Lent Message 2012
I
greet you at the beginning of Lent.
In this year
I’m going to invite you to think about the ancient traditions of preparing in
solidarity with candidates for baptism, to think about the old disciplines of
prayer and fasting and alms-giving and study, through the focus on those beyond
our communities, in the developing world, who live in abject poverty.
I invite you
to use the Millennium Development Goals as your focus for Lenten study and discipline
and prayer and fasting this year. I’m going to remind you that the
Millennium Development Goals are about healing the worst of the world’s hunger.
They’re about seeing that all children get access to primary education.
They’re about empowering women. They’re about attending to issues of maternal
health and child mortality. They’re about attending to issues of communicable
disease like AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. They’re about environmentally
sustainable development, seeing that people have access to clean water and
sanitation and that the conditions in slums are alleviated. And finally,
they are about aid, foreign aid. They’re about trade relationships, and
they’re about building partnerships for sustainable development in this world.
As you pray
through the forty days of Lent, I encourage you to attend to the needs of those
with the least around the world. I would invite you to study, both about
how human beings live in other parts of the world and our own responsibility as
Christians.
What the
Bible says more often than anything else is to tend to the needs of the widows
and orphans, those without. Jesus himself says, “Care for the least of
these.”
I invite you
to consider your alms-giving discipline this Lent and remember those in the developing
world who go without.
I wish you a
blessed Lent and a joyful resurrection at the end of it that may be shared with
others around the world.
God bless
you.
The
Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and
Primate
The Episcopal Church
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