One of my least-helpful personality traits is a kind of existential restlessness. I continually make five-year plans and inevitably rewrite them after six months. I constantly imagine the next step in my education, or my ministry, or my sermon series, in a stream of possible futures that will never unfold. I reassure myself with the certainty that surely, surely once _____ happens then everything will be okay. I prepare, and prepare, and prepare myself for a future that often doesn’t quite arrive.
I’m well suited, in other words, to the season once known as “Gesimatide” that begins, in some traditions, this Sunday: the three weeks before Lent, a season of preparation for a season of preparation.
If you worshiped in an Episcopal Church or in a Roman Catholic church before the 1960s and 70s, you may well have seen or heard the unscrabbleable names Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima for the Sundays leading up to the season of Lent. They originate in the Latin words for seventy, sixty, and fifty, numbers that refer to the fifty, or sixty, or seventy days before Easter week, and by metonymy to the Sundays that fall within those periods. In medieval and early-modern Western liturgical calendars, these Sundays mark a period of preparation for Lent; “Alleluias” begin to be dropped and vestments begin changing to purple, even before the Lenten fast begins.
While the modern liturgical calendars of the late 20th century have ended some of these traditions as part of their fuller observance of the season of Epiphany, traces remain. Our Sunday readings shift from the Epiphany focus on Christ’s revelation to the world toward a dual emphasis on resurrection and law, a foreshadowing of the seasons of Lent and Easter.
This Sunday and next, we’ll hear Jesus deliver a sermon whose contents Gandhi described as the essence of Christianity, and yet which no Christian has ever fully embodied. “Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus says, “for yours is the kingdom of God… Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you… Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you… Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:20-31)
The law laid out in the Sermon on the Mount (in Luke’s case, sometimes called the “Sermon on the Plain”) is good. It is perfect. It is the ideal to which all human beings should aspire. And as with all such laws, no mere mortal has ever left it unbroken. To say that these Sundays before Lent, these Sundays of “Gesimatide,” are a preparation for Lent is to say that we come to understand the depth of our imperfection by reflecting on the height of our aspirations.
Lent is not a wallowing in our badness, a self-centered struggle with our own guilty pleasures. It is a fundamental reckoning with that gap: the gap between our aspirations and our reality; between our calling and our response; between God’s vision for a world in which the poor are blessed and our enemies are loved and the Golden Rule is the only rule, and the world in which we live.
So prepare, this Gesimatide, for Lent. Overprepare. Prepare for the preparation that will prepare you for the revelation that God was born, and died, and rose again to bridge that gap, and imagine a future in which it closes. Make a five-year plan that will never become reality. Dream of the next steps on the road down which God is leading us. And prepare yourself to prepare again the next year, and again the next, and again the next, into eternity.