A Devotion for Lent 4: Halfway There
This Sunday is known as “Laetare Sunday,” and is the fourth Sunday of the season of Lent. This Sunday is typically celebrated in Catholic, Anglican, and some Protestant churches. The term “laetare” comes from the Latin meaning “to rejoice.”
I know you might be thinking to yourself – wait, I thought Lent was the season for repentance and contemplation, even solemnness? Why, right smack in the middle of things, would we set aside a day for rejoicing?
Our liturgical practices were created by people, and for the good of the people (the term “liturgy” literally means ‘the work of the people.’) So it make sense to me that the original observers of Laetare Sunday maybe felt similar to how many of us often feel: even during heavy seasons, we need a time of rejoicing.
Rejoicing doesn’t mean the sorrow did not happen. It does not erase pain or our work through the darkness.
Rather, rejoicing in the midst of grief and sorrow and pain testifies to the fact that we are complex creatures, capable of rejoicing through tears, despite tears, because of tears. Rejoicing when the odds seem stacked against us, or the light at the end of the tunnel – it can seem foolish.
Here, in the middle of the desert of Lent, with the thickest of darkness all around us, rejoicing can be a subversive act. To proclaim joy, goodness, light, and life in the face of death, well,this is powerful stuff.
When we rejoice, we proclaim that we are ultimately resurrection people. To mark a day during the sometimes dark and heavy and certainly solemn season of Lent proclaims that we are people who hope for the breaking of the dawn
On Monday, we return to about 20 days of Lent. The journey is not yet over.
So it is for us as people in the business of disaster recovery. We pause to rejoice because we know the dawn will break, the light of a new day will come. We pause to rejoice because we have not lost hope.
Reading through the Scriptures this week brought me to a translation of the passage in Ephesians that I had to share with you all. It can be found on https://www.unfoldinglight.net/.
Ephesians 2.1-10 - A paraphrase
Face it: you were dead. A zombie, well dressed.
Junked, addicted to your distrustful stupor,
sucked in and thrown away by the world's lies,
self-shelled and painted with all the popular memes,
following the smell of anxiety you thought was good,
dancing, doomed, down a dead-end alley.
Fake happiness had its poison talons in you
the whole time, mummifying your heart.
That anger, that hollow despair we called toughness,
gold-medal swimming in quicksand—yeah, we all had it,
furious at our self-destruction, but looking good.
Then in that trash heap, with bricks for hearts,
in that graveyard we called life, Mercy itself
came with enormous love and grabbed us
and for no reason other than wanting to
just plain made us alive.
The Beloved, rising out of our garbage cans,
wrapped loving arms around us and ripped us out
into this life, this light, this being.
You've been salvaged.
Set up like a refugee in a place God fixed up for you
deep in God's heart, where you always belonged.
This miracle we saw in the Beloved,
this infinite kindness, lasts forever.
It's not about you—it happens to the worst of us—
you didn't do it, deserve it, ask for it
or even know it was happening.
It's pure gift, pure wonder, absolute mystery.
You are now what God created you—all of us—to be
from the very beginning:
pure goodness, alive. Alive and for real.
Astonishing, huh?
So, where do you find yourself halfway through the season of Lent? Are you eager for some rejoicing? Or is joy the furthest thing from your mind?
Wherever you find yourself this week, I pray you will give yourself grace, take time for reflection, and in all things, remember that the light of the dawn is not far away.
In Christ,
Chaplain Amy
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