LENTEN LETTER 2024

 

Ash Wednesday, February 14th, 2024

Dear Friends and Faithful, 

Greetings in the Precious Name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Lent has begun! Blessed fast in preparation for the glorious Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, on this coming Easter! 

Over the last two thousand years, Christ’s Church has developed the tradition of fasting for 40 days, to imitate Christ in the desert and to harden our wills to suffering and persecution, as we expect martyrdom for the sake of Christ and His Coming Kingdom. In the East, the Lenten fast developed as a completely meatless fast for fifty days. In the Western tradition of pastoral and optional fasting, the tradition developed into one mandatory black fast (skipping meals) a week - on Friday - and a recommendation to eat only one large meal and two small meals of vegetarian food on the other days of the week, excluding Sunday. Monks and healthy laymen could undertake a true askesis by black fasting on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The old maxim for fasting follows the law of moderation: “All may, some should, none must.” We try our best to honor God with fasting and prayer, mindful that we are not impressing Him, but repenting and submitting to His holiness, love, truth and justice. 

In a world of weight-loss and intermittent fasting, we now know that this regimen is extremely healthy, enabling us to renew our immune systems and reverse the negative effects of aging. Spiritually, as well as physically, this is exactly what happens. Fasting helps us to strip off our negative habits and sinful selves, and renew our memory of the waters of Baptism, in which we put on Christ and are renewed forever in the finished Work of Christ. It is hard to abstain from meat on fast days, from bad habits of overeating, abuse of our bodies, and eating for boredom and entertainment, but this aspect of Christian life, learning to deny self, and offering up our abstinence as a sacrifice to God, and asking Him to help us learn to turn our struggles back to Him in faithfulness an love, is one of the most helpful things about our experience of Church Life. 

Remember that it is our practice in the Missionary Diocese of East and Southeast Asia to replace the Nine-Fold Kyrie and the Gloria at the beginning of our liturgies with the ancient lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian. This is accompanied with kneeling and putting our faces to the floor, truly humbling ourselves for our sins and imploring God’s mercy upon ourselves, our congregations and upon our nations:

Priest: The Lord be with you!

People: And with thy spirit!

Priest: Let us kneel with our faces to the ground before Almighty God!

Priest: O Lord and Master of our lives, take from us the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk. 

People: Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy!

Priest: But give us rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servants. 

People: Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy!

All: Yea, O Lord and King, grant us to see our own transgressions, and not to judge our brothers and sisters, for blessed art Thou, O Lord, world without end. Amen.

I pray that God would help us all to have a profitable and sanctifying fast this Lent. That we would take time to be silent before God, to hear His Voice, and to follow His Commands. That we would repent of our pride, lust, anger and deceit, and rededicate our lives to Christ and His service. The Lord has much that He wishes to accomplish through us, if we will just submit ourselves to Him, obey Him, and humble ourselves before our brothers and sisters. This Lent, we pray that we would be reconciled to all other Orthodox and Apostolic Christians of good will with whom we share a common faith, and to set ourselves aright with all those who call upon the Name of the Lord. May God grant us true repentance, reconciliation and holiness of  life! Amen.

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, 

Bp. Joseph

Ordinary of the Missionary Diocese of East and Southeast Asia