Pastor's Pondering 3/5
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March 6, 2023There is an old saying about how fools rush in where angels fear to tread. I wish I could admit that I were more angelic, but a short assessment of my history would reveal a boatload of foolishness. Having a lack of patience, and a bit of arrogance, without anything to back it up, I have often found myself having to fix problems of my own making. I have also become very good at apologizing for allowing my impatience to get in the way of respecting others. While the wisdom of age has mitigated my rushing in where angels fear to tread, my humanity and my impatience keeps me well acquainted with foolishness.
Over the last couple of weeks, we have encountered passages of scripture that exhort us to be holy as our heavenly Father is holy. One of these gospel passages even tells us that we need to be perfect as God is perfect. For fools like me these exhortations seem overwhelming but nonetheless I give it my best shot. What I often forget is that being holy, being perfect is not a destination but is a journey.
Like all journeys, our way to holiness and perfection takes some planning. While on the journey we need to be able to read the signs, to follow directions, and to avoid making wrong turns or getting off the wrong exit. We cannot rush into our pursuit of holiness and perfection without having an idea of what we are looking for and what finding it will require of us.
So along comes the season of Lent. Forty days that begin in the bleakness of the winter landscape and end as the newness of spring emerges. Because this season is so familiar to us, we may just rush right in. We may just commit to doing what we always do. These traditional disciplines may indeed help us to recenter ourselves on doing the will of God. They may even help us on the journey to holiness and perfection. The danger, however, of doing the same thing over and over is that while we may expect different results, we often discover that we have not progressed very far from where we started.
Taking time during this season to “take time” seems so obvious but is often lost in our desire to have the best Lent ever. We forget that Lent is modeled after Jesus’s forty days in the desert. Forty days of desert quiet, of no distractions, of prayer, of contemplation. After forty days, we are told, that Jesus was hungry. Certainly, hungry for nutrition, but perhaps also hungry to fulfill the work of the Father. Hungry to love, to forgive, to heal, to comfort and console, to reveal the kingdom of God. Ultimately Jesus’s time in the desert prepared him to reveal to his disciples, then and now, the way to holiness.
Along with doing what we have always done, perhaps this year we can follow the lead of Jesus and concentrate on heading into the desert. We can do this by deliberately disconnecting from social media, by quieting our phones, by turning off the television. We can enter the desert of Lent by intentionally identifying distractions that keep us from making the way to holiness our priority. We can, indeed, avoid the temptation to be ordinary by allowing ourselves to grow hungry for mercy, for grace, for love that are such an important part of our intimate relationship with God.
We cannot foolishly rush into the season of Lent all the while thinking the sooner, we get in the sooner we can get out. We also cannot fear to follow the desert experience of Jesus. Instead, we need to embrace this season as a time, perhaps a difficult time, of purification and reconciliation. We need to see this season as an opportunity to restore our dignity and restore ourselves to the path of righteousness. Put another way, if we do well the desert journey of Lent, we may very well be able to escape our foolishness and boldly go where the angels are.
