins are forgiven each day. The prophet Isaiah tells us that our sins are not only forgiven, but that “God will not remember your sins.” (Isaiah 43.25) While Lucy suffers from a condition that she cannot control, God chooses to forget and dismiss that which severs our relationship. We have a loving God who is pursuing us with persistence — a God who is relentless.

During college, each time I said “goodbye” to my parents in our driveway, my dad would hug me and say, “Remember who you are.” As I hopped in the VW and drove back to school, I often wondered, “Who am I? A son, a friend, a grandson, a student?” All of these identifying characteristics were no match for the reality that I was and am a child of God. As life and the world tried to dismantle me, God continually re-membered me and reconstructed my fractured identity and heart.

May your Lenten journey be a time of rebirth as you reclaim your identity in Jesus Christ. May you remember who you are. You are a child of God.

Pastor Lowell Michelson,

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"...Jesus reduced the mark of a Christian to one word: 'By this all will know you are my disciples,' he said: 'if you LOVE one another.' The most subversive act the church can take is consistently to obey that command." ~Philip Yancey

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