“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Matthew 22:37-38 NRSV

 “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” Philippians 2:3 NRSV

We might think of the Christian life as a reorientation of ourselves around our Savior. The world we are born into is disoriented away from Christ—therefore our desires, our money, our use of creation, our (mis)understandings of race, sex, and gender, and our relationships to our neighbors must be turned toward God, with God’s help. 

Our baptismal covenant asks us to promise, with God at our aid, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, thus loving our neighbors as ourselves. The true spirit of this promise is humbling. It disallows any attitude of noblesse oblige—the presumption that we, as privileged members of Christ’s body, ought to love those who, unlike us, are not privileged and enlightened. 

Rather, we are asked to promise to seek and serve Christ in our fellow sinners. We are to seek and serve Christ in those whose behavior during the current pandemic concerns or irritates us. We are to seek and serve Christ in those whose political attitudes appear repugnant, even dangerous, to us. We are to seek and serve Christ in those who are bigoted, prudish, homophobic, anti-transgender, uncaringly promiscuous, self-centered, and in those who would never seek and serve Christ in us. We promise to do this, not to affirm bad behavior, but because it is only by our cooperation with the cleansing love of God that evil is overcome. 

We are asked to actively seek out the fingerprint of our creator and savior in all our neighbors, and then love and serve them as God’s beloved creation. Lent is a time in which we are asked to do all sorts of impossible things that we cannot do—and yet, we will, with God’s help.