Journey to the Cross
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
No season of the church year invites our assemblies into a journey more than the forty-day season of Lent. Our preachers, in their Lenten homilies, are like guides giving regular talks to a group making their way through the wilderness together.
What is the Lenten journey? One compelling description comes from the text of the Ash Wednesday Invitation to Lent (see ELW Leaders Edition, p. 617). It beautifully sets out the goal of the journey that God has established from the beginning: “We are created to experience joy in communion with God, to love one another, and to live in harmony with creation.” On our journey to this renewed Edenic promised land, we travel in a way that “contends against evil and resists whatever leads us away from love of God and neighbor.” Lent is “our journey through these forty days to the great Three Days of Jesus’ death and resurrection.”
Of course, our journey into Jesus’ death and resurrection is also the journey of baptism into Christ. One way of understanding the origins of Lent is as the young church’s most extensive new-member program: a forty-day journey to the waters of baptism at Easter, with the seven weeks of the Easter season being a time to explore and dwell in the garden of resurrection, and Pentecost sealing the journey with the fiery celebration of the Spirit dancing above the head of each of the newly baptized.
Every year we are guided in the wilderness journey of Lent. What is unique about this year? In years A and B, the Lenten lectionary is mostly Johannine. Aside from the first Sunday in Lent, which is always a synoptic account of the testing of Jesus, all the other gospel readings during the Sundays of Lent in year A are from the fourth gospel, and year B includes only one additional synoptic reading. This makes year C—with four of the five Sunday gospels coming from Luke—an opportunity to follow a distinctively Lukan approach to Lent. The unique Lukan pericopes in year C can be seen as celebrating the persistence of God’s mercy despite stubborn obstacles: in the face of threats from Herod and the religious authorities (Lent 2); surrounded by the disorienting rubble of catastrophes (Lent 3); and in the wake of estrangement, sin, and jealousy (Lent 4). In the fifth week of Lent, Jesus himself receives the gift of anointing through the persistence of Mary of Bethany, who perseveres in her gift-giving despite Judas’s attempt to shame her. The persistence of God’s mercy comes to its most profound expression in the passion reading from Luke on Palm/Passion Sunday, in which Jesus’ final utterance to another person before he dies is a word of mercy and promise spoken to a convicted criminal.
Those seeking to examine the baptismal life receive a gift from this year’s Lenten calendar: a series of commemorations of remarkable saints unfolding each week, with many of their commemoration dates falling on Mondays, as if to lead us into our baptismal vocations during the week. As Jesus finds his way through the wilderness on the first week of Lent, we remember the ministries of African American renewers of society Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, who themselves led others through wilderness and testing. Others who lead us through the forty-day wilderness of Lent include St. Patrick of Ireland, commemorated on Monday of Lent 2; Oscar Romero of El Salvador, commemorated on Monday of Lent 3; mystical poet John Donne of England, commemorated on Monday of Lent 4; and in the week of Lent 5, several German artists and an activist-theologian: Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Lent poses the question, “What does the baptismal life look like?” This international line-up of fascinating and famous saints could stir our vocational imaginations each week during this baptismal season. Review their biographies in sources such as Keeping Time: The Church’s Years by Gail Ramshaw and Mons Teig (Augsburg Fortress, 2009), More Days for Praise: Festivals and Commemorations in Evangelical Lutheran Worship by Gail Ramshaw (Augsburg Fortress, 2016), and All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time by Robert Ellsberg (Crossroad, 1997).
Now that the alleluias are buried, attention turns to repentance and reflection. The wonder of Epiphany makes way for the uncertainty of the wilderness. We slow down to allow lament to expand, to take up space during the season of Lent. Allow—even welcome—the realities of struggle and pain in life. As human beings, it is important and healthy that we recognize the weight of the heartbreaking aspects of life. How do you acknowledge lament and difficulty that already exist rather than adding a sense of guilt or self-flagellation to the season? Beginning with the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, we recognize that we will one day die and that, throughout our lives, things we love and value die regularly as well: relationships, hopes, dreams, capabilities, ways of being. Degradation of the planet through human disregard has brought about widespread climate grief. These can all lead to a worn-down feeling of weariness.
Remember that it’s okay to keep things small and humble during Lent. One way to honor hard experiences is to write griefs and concerns on folded pieces of paper “in secret,” just as we are told to pray in secret, knowing that God sees what we do, even when our griefs or pains are not known or shared more publicly. In this way, the griefs and difficulties can be honored even while keeping their details private.
Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, we are daily tempted to seek our own esteem at high cost to our true calling as beloved children of God. As Jesus was famished after his fast, so might we find ourselves after slogging through an economic system that demands that we never stop producing or consuming. We may be exhausted due to the lies of commercialism, which tell us to throw ourselves down into despair about our outward appearance or how insufficiently wealthy we are and that only products we purchase will provide us with relief.
Make space within the lament of the season to honor others who have also traveled through wilderness. Monday, March 10, is the day in the church calendar for remembering Harriet Tubman, who, like Jesus, answered a divine calling, operating outside the law of the day to offer freedom to others who were enslaved within an evil system. Bring her image or name into your mind to remember that even after a person’s death, their legacy may continue to offer hope in a weary time and inspiration for liberation.
By allowing space for lament and mourning, we honor the gift of tears—the movement of water through our bodies as designed by the One who loves and sustains us through all our laments.
From sundaysandseasons.com.
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