Lenten purity: it isn’t what you were told
Lent begins today, a season in the Christian calendar dedicated to purification and to preparation for Easter. As one church describes the season on their website: “Year after year, the Church wisely offers a specific time for purifying our innermost desires.”
Because “purifying our innermost desires” sounds…vaguely sexual, it’s got me thinking about what purification means.
A few months ago, I ended a blog post by paraphrasing James 1:27. I wrote: “True Christianity, as [Jesus’s] brother wrote, is this: to care for those at the margins.”
Predictably, some folks were big mad that I didn’t quote the entire verse.
If you’re familiar with James 1:27, you know there’s a tiny bit of merit to that accusation—it’s true that I stopped before the end. The complete injunction from Jesus’s brother reads:
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
By focusing on the first requirement — looking after the marginalized in their distress — the angry email man seems to imply that I’m intentionally downplaying an important call to purity, to righteousness.
