Lent 2024: A much-needed sermon.

Sometimes the best sermons are found in the pews.

The family processed down the aisle in various shades of black and took their places in the front row. A family of five, the parents strategically sat where each child had a parent beside. The church was bright, but the sadness dark. The death was unexpected, so bewilderment swirled with the candle smoke along with sadness and anger.

Through it all, the parents held their children. One arm wrapped around her son’s shoulder, the other linked between her other son’s arm. The dad clung to his daughter, occasionally tilting his head to meet hers in the middle.

Stirring hymns were sung, wonderful reflections shared, and the minister said something, but I was too busy listening to the sermon in front of me. I thought about the time I sat in the front pew, when death’s cruelty overwhelmed me, but I also thought about all the other kinds of struggles we face just making our way through this thing called “life.” They leave us bewildered, sad, and maybe angry, but watching the parents sitting beside their children, I couldn’t help but imagine God sitting beside us. With an arm wrapped around our shoulder, with His head leaning in, somehow, I think God sits beside each of us. It doesn’t take away the pain, but it transforms it.

During this season of Lent, we’ve looked into dark places – places of sadness and pain – but it’s important to remember there’s someone sitting beside us. There’s an arm wrapped around us. It doesn’t take away the difficult soul-work we’ve been doing, but it transforms it.

One might say it doesn’t take away the tomb, it’ll just empties it.

Lent 2024: Week three.

Wounds

I can still feel the pain even though it’s been years since I sat in my childhood dentist’s chair. “It’s just air,” he said as he pushed the button and blew a burst of air in my face. It made me laugh. When he blew the air in my mouth and hit my newest cavity I was no longer laughing. I arched my back and gripped the arms of the seat so tight I thought they might break.

So it is when you touch a cavity or any kind of wound. They go unnoticed until they’re touched, or a gust of life’s wind blows in their direction. The pain makes us feel them again for the first time.

We all have wounds. Some might be small and shallow, others large and deep. Some might have healed; others could well be scabbed and ready to open at a moment. Maybe it’s a wound about money, a relationship, a health issue, or career event. Wounds come in all shapes and sizes, and they are specific and unique to us. (Example: a friend does not have the same wounds about money that his spouse does, so when they meet to do taxes, wounds get touched and she recoils.)

I suppose wounds are part of being human, and Lent is a time to acknowledge our wounds. Like our griefs (week 1), and our brokenness (week 2), ignoring our wounds does not get them to disappear. Only by looking, letting them be seen as the hurts they are, will they ever heal.

Such truth is easier to write than practice. No one wants to feel pain, let alone feel it again, but someone wiser than I once taught me that there’s new life on the other side of the pain. When clinging to the arms of a chair and arching my back, the hope of that new life is the only thing that sees me through. Yes, I admit, I’ve often reached for “Novocain” of every sort, but that only delayed the pain and sometimes created new wounds of their own.

This Lent, I want to do the work so that, come Easter, there are more empty tombs than the one two thousand years ago. That would be something to celebrate, indeed.

Lent 2024: Week two

Hiding the Bokenness

When I was a child, I broke my parents’ vase. I don’t remember how, but I remember what I did with the broken shards. I hid them. No one was around to hear the vase fall, no one saw the debris, so I quickly scooped up the pieces and placed them on the shelf in the playroom closet behind a stuffed animal, baseball mitt, or board games like Twister, Sorry, or Mousetrap. I’m not sure what I was thinking. It wasn’t like my parents wouldn’t notice the missing vase, but, at the time, hiding the pieces seemed like a good idea.

It still does.

Although I’m older now, my first instinct when I see the broken parts of me is to hide them. For years, I did my best to hide my brokenness. I stuffed the pieces behind a Christmas-card-family, a successful career, even a black shirt and plastic white collar. I also made sure I surrounded myself with friends who wouldn’t look too close. The problem was, my hiding did nothing to the brokenness. The pieces were still there whether I saw them or not. They were just as real even if no one noticed.

If my emerging faith has given me anything, it’s the power to stop hiding my brokenness. In the assurance that I’m created in God’s image but have distorted that image through costly mistakes and crippling fears, there’s no need to keep hiding parts of me.

Lent is a time to do soul-searching, and one of the things we should search for deep within our souls is the brokenness we’ve spent a lifetime hiding. Like naming grief last week, this is not easy work. It will take effort and practice, but the freedom on the other side is worth it.

Who knows, maybe our courage will invite others to do the same.