Lent is a time for deep self-reflection and repentance, yet, what I found myself missing for many years is the communal nature of Lent. As we recited the Litany of Penitence last week during our Ash Wednesday service, it struck me again that confession, repentance, and examination is a collective task:

“We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us.
We have not been true to the mind of Christ. We have grieved your Holy Spirit.

Have mercy on us, Lord…

Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work,

We confess to you, Lord…

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us,

Accept our repentance, Lord.”¹

We, us, and our, not one line refers to the individual.

We see the collective task of confession, repentance, and examination in the scriptures too: the prophets condemned the Hebrews’ injustices corporately; when John the Baptist called for the Jews to repent it was as a whole; and Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem was over the entire community. This doesn’t mean every individual was guilty, but that as an entity, the community failed in its task to reflect God into the world. Christians today cannot not think of themselves differently. 

In the protestant, and specifically evangelical, world I grew up in, a heavy emphasis was placed on the believer’s individual relationship with God, and the emphasis was intensified during Lent. It may be that in the western world we prefer to maintain an individual focus because it’s easier, or at least in my own life it is. When I read articles on climate change, social injustice, and war I become overwhelmed. I may seek to reduce my carbon footprint but that doesn’t mean others will. I can vote but I can’t force others to do the same. I can donate to humanitarian causes but death and destruction still occurs. However, if I turn inward, I can pick over my life for some sin or some shortcoming and think, “This is something I can control. This is something I can change.”

In The Last Week, Marcus Borg and J. D. Crossan explain, “We must think of Lent today as a penitential season because… we would like its Holy Week conclusion to be about the interior rather than the exterior life, about heaven rather than earth, about the future rather than the present, and above all else about religion safely and securely quarantined from politics.”² When we observe a wholly private Lent focused only on individual sin we miss the point altogether. The God who is active in the world is active through his followers.

This is why Lent must also be taken up by whole communities of Christ followers. If the Church’s collective sin and apathy speak louder than its efforts to be Heaven on earth, we fail to reveal the God of love. when we take up a communal Lent, we pray with the Litany of Penitence:

“Accomplish in us the work of your salvation,

That we may show forth your glory in the world.”¹

—Ben Higdon

1 Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Seabury Press, 1979) 267-268.

2 Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan. The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem (HarperOne: San Francisco, 2007) 91.