Blowin' in the Wind

February 25

2 Lent

Mark 8:31-38

Most years, I have trouble with this season of Lent — with its often too-heavy (for my taste) emphasis on sin and penitence, and its negative take on our mortality, and its penchant for minor key dirge-y hymns, and its stories about humanity at its violent and hateful worst, and its focus on Jesus going to his death instead of his incarnation or resurrection.  I often find myself longing to edit these things out.  To take out some of the darkness and emphasize the light.

But this year, Lent actually did feel lighter to me at the start.

For Lent this year, I signed up for a six-week Ignatian retreat through a church in Georgetown.  The retreat started the Sunday before Lent began with a beautiful candlelit gathering of all the people making the retreat.  We shared where we were and what we were hoping for and were led on a beautiful scripture meditation before being sent back into the world.  From then on, every week I would meet with a spiritual director named Bill who assigns me scripture passages to pray with each day.  Each week has a theme of some sort.  And Week 1 was great - it was all about God’s love.  I had no trouble reading my assigned passages and spending time imagining myself into them and envisioning myself surrounded by God’s love.  That time of rest and assurance was just what I needed after what had been a frustrating time of recovering from my broken arm.

And I guess because I’d been basking in that loving presence of God, Ash Wednesday felt different to me this year.  Rather than feeling weighted down by the call to a holy Lent, I heard a gracious invitation.  As I sat in my chair listening to John preach that night, a vision formed in my head.  I saw all of us as mounds of ash dust.  And the breath of God was gently blowing the layers of dust away.  I couldn't see it yet, but I knew that that breath would eventually reveal our gleaming true cores under the ash.  We were all in the process of transformation.

It was a great start to Lent.  

But it only took a week to realize that even though that vision had felt like a welcoming invitation, the process of ash removal itself could be very uncomfortable.

When I met with Bill the second time, we talked about how everything had gone and he asked if I was ready to move on to the next theme or would I rather remain in God’s love another week.  I am very much a person who likes to make progress, plus clearly I had this whole love of God thing down, so I said I was ready to move on.  So onto Week 2 we went.

Now the theme was indifference.  Bill described it as spiritual freedom - not being attached to our desires  I didn't like the theme from the start, and none of the assigned readings sat well with me.  They focused on not worrying and being content no matter the circumstances.  Things that are definitely not always my forte and, in fact, felt like a rebuke after all the angst I’ve experienced this past month.  I was confronted by all the pieces of life I grasp too tightly to - like my expectation of physical health and strength, and my ability to be in control of my body, and my desire to accomplish things.  And I could see the weight of all my worries that kept me from finding joy and peace in the present moment.

Then this week’s theme has been sin.  And I keep coming face-to-face with both my personal failings and my role in the systems of power and inequality in the world of which I am very much a part.

After all the discomfort and wrestling, I told Bill I was sorry I hadn't just stuck with the love theme because this indifference and sin stuff was kicking my butt.  Bill laughed and said that sometimes God works that way too.

Sometimes God gently blows away a layer of ash to get us closer to that gleaming core.  And sometimes it takes a windstorm for that ash to sift through our clenched fists.

I think Peter encounters the windstorm version in our Gospel story for today.

The disciples have been with Jesus now for several years.  They’ve known Jesus to be a caring and wise teacher, a healer, an opener of possibilities, a doer of miracles, a drawer of crowds.  But now Jesus is talking about suffering and rejection; now he’s predicting his death.  This isn't what Peter left everything to follow.  He was expecting kingship and victory!  A delivery from Roman oppression!  A suffering messiah?! Unthinkable.  Peter (being Peter) wastes no time in telling Jesus exactly what he thinks.  We aren't told, but I imagine it went something like this: “Jesus, enough already with all the negativity and death stuff!  Show us how we’re going to win!”

I’m guessing most of us aren't big fans of the crucified Christ piece either.  We prefer comfort to suffering, glory to the cross, acclaim to rejection, Easter to Good Friday.  We want a God who shields us from vulnerability and promises us prosperity and good health and security.  We’d really prefer a painless shortcut to the Kingdom, thank you very much.

But that’s not what Jesus offers. In Jesus, God shows up where we least expect — as a homeless baby, as an exile and an immigrant, as an outcast and a criminal.  Jesus points to a God who meets us in vulnerability, suffering, loss, and even death.  His ways are not our ways, but he invites us to follow him anyway.  

Jesus is constantly inviting people to follow him.  And just like the ash is sometimes blown gently and sometimes it takes a windstorm, at times the call to follow Jesus sounds like a gentle invitation and at times it feels like a dismal warning.  

I’d say our reading today falls very much in the second category.  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  Not much by way of a marketing slogan.  I much prefer: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people!” and “Come all you who are heavy burdened and I will give you rest!”

The words we hear today from Jesus are unsettling.  Carry your cross. Lose your life in order to find it.  These words feel like a violent wind blowing against our desire to cling tightly to whatever the ash is that obscures the gleaming core of the person God has called us to be.

In this world where the shiny marketing slogans ignore reality and tempt us to be a lesser version of ourselves, Jesus’ call to transformation is just the opposite.  The world calls us to be more powerful, better looking, skinnier, stronger, richer, more successful.  Today Jesus calls us to hold all that lightly — to be willing to lose it all on the path to transformation.  The path we are invited to walk may be rocky and painful and demanding.  It may call us in directions we would never choose for ourselves.  It may require us to let go of our certainties about God, or our expectations of how life is supposed to go, or our hardness of heart in our relationships, or our worries about the future, or our guilt about the past.  But the path Jesus asks us to follow transforms us slowly but surely into our true, gleaming, God-created and God-beloved core.  This path leads to Easter.  And it definitely leads us home.  Amen.