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Every year of my life, Lent has marked a time of giving up extras, being a bit more austere, and considering my mortality. This year is different. Most of us have been doing without extras for almost 12 months – including things we didn’t think were extras, like human touch. 

So what does it mean to enter Lent at a time of pandemic and winter storm? What does it mean to give something up when we’ve already given up so much, even heat and water? What does it mean to start considering our mortality when that thought has been simmering under all our daily tasks and interactions for so long?

It might be right this year to think of Lent from a different perspective. I am sure we all have plenty to be penitent about and we will – today and throughout the season – pray for the forgiveness of our sins. Yet, Lent is above all else a season of preparation. Preparation for Easter. We are entering a time of getting our hearts and minds and relationships ready to hear and accept the good news of Christ’s resurrection. There is always good news on the other side of sin and suffering. 

I invite you to observe Lent in any way that gets you to Easter! The ashes we typically use on this day to remind us of mortality are not a requirement of our faith. They are a tool. This Ash Wednesday, we have other elements right in front of us that point to that mortality and also toward the coming celebration of life and resurrection. 

Many of us are now looking at a landscape coated in snow and ice, which will melt and be replaced in time by new life. That is a great Lenten image of renewal and growth.

All of us have been isolated from one another for months, yet we hope for regathering to start again soon. That is a hopeful Lenten image of reconciliation and community. 

During this Lent, even with a pandemic and a winter storm, we will still be preparing for Easter and all it means to us as Christians. Like the first Christians, we can prepare for baptism or the renewal of our vows. Like Christians in every age, we can use this time to ready ourselves for reconciling and reconnecting with those who have been made distant from us, whether by choice or circumstance. 

In the darkest of times – and our Christian sisters and brothers around the world and across time have had many dark times – Christ is still a light for us. 

My hope for all of us is that this Lent, like all those that came before it, will be a time when each of us individually and all of us together can grow in faith, 
renew ourselves through penitence and study, 
reflect on God’s goodness, 
show generosity toward our sisters and brothers who are suffering…
…and through this prepare to greet once again a glorious Easter. 

Jonah might be a prophet for our time. A reluctant believer called to a task he resents, his story includes some of the tensions we – or at least I – see in the culture all around me, and sometimes in my own heart.

In brief the story of Jonah goes like this:
God tells Jonah to go preach to Nineveh, a great city that is the center of power in the
Assyrian Empire. God tells Jonah to cry out against their wickedness. But Jonah says “no.”
He flees and tries to escape God by sailing away. But you can’t escape God, who sends a
storm that threatens to overwhelm the ship Jonah is on. Everyone on board prays to their
own gods for safety and they come to believe, correctly, that someone on the ship has
incurred this storm by angering heaven. Jonah admits it’s him and tells them. “Toss me
overboard.” As soon as he hits the water the sea is calm. Experiencing all this, the Gentile
sailors on the ship turn to Jonah’s God. 

But Jonah is still having problems with his God, who sends a huge fish to swallow him.
Some people need to hit bottom before they turn away from their errors – and being in the
belly of a fish is certainly pretty low. While he is there, he has a change of heart and sings a
song of thanksgiving to God. On the third day, the fish vomits him up on the beach. 

God tells Jonah again. “Preach to Nineveh” and this time, Jonah goes. His message is short
and simple, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” He doesn’t even mention
God’s name. And yet the whole city is moved to repent – they even make their animals don
sack cloth and repent! Their hearts are changed and, watching them, God’s heart is
changed. God does not destroy the city. 

Jonah is not happy. It is not until this point that we find out why Jonah didn’t want to go to
the people of Nineveh: he didn’t want them to change. He didn’t want this city and these
people – these outsiders – to hear God’s call and repent. He tells God, “I know you are
merciful (indeed he’s experienced it first hand) and ready to relent from punishing!” Jonah
wanted the city to be destroyed – because it was foreign, because its people had been
sinful and cruel. The people of Nineveh worshiped other gods and were enemies of Jonah’s
people. He thought they didn’t deserve a chance. 

And yet, deep down he knew that the outcome he wanted was not in line with the God who
called and chased him. 

Reading this story, I have to wonder, what kind of prophet this is? He refuses to listen to God, tries to run away, and is resentful when things go God’s way. There are a lot of reluctant messengers in the Bible – Moses and Jeremiah to name two – but Jonah takes it to a whole new level. At the end of the story, he says he’d rather die than live with the consequences of God’s mercy on the people of Nineveh. Who thinks this way? And why would God call someone like that?

There’s a lot we can learn from this story, and some of the key lessons are about who God is. 

This story illustrates God’s mercy to those who have sinned greatly – including both Nineveh and Jonah. We see God’s persistence in calling Jonah and following him despite Jonah’s many attempts to run away or hide. God is revealed in this story to be responsive to humanity – in this story God changes God’s mind! We see the universality of God’s salvation extending beyond Jonah and his people to their enemies.  

The story also illustrates human nature. Our habit of assuming that our understanding of God is accurate and complete. Our tendency to put people into categories of US and THEM – with God always on the side of US. Our certainty that God’s judgments and preferences align exactly with our own.  

This story is a caution because Jonah is an exemplary believer… up until God actually calls on him. Jonah is committed to serving God right up to the moment he must extend his faith outside of his feelings and beliefs and into action. The idea that he might have to live out his faith was a deal breaker for Jonah. 

Why would God choose a prophet like this? Certainly, the city of Nineveh needed an intervention; they are described by their own king as evil and violent. And Jonah’s prophecy, once he actually starts talking, is amazingly effective. The city – all of it – repents immediately and they do it with no promises of forgiveness. If reluctant Jonah can get a result like that, just imagine how it would have gone with a more cooperative prophet! 

It is possible that confronting Nineveh was not the only purpose in this prophetic mission. After all, if telling the people of Nineveh how wicked they were and warning them of impending destruction was the only goal, then God surely could have picked a more expedient path than via ship and fish’s belly. But that is not what God did. 

God called Jonah. 
God called Jonah to preach to people he loathed, to people who offended him and his religion. 
God called Jonah to a mission that was worse than being tossed in the sea and living in a fish’s belly for three days. 
God called Jonah to a task that he carried out half-heartedly with no passion or joy. 

And I wonder if God might be calling you and me in the same way. Most of the time we experience a sense of God calling us through the things we are good at, the things we have a passion for. 
Music, writing, hospitality…public speaking, prayer, teaching…healing, organizing, even managing money. 

Yet it might also be true that God is calling you in a way you don’t expect, 
to use gifts you don’t have, 
to touch people you do not like. 
And even through this strange interaction to save you, as well. 

As we learn from this story, God is persistent. God is responsive and in relationship with us. God loves limitlessly and universally. 

One true thing about God’s mission is: you can join it, but you cannot define it. God’s mission will always go beyond your hopes and expectations. It might even be the case that, like Jonah, you will be called not according to your greatest gifts, but according to your greatest need. Because in the end, the one person in the story who was resisting the voice of God was the only one who believed in God and whom God called directly. It was Jonah—who in his settled, comfortable faith thought he had God all figured out—whom God called. 

It has become almost too common in recent years – and especially recent weeks—to talk about how divided our nation is, and our local communities as well. The divisions are not just political, they are along all sorts of fault lines – including faith. There are calls for both accountability and reunion. Twin longings for vindication and harmony. In this atmosphere, we are tempted to view others as Jonah saw the Ninevites – as enemies undeserving of mercy. As believers who are committed to prayer and a relationship with God, we think we know how God should deal with them. 

And yet, when God calls you, as we are all called in our baptism and as Jesus called his disciples on the shores of Galilee, when God calls you to address divisions and violence and cruelty it might be you God is aiming to save. 

It might be you that God chases when you try to escape. 
It might be you that would rather be tossed into the sea than meet with “those people.”
It might be you that resents the inclusion of people you still can’t see as deserving. 
It might be you whose idea of God is too small. 
I know it might be me. 

In the end, we don’t know what happened to Jonah. God admonished him, reminded him that it isn’t for any of us to resent God’s mercy. And the story ends there as an open question for us. 

If you were Jonah, what would you do?

Here’s some encouragement: No matter how you respond to the call, God’s mission will be accomplished! After all, even Jonah at his least cooperative moments caused the sailors to discover God and brought the Ninevites to repentance. There is not much you can do to stop God’s mission. 

So why respond at all? Maybe because God’s mission involves you in ways you don’t expect. It might be that when God calls you to address the brokenness in the world God is also calling you to mend the brokenness in yourself. That work is as uncomfortable as being in a fish’s belly, and humbling as being vomited up on the beach, and enraging as watching your adversaries forgiven. 

Yet it is necessary. Answering that call will help heal the world and help heal you. 

In a drop of water, millions of molecules hold together by, in part, pushing against each other. This phenomenon is called surface tension. Two things are happening in the water drop at once. 

Water molecules push and pull each other constantly. They hold together because they are all, well, water. Each and every, all of them. 

There is a greater attraction of water to water than water to air or leaf. And where water meets a different material the molecules at that meeting point pull closer to other water molecules than to the air above or the leaf below. They create a surface that pulls in and holds all the water together. 

When two drops of water meet, they join and form a larger drop – water holds to water. 

I noticed drops of water experiencing their tension after a summer rain recently. It got me thinking about all the things that are possible because of this tension. It creates puddles and lakes and oceans. It allows us to float. It is a factor in how plants and animals and soil interact with water to make life possible. 

So this tension is part of what makes life possible. 

It got me thinking about how humans talk about tension in a different way – as painful or objectionable or violent. 

What if we thought about it as the natural consequence of humans pushing and pulling each other constantly and something that can hold us together? 
What if we pulled in close those of us at the surfaces – on the edges and at the margins –  to form a strong, cohesive community? 
What if we welcomed and joined other groups of humans we encountered – just because we are all human? 
And what if our tension – our pushing and pulling – created the possibility of more life? 

Of course, we are not as simple as drops of water. We think and feel and categorize ourselves. 

Too often we treat other people and groups as if they are a completely different substance from us. How can non-sentient water be wiser than we? 

We experience tension as conflict, yet it can also be a creative force, the thing that helps ideas bloom. The thing that makes life possible. 

One of the ways that humans across many cultures and eras describe coming together is in our eating together. Breaking bread is a euphemism for peacemaking. Everything on the table of our peacemaking is possible because of tension. Surface tension, this concept described by physicists, makes possible the grain in the bread. It is the way we are able to pour and share and swallow a drink. We couldn’t even hold hands or say a prayer without that tension. 

There is something that can attract us to each other if we let it. We are all human, each and every, all of us. In my tradition, we say that all humans are created in the image of God. For all our pushing and pulling, there is this essence about us at a cellular level that makes us one, that makes life possible. That makes life. 

Five and a half months into pandemic-style living, I’m seeing a parade of new memes and advice essays about how to cope. First we helped each other adjust to the sudden change to staying at home and avoiding social contact. Then we engaged in the euphoria of possible pandemic projects – Cleaning baseboards! Making sourdough bread! Learning a new language! That phase didn’t last very long. 

A couple of months ago we sent each other reminders to be gentle with ourselves. This thing we are all going through is stressful and it’s okay to be tired and anxious and overwhelmed. You don’t have to clean your baseboards with a q-tip. (Very glad about that advice since I never started.)

Now, we’re having local and national conversations about how to do very familiar things in a totally different way. School. Elections. Even hurricane evacuations. So five and a half months in, there are some new messages and some recycled messages that help us remind each other to have compassion, to be careful with ourselves and with each other. 

Way back in March, I participated in a webinar called The Psychology of Pandemics. The panel included Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist who presciently published a book by that title in October 2019. (Can you imagine?) There were a couple of other psychologists on the panel as well and they had some helpful insights. I recently looked over my notes and it was interesting to see how what I heard in March is looking today. 

The first (and at the time most surprising) message was that the psychological foot print of a pandemic is much bigger than the medical or economic effects. I think we are seeing this all around us. Everything from fear to denial, anxiety to anger, depression to resentment. There is stress when we maintain social distance and stress when we try to gather. It’s a no-win situation. 

One of the predicted psychological reactions has played out all spring and summer: pandemic-related racism. It is a common human characteristic to find someone to blame for hard times; it helps us feel in control of a difficult situation if we can think that it isn’t our fault or the scary things can’t happen to us. This tendency is perhaps one reason that that most of our religious and ethical traditions teach us NOT DO IT. But do it we have. People of Asian descent have been targets of increased fear and anger related to COVID-19. People who are experiencing the disease at greater rates – African Americans and Latinx communities, for example – are blamed for their own vulnerability. Essential workers are stigmatized because of their exposure. (This is on top of the racism that already exists and affects daily life – but that’s for another post.)

The panel for the webinar talked about two opposite reactions that we have seen played out in our neighborhoods and on our TVs. One reaction is monitoring; these folks tend to amplify the threat and look for certainty in ways to protect their health and safety. The other reaction is blunting; these folks tend to minimize threats and ignore emotional appeals to follow safety protocols. It is important to note that both of these reactions are attempts to control an uncontrollable situation. Most of us have a little of both in us; both are expected in a crisis situation like the one we are in. 

I am not qualified to give medical or public health advice, and besides there’s plenty out there if that’s what you want. What I can offer is the observation of a pastor who has felt the stress in my own life and walked (distantly!) with those who are feeling overwhelmed by the changes, pressures, and uncertainty this pandemic has wrought. 

Be patient with yourself and those you encounter. 

Fears for health and safety are stressful and they have been magnified for everyone for an extended period of time – and it isn’t over yet. Change – even positive change – is difficult in the best of times. Schooling your children from home while you are working, having to learn multiple new technology platforms, re-learning familiar tasks like grocery shopping or going to the doctor are stressful all on their own without the compounding factor of disease. 

Even the smallest annoyances or actions might be related to pandemic thinking. A recent list of behaviors related to pandemic and social isolation stress included “doesn’t return/answer messages.” Almost everyone I know who read it was both surprised and relieved to know it wasn’t just them. In the moment, it feels like negligence or laziness – it is, instead, a reaction to being overwhelmed. 

Be patient with yourself and those you encounter. 

Unless you know someone who lived through the 1918 pandemic you won’t know anyone who has been through this before. None of us have been through this before. We can learn from those who have similar experiences – those affected by the AIDS pandemic or the SARS outbreak can teach us about fear and isolation and victim-blaming. For the most part, though, the whole world is building this plane while we are flying it. The lack of knowledge is frightening and leads us to try to fill the void. If leaders in science and government can’t adequately calm our fears, we will look to theories that do. Even if they are false or outlandish or both. Humans hate uncertainty. And yet, we are in an uncertain situation. It’s a hell of a place to be. 

And remember that “those you encounter” now includes virtual encounters. What you “say” can be seen and felt miles away. It can be shared widely. You can send compassion far into the world, or you can send condescension. But it is hard to successfully do both. 

Be patient with yourself and those you encounter. 

Since March, I’ve talked to people who’s faith has been strengthened and those who feel like it is slipping away. Where is God in all this? Whichever camp you fall into, you are not alone. You are not unrealistic to feel closer to God, you are not inadequate to feel abandoned by God. Our spiritual ancestors felt all of these things throughout the centuries and we are feeling them now. 

Be patient with people who are struggling. Be patient with people whose hopefulness seems absurd to you. Struggles and optimism can remind us how much we need each other. Struggles ground us, optimism lifts us. Between the earth and the sky we are all in this messy world together. We are not meant to go it alone. There is a miracle in the ways we have found connection at a time we are physically apart. I believe God is in that connection, the threads holding us together – even when they seem to be fraying. 

I’ve been meaning for a long time to read Evelyn Underhill, the early 20th century English mystic. Mostly, I was intrigued about there being mystics in the 20th and 21st centuries – as if this type of spirituality is restricted to more ancient times. Reading Howard Thurman in seminary cured me of that! And now Evelyn…

Although she wrote multiple books on mysticism and spirituality, I find her letters fascinating and practical. She addressed them to friends and acquaintances who sought her advice when they faced challenges in living out their faith. I tend to imagine mystics living otherworldly lives, detached from the rest of us. But Evelyn’s letters reveal that her spiritual life was pretty down-to-earth.

In April 1939, she wrote to a friend:
“Make up your mind from the first to ignore the ups and downs of the “spiritual climate.” There will be for you as for everyone sunny and cloudy days, long periods of dullness and fog, and sometimes complete darkness, to bear. Accept this with courage as part of the Christian life. Your conversion means giving yourself to God, not having nice religious feelings.”

She reminds this person that what offends you is “religious food and drink” to another.
“Beware of fastidiousness! You are highly sensitive to beauty, and whatever branch of the church you join, there will be plenty of things that offend your taste.”

In another letter, she described what we’d today call self-compassion:
“…don’t be ferocious with yourself because that is treating badly a precious (if imperfect) thing which God has made.”

As World War II was beginning and many were, as we are in our own day, distracted by fear and overwhelmed by uncertainty, she reminds us that “Christ did not come to save us from trouble but to show us how to bear trouble.”

It’s hard most of the time to see the mystical in the efforts it takes to get through the day. Work from home, school from home, masking for every venture out, planning for things that can’t be planned. When trapped in a cycle of very earthy worries, it’s hard to see the heavenly. Underhill reminds us that the heavenly is right here in the midst of the mundane – in fact, the mundane was made in love by the heavenly. As she wrote in a 1937 letter:
“Christianity does mean getting down to actual ordinary life as the medium of the Incarnation, doesn’t it, and our lessons that get sterner, not more elegant, as time goes on?”

From The Letters of Evelyn Underhill

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Today was supposed to have been the last day of SXSW, the annual Austin festival of music, film, tech, and more. The streets and clubs and sidewalks that would have been teeming with hipsters from around the world are empty. We are all in our various homes (those of us lucky enough to have them) hoping to delay viral catastrophe.

I am still thinking about all the songwriters I typically see during this week in my town. Craftspeople who make tapestries with words, who turn air into art. And I was thinking of them when I considered the Psalm we said in virtual worship Sunday – Psalm 23.

Psalms are songs, they use words and music to help us – individually and collectively – express deep human emotion and experience. Even when you say them, the rhythm of the words is musical. They describe a wide range of experiences from agony to joy in a way that helps us feel less lonely in our sometimes angst-ridden humanity. When you hear one person’s experience expressed in song, both you and the songwriter know – I am not alone, someone else feels this, too.

This being Austin, I talked to a couple of songwriter friends about songs, psalms, and putting your words out there for the world to sing back to you. It is interesting, Psalms, especially the 23rd that I meditated upon today, are some of the most familiar words in any religious tradition. People of many different faiths or no faith at all know what comes after

“The Lord is my shepherd…”

Here’s something to contemplate – the Psalms are songs written to God. Yet they are also a part of scripture that is, in one way or another, understood to be God-sent. So who is singing to whom? My friend Jan Bozarth says there is no better feeling as a songwriter than having your words come back at you from an audience, when other people make your words their own. The psalms make that come true in both directions: God hears words of inspired scripture come back to God from us; we hear in the psalms God standing with us in the full range of our experiences.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me

Betty Soo, whose words I often sing in my car, notes that in modern songwriting there is an imperative to put your name on your work, to own it. Even when you want to share it, there is an industry built around stamping a song as yours or mine. Not really ours. The human crafters of the psalms, however, are anonymous, their work was meant to be lifted up by a whole people, on behalf of a whole people. And yet the words of the psalms can be experienced on both the individual and community level – I am walking through the valley of darkness and so are we. My cup overflows, and so does ours.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life

 All the days of my life. Of our lives. Of our life together.
Sing me a psalm.
Let’s sing it together; it is at the very least a duet.

I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.

 Perhaps in song and in psalm we are always at a community festival offering our words and our very selves to each other.