We are as used to customizing our devotions as we are with all the other options in our lives. The Episcopal Church long ago took due note of that, and makes generous and loving space for variation and individual choice. So accommodating however, that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that the Episcopal Church is not issuing carte blanche for you to live out your Christian lives as you and you alone see fit. The Church gives wide latitude for personalizing her eternal message.

But the Church is not quite so indulgent when it comes to Lent. We tend to fashion the Lent that is right for us, so we think, the Lent that will be the most helpful to us, so we intend, the Lent that is made for me and my circumstances, so we assume. Then, this night reminds us without the possibility of misinterpretation, that our Church, so grandly and rightly permissive is not as ambiguous as usual, in prescribing what goes into a Holy Lent. You may adapt all of this to your own needs and talents, but the Church intends you to touch on all of these points in your Lenten preparation, not just your favorite ones or the easy ones. Somehow all of this has to be part of your Lenten discipline: self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and reading and meditating on God's Holy Word. Six things in six weeks.

Beyond these straightforward marching orders, issued with no ambiguity, there is a suggestion, an implicit and subtle guide to what else we ought to consider this Lent. During the Litany of Penitence and Repentance, we will confess the whole range of human sin, and the church is quietly but decisively assuming we are guilty in some fashion of most of them, if not all. Read the list, and match the sin in your life to the categories mentioned. You should be able to come up with at least one in each instance. Do it if you want, do it if you dare. But there seems no escape from this basic, stripped down, bedrock foundation for a Holy Lent. The Church issues in her Prayer Book this night what she rather coyly calls an Invitation.

The Church's Invitation to a Holy Lent, which we will shortly hear, expands that a bit and suggests adding self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and serious faithful, contemplative, regular reading of the Bible. Not slim volumes about the Bible, just the plain old Bible itself.

I don't know what your plans are for this Lent, you do not know mine - they are private and unannounced usually, bragging about them or displaying them to reap acclaimed or admiration is what the Gospel tonight forbids. If the details are a secret it is no secret from the Church's point of view of just what needs to go into those individual preparations

The Church is expecting us, not vaguely hoping, not discretely suggesting, the Church is expecting us to undertake serious, regular, thoughtful, wise attentive, contemplative Bible reading - for the next six weeks.

The Church is expecting us to fast. Not to undertake a long-delayed weight-loss program, not stay away from those non-nourishing food additives we been warned about, not to overhaul unhealthy eating habits, no, the Church is expecting us to fast from time to time over the next six weeks. We are not talking about spiritual fasts or equivalent fasts or virtual fasts. The Church expects us not to eat something we otherwise would, and will again once Easter arrives. That can be one item we give up completely, or a meal from time to time, or a recurring day of the week set aside for a genuinely frugal meal. We sometimes, fudge, so to speak, about what the word fast means, but lets face it, it's a very simple word, we know what it means, it has a long and honorable and helpful history in all forms of spiritual progress. The Church expects us to make use of this tool during Lent.

The Church expects us to pray, not just ask others to pray for us, not just to phone in prayer requests to the parish, though all of that is good, but beyond all of that in addition to all of that the Church this Lent expects us to pray, to pray profoundly and deeply: for ourselves, for those we love for those we hate, for those in the world around us for those no longer in this mortal world at all, for the departed. And the Church expects us to do that regularly, systematically, faithfully, repetitively, recurringly, intentionally, deliberately. To pray. I don't mean to seem to be suggesting that this is news to you, that praying is something you might not have though about, it is rather that I think the Church is summoning us to re-invigorated prayer. The Church expects an unusual intensity to our prayers in Lent.

The Church expects us to examine our lives, not glance at them, not psycho-analyze them, not redecorate them or pump them up, or nurture them, but to examine our lives. Examine. That word has such connotations of precision, detailed thoroughness. One has perhaps the image of a careful and astute scientist looking through a powerful microscope under well-lighted conditions. Examining. One thinks of a doctor carefully, precisely, knowledgeably examining us to see if there is some hidden disease or some worse injury than we already know of. That is what the Church wants you to do with your spiritual life over the next forty days. Examine it. Precisely, thoroughly, clinically.

And finally, the Church expects you to deny yourself. Not just willy-nilly, random denial, to prove it can be done. To deny yourself for a reason and for a greater good. We are to do this for something, for someone. I think the Church assumes we have read tonight's Gospel from Matthew. Deny yourself something you want so that you will have the wherewithal to offer something to someone else. Matthew wants us to give alms. The Church would have us create those alms, provide for those alms we are to give, by denying ourselves incidentals and luxuries in order to furnish others with the basics.

An ambitious program, a demanding program, the Church it seems to me, expects a lot of us. We certainly can't keep that up for long, but for forty days, for six weeks? I think so. The Church has always thought so.