We find faith when the questions we ask exceed the answers we have. Welcome to Ash Wednesday, the annual starting point of the season of Lent. Traditionally we follow the example of Christ and meditate for forty days and nights, preparing ourselves for the heartbreak and joy of Easter. Forty days and nights to contemplate Jesus’s trial in the wilderness, where he overcame all temptations and emerged ready for his brief but impactful ministry on Earth. But in this year that feels different than all years, as we return to the wilderness, it might feel like we never left.
Last year, when the pandemic became real and churches transitioned from in-person to online worship, Lent ended without the usual fanfare and celebration. Without the ability to gather for Easter, to celebrate Jesus’s triumphant resurrection, there was not a clear ending to Lent. It was as if it never ended. Did it end? If we experience Lent as a time of solemn meditation and sacrifice, a period that anticipates the pain and grief before the Resurrection, it would be easy to mistake the last year for an extended Lent. In past Lents, it might have seemed sufficient to give up caffeine, alcohol, fast food, sugar, or any other significant temptation to feel more in tune with Jesus’s trial in the wilderness. Yet, last year’s Lent demanded greater sacrifices than we could have anticipated or would have been willing to make. Who would have thought that companionship, hugs, handshakes, dining in, in-person worship, singing, and all things that used to be defaults would become sacrifices. Now that a year has gone by and we have returned to Lent, it is fair to ask, “what more can we give up?”
Before the pandemic, it was possible to have forty days and nights of sacrifice and self-reflection because we lived in a liturgical cycle, an endless repetition of celebrations and prayers to follow and reflect on the life and ministry of Christ and his disciples. But what do we do when time stops? When Covid became real, the calendar moved on, but we didn’t. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and seasons have come and gone but, without the ability to gather with friends, neighbors, and loved ones, it is easy to ask, “did they really happen?” But maybe this departure from cycles was necessary to appreciate the power of each moment. After all, Jesus only lived each event once.
Jesus lived a life, not a liturgical cycle. Each event we gather to celebrate or observe recognizes steps Christ took in fulfillment of a predestined path, a call to live a more perfect life than any other so that we all might live when he died. For Jesus, forty days and forty nights in the wilderness was sufficient. Before he began his ministry Jesus endured harrowing days and nights without food or water, pursued by Satan at every turn, all to see whether or not he could live up to his name and be worthy of the ministry he was called to pursue. But what about us? According to the calendar we do Lent and Easter every year. But what if that is not how we are supposed to look at it? Maybe this life is something like Groundhogs Day where, unlike Jesus’s one life, we retrace Jesus’s steps each year in the hopes that we might trip less, might lose our way less as we walk a path between Heaven and Earth. Maybe Lent does not end until we are at the end.
The idea of a never-ending Lent is not a pleasant one. Out of all the times in Jesus’s life to emulate, the forty days and nights in the wilderness is one of the loneliest and hardest to follow. After all, Jesus wandered alone, tempted at every turn with whatever he would desire as long as he would abandon his faith. Fortunately, although our endless Lent is fraught with the same doubt, loneliness, hunger, temptation, and pain that Jesus experienced, we are not alone. We are never alone.
In this church of the wilderness, the crossroad where all God’s children meet, we have to look around us and reach out for the “other,” because that is where we will find God. When we are hurting, lost, disillusioned, angry, or grieving, it is human to ask, “where is God in this?” “Why is this happening?” hoping for answers that will soften the loss of loved ones, make injustice less hideous, give purpose to suffering. The questions come easily, but the answers feel cheap, naïve, or less sufficient than the honest admission of “I don’t know.” Yet, in the admission of “I don’t know,” faith and community grow.
Although hope, love, and faith are easy targets of cynics, they are the only food that feeds the soul when there is nothing left to thrive on. As we wander in the wilderness, hungry for meaning, acceptance, security, freedom, purpose, everything other than God and the community of the neighbor falls short. Through faith, we can follow Christ to one another so that we all might find joy, peace, and love in life and find hope to live on, rather than hope for an end. We cannot escape the pains that afflict us in life, the loss of loved ones, afflictions, and injustice but we can control how we respond to them.
In the face of political polarization, distrust of science, economic inequality, social injustice, and hundreds of thousands lost to a virus we can follow the example of Christ and avoid the temptations to harden our hearts, seize power, and cloak ourselves in security, and instead go out living our ministry, no matter what ills, persecution, or injustice might befall us.
As children of God, gathered in communities to weather the storms of life, we can be enough because God is enough. If Christ died so that we might live, we find life in pursuing that which Christ died for, a belief that no one was too wretched or lost to be unworthy of love or redemption, a belief that we could be forgiven for and not defined by our sins and selfishness. We know not the lengths of our days or what comes next but when we put our faith in God, follow Christ, and trust that love of one another is more sustaining than fear, doubt, and faith, we find life, even though we never left the wilderness.
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