1. Trinity – Paying attention in Lent
In the sobering stillness of Lent, we surrender our busyness and preconceived ideas and open ourselves up to being surprised and changed by God’s love. We practice paying attention. We may find ourselves led down paths we didn’t expect — right to our own wildernesses. And as we are loved through our discomfort, we see the work God is doing in the world to bring about justice and peace, and we become part of that work. In letting go, we make room for new life, even in the most inhospitable of places.
Who knows where God will send us — beloved and driven by the Spirit — to help heal our broken world?
2. Beasts and Angels
Debi Thomas
As I reflect on Mark’s version of the story, three details stand out to me:
First, Jesus didn’t choose the wilderness. He didn’t schedule a National Geographic expedition, or plan a desert marathon to improve his cardiovascular fitness. The Spirit of God “drove” him, compelled him, forced him, into the desolation of a wild and unsafe place. Jesus didn’t want to go, and it is very possible he resisted. But the Spirit drove him, anyway.
Maybe it’s strange that I find this detail comforting, but I do. Why? Because it rings true to life. Most of the time, we don’t choose to enter the wilderness. We don’t volunteer for pain, loss, danger, or terror. But the wilderness happens, anyway. Whether it comes to us in the guise of a devastating pandemic, a frightening hospital stay, a broken relationship, a hurting child, or a loss of faith, the wilderness appears, unbidden and unwelcome, at our doorsteps. And sometimes it is God’s own Spirit who drives us there.
Does this mean that God wills bad things to happen to us? That God wants us to suffer? No. Does it mean that God is ready to teach, shape, and redeem us even during the most barren periods of our lives? Yes. In the startling economy of God, even a dangerous desert can become holy. Even our wilderness wanderings can reveal the divine. This is not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a chaotic, fragile, and broken world that includes deserts, and because God’s modus operandi is to take the things of shadow and death, and wring from them resurrection.
Second, our wilderness journeys sometimes last a long while.
Maybe, we need to ask a harder question: why did Jesus need the wilderness? Why do we?
Mark’s story begins with an account of Jesus’s baptism. When Jesus rose from the waters of the Jordan River, the heavens tore open, and God announced Jesus’s identity loud and clear: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
But what happened to that certain sense of identity and belonging as Jesus’s wilderness wanderings stretched into week two, week three, week four? Did it waver? Did the Son of God have to keep reminding himself of who he was? Did he have hours, or days, or weeks, when he forgot?
If those forty days in the wilderness was a time of self-creation, a time for Jesus to decide who he was and how he would live out his calling, then here is what the Son of God chose: deprivation over power. Vulnerability over rescue. Obscurity over honor. At every instance in which he could have reached for the certain, the extraordinary, and the miraculous, he reached instead for the precarious, the quiet, and the mundane.
Third, there were angels in the wilderness. Even in the land of shadow and starvation, even in the place where the wild beasts roamed, God’s agents of love and care lingered. This, too, is a startling and comforting truth — one we can recognize if we open our eyes and take a good look around. Even in the grimmest places, God abides, and somehow, without reason or explanation, help comes. Rest comes. Solace comes. Granted, our angels don’t always appear in the forms we prefer, but they come.
3. A Is for Alleluia
When I was a small boy, the talk in the class was what you were giving up for Lent — crisps, or lemonade, or, for the radically committed, sweets. Last Tuesday, eating pancakes and lemons, some friends discussed what to give up. We were all agreed: Lent is less for giving up, and more for making space.
We make space to contemplate what it is that we will celebrate in 40 days’ time. We make space to recognise our faults. We pray a little more. We allow our emptier stomachs to remind us of the pithiness of our observations in comparison with real hunger. We give more money. We confess. We reconcile. We listen to emptiness for a while. We do not say Alleluia.
4. Shame-freeing Lent: Stories & Practices for Liberating Lenten Formation –
Jodi Belcher
I do not believe that the Lenten journey should be a shaming one. I believe that the invitation into a holy Lent is an invitation into a shame-freeing Lent. While Lent is not devoid of shame, this season provides several liberating ways of dealing with shame.
In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” It is an emotion that is part of being human, Brown indicates, but one that can compel us to turn against ourselves or our neighbors in an effort to alleviate rejection, isolation, and estrangement. Brown describes shame as a “social emotion” that needs “empathy” and “compassion” to loosen its grip and debunk its untruths when we would rather hide, bury, and not breathe a word of it to another soul.
We don’t have to look far in Lenten traditions to find sites where shame stories can flare up. Human sinfulness is writ large in the Ash Wednesday liturgy as well as in the call to practice Lenten disciplines in The Book of Common Prayer. It seeps into the imposition of ashes as they symbolize “penitence” (p. 265). It swells in the lengthy “Litany of Penitence” for numerous actions, behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that we are instructed to name as sins and claim as “our own fault” (p. 267). The vision of God that appears near the end of this litany is one characterized by “anger” at us for these sins (p. 268) and whom we should seek to “please” with “pure and holy” lives (p. 269). The disciplines prescribed for “a holy Lent” combine “repentance” with “self-examination” and the complicated idea of “self-denial” (p. 265).
How might we let go of stories of a shaming God and of shame-inducing practices in the Lenten season? How might we experience a shame-freeing Lent instead? I see three key sites in our Lenten tradition where we find stories and practices that can meet us in shame and dispel its power: Jesus’s death and resurrection, baptism, and reconciliation.
1. Jesus>’s Story: A Counternarrative to Shame
In Jesus’s resurrection, we find a God who unravels the shame of the crucifixion by issuing a resounding “No” to the Roman imperial condemnation and dehumanization of Jesus
2 Baptism into a Body: Shame Stories Overturned
The second key focal point of Lent that the Ash Wednesday liturgy identifies is “prepar[ation] for Holy Baptism” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 265). Baptism incorporates us into the body of Christ, as Paul indicates in I Corinthians 12:13, and being part of this body transforms every member’s relationship to shame.
Baptism reminds us that we are not alone as members of this body. It shows us that shame is no barrier for God or for inclusion in this body. It also calls us to be a body that continually includes new members and overturns shame stories in the community and in the social order.
3. Reconciliation: Restoring rather than Shaming
A third focal point of Lent mentioned in the Ash Wednesday liturgy is “reconcil[iation]” among church members (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 265). Because reconciliation in the body of Christ aims at “restor[ing] . . . fellowship,” it is a process that runs counter to shaming.
Reconciliation practiced well creates space for addressing sin and repairing relationships within the community so that members can meet one another in sites of shame with compassion and empathy