How To Have A Happy Lent

In which I enumerate why it's my favorite time of year and explain why Joel Osteen should consider becoming a Christian

It’s finally my favorite time of year! Lent—that long journey through the forty days leading up to Easter. Staggering into church last night for Communion and Ashes (the better and holier choice than Bread and Circuses), my heart soared with delight that all the Christmas decorations are finally gone, that we can finally get on with the real business at hand—being sorry about being sinners.

One of the most exasperating things about living in a post-Christian—some people are saying anti-Christian—age is the relentless, senseless, and exhausting pressure to present oneself as a good person. All the euphemistic circumlocutions to work around the obvious fact that I am not good and no one is good are a weariness and a burden. It is a great pleasure. for me at least, for some small portion of the year, to declare unto the nations that sin is real and that people are bad at their core. I’m not good, you are invited to keep saying for five or six weeks, and that is a great and good blessing for both of us to know.

I have this in mind this morning because I happened to watch the terrible response Joel Osteen had to the shooting at his church this last Sunday:

He does look overwrought, and yet, as someone pointed out somewhere, if you watch with the sound off, you can’t tell that anything bad happened, except for the grave faces of the people behind him. Why is he smiling? What is he even talking about?

Here’s part of the transcript:

But, you know, we don’t understand why these things happen, but we know God’s in control and we’re going to pray for that little 5-year-old boy and pray for the lady that was deceased, her family and all, and the other gentleman. But I don’t know. It’s kind of a fog, but, you know, just believe that, you know what, we’re going to stay strong, going to continue to move forward. There are forces of evil, but the forces that are for us, the forces of God are stronger than that. So we’re going to keep going strong and just a, you know, doing what God called us to do to lift people up and give hope to the world.

What a missed opportunity to explain the nature of the cosmos! How sin entered the world through one man, thereby subjecting creation to futility and all men to death, but how a second Man came to restore all that he had made, beginning first by dying to forgive sin thereby removing the sting of death. All you have to do is put your life into the hands of this second Man. What was his name? I feel like it begins, at least in English, with the letter “J” and ends with an “s.” Of course, Osteen couldn’t take this opportunity because he doesn’t believe it. Instead, he said “we” “don’t understand” why “these things” happen, except that “there are forces of evil.”

Anyone reading the news might rightfully conclude that one of these “forces” of evil happened to be a person. A person went into a huge room full of other people and tried to kill some of them. It’s not like some sort of evil noxious emanation came in there. It was a person. Beyond that, we might learn some things about the person. Not only that she was a sinner, but where she was from, what particular evil circumstances and other evil people might have nurtured her along the way to this heinous act. One of the things human people have to do is constantly search out and deal, somehow, with evil, with sin, with wickedness. If you’re able to be honest about this, that search has the possibility of leading you to the true source of goodness—God himself.

If you’re deeply committed to people not being bad, though, you have to commit epic displays of Cope. Whose fault is this, Mr. Osteen? The church is in your care. Did you forget to do your daily affirmation? Did you lack faith? Or is it the fault of the people who were injured? Why did this “force” of evil come close to this church?