In our religious discourse and in our Prayer Book we often describe Lent as a “Penitential season”. Advent is often described this way too, though some like to argue that it is not, or is less penitential than Lent. In any case, what I want to explore today is “what is a penitential season?”

Penitence is a posture and set of acts that express sorrow for sin, doing penance, pursuing holiness and healing in the wake of repentance from wrongdoing. A penitential season, therefore, is a period of time in which someone (or more usually the whole church) engages in this with a defined beginning and end.

What easily gets lost in the mix is that, if we are (or if one is) to have a set time of penitence, there must first be a time of self-examination culminating in a confession or act of contrition or resolution to make amends. After all, there’s little use in expressing sorrow for sin one hasn’t yet identified, in doing penance without being assigned any by a confessor, in pursuing healing before the medicine has been prescribed. In short: a “Penitential Season” needs a “Self-Examination Season” to come first, otherwise the penitential season is just glorified gloominess.

Too often, this is how we approach Lent. We come into the season and remember “oh yes, this is the time to think extra hard about my sins and what I can give up and how to be a better Christian and grow closer to Jesus. And I guess I’m not supposed to Alleluia in the worship service for six weeks because I’m supposed to be sad in church or something.” This jumble, while well-intentioned and technically correct, does not reflect wise preparation and lacks the insight and aid of church tradition.

In the old calendar, before the 1970’s, the season of Lent was preceded by three Sundays, called “Pre-Lent” or the “Gesima Sundays” after their Latin names: Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima. However we name or label them, the themes of the readings through these days pointed the congregation toward questions of self-reflection and examination. The traditional practice was that by the end of this period everyone would make their confession to the priest (typically on Shrove Tuesday) so that on the next day (Ash Wednesday) everyone would be ready to worship the Lord in a unified act of penitence, and enter into the season of Lent with an actual plan or intention for increased spiritual discipline.

The modern calendar has, sadly, done away with this valuable period of reflection, and many preachers who serve in churches that do retain the Pre-Lent Sundays don’t always take proper advantage of those weeks to prepare people for their Lenten observance.

However, the attentive preacher can still find fodder for preparing people for Lent in the modern calendar and lectionary. In Year A of the three-year cycle the Gospel lessons through the season of Epiphany walk through portions of the Sermon on the Mount (mostly from Matthew 5). Our Lord’s teachings on holiness in these passages provide excellent material for self-examination in the final weeks before the season of Lent begins. That is what I strove to do in the past three weeks before writing this. In Year B the readings offer fewer obvious aids to this theme, but it must be noted that on the 6th Sunday of Epiphany the epistle lesson is 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 which happens to be the traditional Epistle for the first of the three Pre-Lent Sundays! In Year C, if the Epiphany season is long enough, its Gospel readings also reach Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount in chapter 6. And those are just the obvious lectionary opportunities; an attentive preacher will be able to prepare the congregation for Lent appropriately with nearly any biblical text at hand.