Lent and the Present Social Crisis
As we wrap up our three-part series, Social Repentance Not Private Piety, let’s consider our season of Lent this year in the middle of our present social crisis. The point of both these examples we have considered in this week’s reading is simply that systems of injustice are never sustainable for the long term. At some point, there is whiplash and too often that whiplash is violent and innocent people suffer as a result.
How might this apply to us today?
Part 3 of Social Repentance Not Private Piety
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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
Here in the U.S., we are witnessing the gutting of programs that help our society’s most vulnerable. All of this is so that, under the guise of concern for the national deficit, those in power can grant tax cuts to the billionaire class who are already wealthy beyond their ability to use their wealth in one lifetime. This is compounded by the fact that all of these new budget proposals will still increase the national deficit by trillions of dollars. For the common person in our communities, prices on daily needs continue to rise, wages remain low, and thousands upon thousands of people are losing their jobs through massive firings and layoffs, with new firings being announced almost every day. Where will our breaking point be?
Our reading this week calls us to pause during our season of repentance in this year’s Lent. Lenten repentance can be superficial and temporary or long-lasting, deep, and life-giving.
What our reading this week is calling us to consider is the concrete reality that many are experiencing right now around us. Our seasons of repentance should not be limited to personal piety that leaves those whom our system is harming still hurting. Repentance is about course correction. This year, our season of repentance should be more broadly themed than private, personal, or individual course corrections. What about a social course correction? What about an about-face where we pursue a society where everyone is taken care of and there are no more losers so someone else wins, but we instead have a society where everyone benefits and everyone wins? Let’s shape a society that becomes a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone, where the last are first and the first are last because everyone has what they need to thrive.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke? (Isaiah 58:5-6)
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