Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

We’ve embarked on our Lenten journey together, and as we begin to practice our Lenten rules and disciplines, or as we begin to finalize our rules, or even as we begin to think about the sort of rule we’d very much like to practice, our Office Reading from Deuteronomy gives us a salutary reminder of something very important.

Speaking to God’s people, Moses says (7:7-8a), “It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you.” It’s not account of how convincingly holy or righteous or good we can be; it’s not because we can do or say or be something particularly impressive; it’s not on account of any quantitative measure or qualitative perfection that God has chosen us or anyone. No. God has chosen us because God loves us. Love made an inexplicable, gratuitous, irrational, free and sovereign choice for us. Love alone, Love itself is the reason.

Last year, I talked a little bit about what our Lenten disciplines are for in a Little Guide to a Great Lent (which you can find here), and it’s worth it, from the very start, to be reminded that we don’t practice a rule in order to make God love us more (that’s impossible! God already loves us with the infinite fullness of God’s being!), nor do we practice a discipline in order to make us worthy of the love we receive (God’s love for us is not a response to our worthiness, but an outflowing of God’s own sovereign freedom in Love, to Love), nor is a Lenten rule a self-help regimen meant to make us “better” or more productive people (we cannot produce anything worth calling good unless grace produces it in us, nor can we become “better” on our own steam, by our own efforts, unless grace is at work to do the good in and through us that we cannot do). No, our rules and disciplines are meant to open us to the grace, the love, that God is constantly giving to us so that God’s love can transform us, so that the dew of grace can water the seeds of the Gospel, the seed of the Word in our hearts, so that we can grow in love, in grace, in righteousness, and bear good spiritual fruit. All of our effort, all of our practice, is a response to a love that’s already been given us, and is meant not to add to that love, but to increase our capacity to receive it. All of our effort, all of our practice, is cooperation with a grace already at work in us, working to open us out to the torrents of grace in and through which we already live and move and have our being. All of our effort, all of our practice, is a getting-out-of-the-way of the Love that desires not only to live more fully in us, but to be our All in All.

John in our Office Gospel points to the Lamb—his whole ministry, his whole being, his whole practice of faith, is bent on this one thing: to point to the Lamb, to decrease so that Jesus—so that Love—may increase in him and the world around him. It's a response of gratitude and joy to the Love that has chosen him and shaped him from before he was born. Beloved, it is the same with us, with our ministry, our being, our practice. Our rule is a way by which we respond and point to the Love that has Loved us into a people of Love; and this response can help open us out more and more to the Love which makes of us a people whose lives reveal the goodness of God at work in and through us in doing justice, in loving mercy, in walking humbly with God; a people who point to no goodness or righteousness or holiness of our own, but to the goodness, righteousness, and holiness of Jesus Christ who makes us good and righteous and holy beyond our imagining…not because we’ve earned it, but because he loves us. This is a transforming love worth pointing to, worth living!

May our Lenten disciplines, Beloved, help us to point to Jesus Christ, to the Love that makes us its own because it really, truly, and actually is Love…because it is its own reason and needs no other. May our Lenten disciples be a humble response to God’s loving choice for us, a sign of our desire to be living signs of Love, and instrument Love can use to fashion us more fully into Love's likeness.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+