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Lent is the season to sort out the gods.

Ken Sehested
Text: Philippians 3:17-4:1

Invocation.  “Lovers of the world unite / bound to Creator’s vision, bright / that even these our darkest nights / become the light become the light.” — “Hope Beyond All Hope,” Alana Levandoski

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You may have seen this social media meme. It’s a painting, of a woman in Victorian style dress, and the caption reads: “These days most of my exercise comes from shaking my head.”

Any of you been doing this kind of exercise lately?

Without a doubt, we’re in a rough patch as citizens in this republic. Clearly moving toward an extreme autocratic (or oligarchic) federal government. Depending on your definition, you could also say fascist. Reminds me of Jeremiah’s scathing criticism in his age: “Were [the rulers] ashamed when they committed abomination? . . . (No) they did not know how to blush” (Jer. 6:15). Or recall the judgment of Amos, who complained that the rich sell the poor for silver, and barter the needy for a pair of shoes (8:6). We are millennia removed from the ages of these prophets, but their sharp accusations are as relevant as ever.

On the very day of his assassination in Memphis, Dr. King called his office at Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta to give them his coming Sunday’s sermon title. That sermon title was this: “Why America may be going to hell.” By the time of that fateful day, King’s popularly among the general public had tanked, particularly in the previous 12 months since his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City. After that speech, loudly condemning the war, most of his supporters among white liberals vanished. He was bitterly criticized by more than a few leaders in the civil rights movement. His clear linkage between domestic oppression and international aggression suddenly turned his fame into infamy. Dr. King recognized that the goals of voting rights, integrated schools and buses and lunch counters, were too tame. Something more fundamental was at stake. That’s when he began speaking more directly about predatory capitalism.

And when he did . . . well, you know the old aphorism: Now he done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’!

Just so, what is needed from the community of faith is that its preachin’ includes meddlin’—meddling in the ways money becomes the supreme arbiter of value, in which case the poor and the weak become expendable. What is at stake in this moment in history is more than our democratic norms, the rule of law, maybe the very soul of our nation. This is a profoundly spiritual struggle.

There have always been times when some in power have exercised cruelty and deceit. But never have the majority in all three branches of our government displayed such cold hearts, cruel minds, calloused hands and feet. A time when empathy, a vigilant attention to suffering, has been explicitly repudiated. As our shadow president, Elon Musk, said recently, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”

Many economists believe that the current state of our ruthless economy and politics of fraud are worse than it was in the Gilded Age, during the latter part of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when robber barons amassed their wealth at the expense of workers, when political corruption was rampant—or, as the title of my sermon says it, quoting Paul’s letter to the small Christian community in Philippi, “their god is their belly.” And I’m not just talking about stomachs or culinary habits—it was (and is) a gluttony of twisted desires and rapacious appetites, where might most certainly, and most ruthlessly, makes right.

I’m remembering, too, the Prophet Micah, who warned of the judgment to come of those, as he puts it, “who devise evil deeds on their beds!” And can’t wait until the sun rises to seize the property of others, who covet fields and oppress householders (2:1-2). Those who, like our golden-dyed hair-of-a-president, resurrects our nation’s colonial past by his intention to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, ethnically cleansing Gaza to establish it as a massive tourist resort—even to the point of annexing Canada, all to satisfy his insatiable quest for personal gain and coercive plunder.

We are witnessing as never before the transforming of common wealth into private equity. Filling his unquenchable belly, and those of his parasitic patrons.

Now, put on your seatbelt because I’m going to make a hair turn maneuver to ask what in the world does this have to do with Lent?

One of the unheralded theologians of the 20^th century was Charles Schultz and his serial “Peanuts” cartoons. In one day’s panel, Snoopy the dog declares he’s going on a hunger strike. The next day’s sequel has Snoopy banging at Charlie Brown’s back door, food bowl in mouth. Charlie Brown opens the door and says, “Your hunger strike didn’t last very long, did it?” To which Snoopy replied, “The brain may be important, but the stomach is still in charge.”

Though we’ve all recognized this fact over and over, we’re still surprised when our consciences are overruled by our exaggerated appetites. Long before Karl Marx’s claim that money is the prime factor in human decisions, Jesus said it much more concisely: “You cannot serve God and mammon.”

The brain may be important, but the stomach’s in charge.

Lent’s labor is designed to give devoted time to our own hearts and minds; to examine the work of our hands, the paths of our feet; to inquire into the orientation of our eyes and our ears; to audit our speech, whether we have been true and truthful, whether we have said too much—or too little; to scrutinize our longings and desires to see if any have breached their healthy boundaries, if some need retraining of retracting—or reviving.

But hear this! Lent is not for our self-absorption or flagellation, which can be yet another form of narcissism, of pride, of conceit. The work is not a spotlight on ourselves, much less a despairing obsession with our own failings. It is the work of triangulating our attention, in alignment with and yoked to the Work of the Spirit, in a world that has forgotten its origin, its promise, its purpose.

Lenten observance is simply the recognition, followed by corrective measures, that pipes can get clogged; moving parts need lubrication; bodies, in need of medical intervention; cracks exposed and rot replaced.

Remembering that you are dust is not an insult, for such is the very stuff of the universe, ordered and animated in God’s own delight. Do not grovel! Simply allow your compass to be adjusted, as needed.

When we do this, we begin to gravitate toward the most essential question, which Missy mentioned last Sunday: What does it mean to draw near to the heart of God?

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Prepping for Tenebrae. “My harp is turned to grieving / and my flute to the voice of those who weep.  / Spare me, O Lord, / for my days are as nothing.” —English translation of “Versa est in luctum” by Alonso Lobo, 16^th century composer, performed by Tenebrae Choir conducted by Nigel Short 

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And what, you may ask, does calling out dictators have to do with drawing near to the heart of God?

This juxtaposition seems senseless and contorted. Oil and water. Material and spiritual. Doesn’t this confuse piety and politics? And with today’s text, two things are connected in ways that seem preposterous: gods and bellies. Are you kidding me?! Gods and bellies! Can there be a more ridiculous pairing of words?

This is the very point where our piety has too frequently abandoned the very meaning of holiness. So let me see if I can clarify.

In short: To be holy is to be made whole. To draw near to the heart of God is to enter into God’s delight over the created order and into God’s pathos, God’s own grief over a world gone amok. On the one hand, we are called to recognize and proclaim the beauty of what God has created. On the other hand, to accompany the Spirit into God’s grief and anguish is to come alongside those afflicted by the business end of the gun barrel, the pointed end of the knife, the bludgeoning end of the billy club.

This kind of piety—which is rooted in beauty, not duty—prompts us to live in compassionate proximity with those who are shamed, disfigured, silenced, or abandoned. When we experience the loveliness of God—when we draw near to the heart of God—we become lovely, most expressly with those for whom love and care have been suspended.

There are limitless ways to do this, of course, some very ordinary and familiar and nearby; some more ambitious or dramatic or faraway. Integral to our work is to train our attention both to the earth’s beauty and the world’s disfigurement. Sometimes we are called to go beyond our comfort zones, to get ourselves in “good trouble,” to call out injustice or call in the wounded.

Hear this, you Little Flock of Jesus: Trouble is when we go with the people we love. The imposition of Ash Wednesday is not an act of subservience, like a supplicant to a monarch. It is to allow our appetites for fatty foods and sugary colas to be corrected.

In the so-called “real” world, the market insists that we are what we consume; that we are utterly alone, with no covenants, no lasting relationships, no communal bonds. The market’s propaganda says might makes right; that only the strong survive; that you keep what you can seize; that the rich take what they want and the poor suffer what they must.

Lent is our iconoclastic season, to sort out the gods. In particular, Lent’s interrogation is to examine the relationship between gods and bellies. To examine the ways our appetites are serving, or have been severed from, our relationship to the One who alone is worthy, the One who both delights in creation’s sacred status but also grieves over the ways humanity has been warped by inhumane loyalties, desecrated neighbors, and nature itself.

So, let me sum all this up as make our journey with Jesus to Jerusalem: In the immortal words of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “Carry on. Love is coming. Love is coming for us all.”

Live accordingly. Do the truth. In times of trouble, come what may, return again to the Love that will not let you go.

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Benediction. “All the pain that you have known  / All the violence in your soul  / All the ‘wrong’ things you have done  / I will take from you when I come.” —Sinéad O’Connor, “This Is to Mother You”

Recessional. “Verbovaya Doschechka.” —Ukrainian folk song, with 94 violinists from 29 countries collaborating on this rendition

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Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville NC, 16 March 2025, Lent 2

Ken Sehested

Invocation (on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). —“A City Under Siege,” in solidarity with Ukraine, composed by Elijah Culp, text from Psalm 31: 21-24

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In remembrance of Malcolm X
(He was assassinated on 21 February 1965.)

There was a period of years, decades ago, when I experienced a crippling sense of personal shame and social despair when realizing my own complicity in systemic racism. The shame wasn’t because I had enslaved anyone; or had committed blatant acts of racial animus.

It was because I realized how clueless I was. And if I was this clueless in this regard, chances are I was equally clueless about a whole range of other forms of unconscious bias.

Simultaneously I feared that the same applied to larger society, that we as a people were also structurally complicit, trapped in a naiveté that prevented us seeing the truth about our wounded history that continues to color current behavior.

There came a time, though, when, in quick succession, I came across quotes from three of my heroes that bore me up from the sloughs of shame and despair. Not to make me innocent, but to allow me to be responsible, able-to-respond, freed from humiliation’s disabling power to move forward with courage and perseverance for the work of repair.

The first liberating quote is from James Baldwin, writing in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis
whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.
The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean
that very seriously.  You must accept them and accept them with love.
For those innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect,
still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and
until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

 

The second quote is from Maya Angelou.

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it,”
and
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Finally, one from Malcolm X himself.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do,
or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”

Each of these are grace notes, hopeful disclosures, stemming from the pivotal word embraced by people of faith: Repentance is not for punishment but for the power of beginning again. Not with a clean slate—we will ever bear our scars. And certainly not as a one-off occasion: Penitential living is a daily commitment and a lifelong process.

But the goodness of the Good News is that we can begin again, we can orient ourselves and our society toward the holiness which radiates neighborliness, restoring right relations and just kinship and social policies, knitting together the warp of Heaven with the woof of Earth.

Only by such grace-impelled, hope-provoked work—and it is laborious, sometimes sweaty, difficult, persevering, frustrating work—can we be saved.

§  §  §

In Latin America, a common liturgical ritual is to name a salutary person who has passed but whose memory is a source of inspiration and resolve that animates the present, someone who is a guiding light and is seated among our “cloud of witnesses.”

Join me in saying Malcolm X: Presenté!

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Last week I drove several hours to attend the memorial service of a remarkable human being, one I never met. Rev. Nelson Johnson died earlier this month. His name is not listed in the familiar cast of renowned civil rights leaders. But in Greensboro, NC, and among a certain class of human rights activists, he is legendary.

The historic episode for which he is primarily known is the 3 September 1979 “Greensboro Massacre ,”a bloody confrontation between a group protesting the existence of the Ku Klux Klan. As those marchers were assembling, a gang of fully-armed Klan members arrived.

Within minutes the conflict escalated from shouting, to fist fighting, to gunfire. Five were killed and dozen others injured, including Johnson. He and his wife later founded the Beloved Community Center which, still today, engages in a wide variety of justice, peace, and human rights advocacy.

Importantly, after years of the city’s ignoring this brutal history (the police were present but did not intervene until the gunfire ended—Klan members were exonerated), Nelson formed a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to investigate the history, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and concluding that the Greensboro police bore the brunt of responsibility.

Rev. William Barber—some would say the best preacher in our country—gave the eulogy in the memorial service. It was more like a revival than a eulogy. You can watch Barber’s extraordinary homily at this link beginning at 2:32:54. I cannot commend it enough.

Join me in saying Nelson Johnson: Presenté!

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Hymn of resolve. “I only ask of God / That I am not indifferent to the pain, / That the dry death won’t find me / Empty and alone without having done enough.” —English translation, “Solo le Pido a Dios,” performed by Mercedes Sosa. Originally written and performed by Argentinian musician Leon Gieco in 1978, this song is an anthem that was widely used throughout the social and political hardships and civil wars across Latin America, particularly in Argentina and Chile.

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My Cuban friend Samuel Rodriguez Cabrera is not someone many here in the US know. And it’s a stretch for me to call him a friend; more like acquaintance, greeting each other in my several visits to Matanzas. It was 2016, after Trump was first elected as president, that he mentioned to my (very good) friend, Stan Dotson, that Trump would be our country’s chemotherapy: “Either it’s poison will kill you; or will remove the cancer with which your country suffers.” Or something close to that. With the next election, many thought, well, maybe we’re cured. But ’24 said otherwise.

Samuel was a deacon at his church, Primera Iglesia Bautista, a founding member of the Kairos Center, a ministry for the arts, liturgical renewal, and social service sponsored by the church, and served as its chief social worker in its poor neighborhood. His funeral was last week.

Join me in saying Samuel Rodriguez: “Presente!”

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Word. Before the end of Black History Month, watch “Backs Against The Wall: The Howard Thurman Story” (2019, 56-minute film).

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Call to the Table
Come now to this table, all who hunger and thirst for justice,
and all whose hungers are not so clear, but have still led you here.

Come all who weep now, as well as those who are numb and long to feel anything again.

Come all who love and trust in the goodness of God,
all who are leaning on the grace of Jesus Christ,
all who are saying a bold and willing Yes to communion in the Spirit . . .
and all those whose faith is shot through with doubt and fear and confusion.

Come and draw near to One who risked drawing near to us,
despite our own mixed up motivations and simmering hostility,
and even our smug self-righteousness.

When we draw near Jesus, we draw near one another
to live in thanksgiving, and to abide in forgiveness.
—Rev. Stan Wilson, co-pastor, Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville, NC

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Benediction. “In the midst of pain, I choose love / /In the midst of pain, sorrow falling down like rain, / I await the sun again / I choose love.” —“I Choose Love,” Lindy Thompson & Mark Miller, performed by Voces Aged. The song was written in response to the 17 June 2015 mass murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC.

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Including 35 questions for contemplative attention

Ken Sehested

Invocation. “Tempted and tried we’re oft made to wonder why it should be thus all the day long / While there are others living about us, never molested, though in the wrong. . . . / Farther along we’ll know all about it; farther along we’ll understand why / Cheer up, my brother; live in the sunshine, we’ll understand it all by and by.” —“Farther Along,” Dolly Parton

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Lent’s labor is designed as special time and attention to our own hearts and minds; to examine the work of our hands, the paths of our feet; to inquire into the ways and wherefores we give attention with our eyes and our ears; to audit our speech, whether we have been true and truthful, whether we have said too much—or too little; to scrutinize our longings and desires to see if any have breached their healthy boundaries, if some need retraining, retracting, refuting—or reviving.

But beware: Lent is not for our self-absorption or flagellation, which can be yet another form of narcissism, of pride, of conceit. The work is not a spotlight on ourselves, much less a despairing obsession with our own failings. It is the work of triangulating our attention, in alignment with and yoked to the Work of the Spirit, in a world that has forgotten its origin, its promise, its purpose.

Lenten observance is simply the recognition, followed by corrective measures, that pipes can get clogged; moving parts need lubrication; rust appear on metal; bodies, in need of medical intervention; cracks exposed and rot replaced.

Remembering that you are dust is not an insult, for such is the very stuff of the universe, ordered and animated in God’s own delight. Do not grovel! Simply allow your compass to be adjusted, as needed.

§  §  §

Hymn of petition. “You who went before us, / furthest into the unease, / help us to find you, / Lord, in the darkness.” —English translation to the first stanza of the Swedish hymn, “Du som gick före oss, (Psalm 74)” performed by Voces8

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35 questions for contemplative attention

We all need helpful hints on how Lent’s labor can be carried out. There are many—none are foolproof. What follows are some suggested questions to ponder in your own solitude or in conversation with others. Asking the right question is often essential to arriving at the right answer. You may not find what you need here, but in considering them, you might formulate your own.

1. Can we be faithful without becoming arrogant
2. Can we be generous without recreating relations of control and manipulation on the one hand and dependency and servility on the other?
3. Can we be compassionate without seeking publicity?
4. Can we be patient without becoming passive?
5. Can we be angry without becoming vengeful?
6. Can we become agents of reform without becoming brokers of imposition?
7. Can we be hopeful without being sentimental?
8. Can we weep with those who weep while also rejoicing with those who rejoice
9. Can we offer mercy without ignoring the need for repairing harmed relations?
10. Can we act kindly without becoming passive aggressive?
11. Can we be prophetic without becoming merciless?
12. Can we publicly, even vociferously, demand public justice without becoming self-righteous?
13. Can we excavate the root causes of violence in the world while also doing that work in our own hearts and minds?
14. Can we be forgiving without collecting IOUs?
15. Can we perceive the connection between our efforts at disarming the nations with the work of disarming the human heart?
16. Can we be joyful without being triumphalist?
17. Can we tearfully express our grief and anguish without languishing in the solitude of lethargy and indolence?
18. Can we pledge ourselves to faithful communities without allowing such vows to be transfigured into mobbish, nativist, or insular conduct?
19. Can we recognize that in leaving “Egypt” behind, we also have to dethrone the lingering presence of “Pharaoh” within our own hearts.
20. Can we rediscover God’s passion for the flourishing of the natural world—see ourselves as located within, not dominating from without—thereby recognizing our need for repentance and turn toward repairing and protecting the created order?
21. Can we discern the different but connected needs of providing emergency aid to the suffering as well as the need for opposition to policies which make charity necessary? Engaging in the charitable work of binding wounds, providing shelter and adequate clothing and nutrition and health care—but also deconstructing and reconstructing structures and policies which are the root cause of such deprivations?
22. Can our hands and feet be deployed in the work of resistance to injustice without resorting to clinched fists or trampling boots? To guard against becoming beastly in our struggle with beasts?
23. Can we be “still”—embraced by grace that generates calmness in the midst of torrents—without becoming indifferent?
24. Can we affirm that God is more taken with the agony of the Earth than with the ecstasy of Heaven—employing that affirmation as a plumb line to appraise all that we do and say and think?
25. Can we think of ourselves less rather than thinking less of ourselves?
26. Acknowledging we all have blind spots, unexamined presumptions, privileges of which we are unaware (especially those of us in the majority caste), how can we open ourselves to experiences which might expose our privileges—not for punishment but for reparation, for the growth of our understanding and the stretching of our hearts?
27. Can we conceive of the “good life” for ourselves as that life extending to an ever-widening circle of kinship?
28. Can we imagine that in our revolt against an economic system, which centers human greed, we need to do the hard work of imagining and constructing a new system which centers human need?
29. Can we revive the conviction that faith in the Manner of Jesus entails a bet-your-assets commitment.
30. Can we get to the point of understanding there is no sacred and secular, only sacred and desecrated?
31. Do we have the needed imagination to affirm that one day all shall go out in joy and be led back in peace, the mountains bursting in song, the trees in applause? (cf. Isaiah 55:12).
32. How can we shape our communities of conviction so that pastoral work is not segregated from prophetic engagement (and vice versa)?
33. Is our faith buoyant enough to withstand squalls of doubt? (They will come.) Our hope, resilient enough to endure seasons of despair? (Those storms will arrive, sometimes without warning.) Our love, sufficiently robust to survive contagions of anger and resentment? (Infections are common.)
34. Can we be confessional without being colonial? Might digging deeper into our specific tradition of faith—its history, its language, its insights—be more successful than neutering ourselves? And can we do this without demanding that others, even our collaborators in the work toward a Beloved Community, adopt our identity?
35. How best can we adopt this pastoral advice from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. Just keep moving forward”? In the end, that all we are asked.

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Benediction. “All this pain / I wonder if I’ll ever find my way / I wonder if my life could really change at all / All this earth / Could all that is lost ever be found / Could a garden come up from this ground at all? / You make beautiful things / You make beautiful things out of the dust / You make beautiful things / You make beautiful things out of us.” —“Beautiful Things,” Gungor

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Ken Sehested

Mardi Gras processional. “Jubilee Stomp.” —Tuba Skinny

Ash Wednesday invocation. “When Love Meets Dust” —Alana Levandoski

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A couple years ago I had an email exchange with my friend, Phillip. He ended with:

And today we wear the ashes. I’m always humbled. Especially when I as pastor “impose the ashes” on people I love. (Impose? Really? Oh God)

And I replied:

Oh, great insight re. the word “imposition,” whose root meaning is “inflict, deceive.” It’s an unfortunate word to be associated with Ash Wednesday’s ritual.

Except . . . maybe . . . if the imposition is actually “the world’s” demand that we recognize the authority of and justification for crucifixion—and to be intentionally marked with ash is a sign of resistance to that imposition. It is a holy act of defiance: “I, too, am a follower of this Way! Take me if you dare, if you must; do your worst. I will not renounce. Your threat of imposition will not deter me.”

And then, in my imagination, we repeat these lines from Daniel 3, addressed to the Babylonian ruler, who threatened the non-compliant with being tossed into a fiery furnace:

“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter [of bowing down to worship your golden statue].  If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.’”

It is the great nevertheless of faith. The defiant come-what-may. The provocative we-shall-not-be-moved. . . except when our moving is out of Pharaoh’s bondage; moving out of Herod’s reach and Caesar’s interdiction; out of step with every royal assumption; and moving on in disobedience to every hierarchy of race and class, gender and caste; ever refusing to back down in the face of these pretenders claiming divine right or historical necessity.

All of these refutations accompany the great affirmation which is Ash Wednesday’s mark of rebellion against every despot who seeks to annul Heaven’s intention for Earth’s reclamation. Such is the terror of God sounding in the tyrannical ears of all who believe death has the last word.

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Biblical anthropology

Some in the community of faith are repulsed by the Ash Wednesday smudging. It’s not hard to imagine why, as if what God demands of us is self-abasement (if not self-mutilation—do a web search for images associated with the word penitence and a great many show people literally lacerating their own bodies).

No doubt a good bit of this theological mischief is due to notions like original sin or The Fall or its escalation in the Protestant Reformation to total depravity. You would think the sola scriptura folk would reject such language since none of these words appear as such in the Bible.

The history behind original sin theologizing is a labyrinthine jumble of complex conjugations piled this way and that, abstractions galore, tortured logic and hair splitting around every corner, littered with obscure, exotic rhetoric amid a cascade of mutual condemnations between its defenders. Shakespeare himself might apply his famous line of “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” to this hot mess of specious tomfoolery.

Nevertheless, it is true that Scripture doesn’t shy away from documenting the scale of brutality humans are capable of. Sometimes in grisly detail—read the story of the unnamed concubine in Judges 19 or the petitions in Psalm 139. And in the Newer Testament, one of Jesus’ closest confidants betrays him, and another, allegedly upon whom the church is built, flagrantly denied even knowing Jesus three times before breakfast.

We are a shaky lot. Rare the exemplar, common the culprit. Our collective, bloodstained trail of infamy goes all the way back to the first family in creation, when Cain slew his brother Abel. Scripture’s opinion on humanity’s character is tangled.

For sure, on the one hand, it is recorded that “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” and “for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth” (Genesis 6:5 & 8:21). On the other hand, “God created humankind in [God’s] own image” (Genesis 1:27).

On the one hand, it says “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5).  On the other, “I praise you [O God], because I am awesomely and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

On the one hand, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17:9)? On the other, “You have made [humans] a little lower than angels, and crowned them with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5).

On the one hand, “None are righteous; no, not one” (Romans 3:10, echoing Psalm 14:3). On the other, “The Lord your God rejoices over you . . . exults over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17) and “The dwelling place of God is among humankind (Revelation 21:3).

 Therefore, how, and in what way, are we to welcome our ashen mark as the inauguration of Lent’s observance?

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Consider these instructions for the onset of Lent’s journey

The work of Lent involves both how we allow ourselves to be shaped by, and how we participate with, the power of the Spirit in a world that has lost its way. The Lenten season is traditionally understood as our own metaphorical venture into the wilderness of our own hearts, where we wrestle with demons, and are waited on by angels.

The journey into and through our own heart circles back into the wilderness of history’s wayward affairs as agents of healing worldly wounds and wastrel dispositions. The foretaste of Love makes us lovers, and such belovedness thereby incrementally interrupts the spirals of disdain and violence that flow from inherited trauma, affliction, and misery.

The trek through Lenten practice is not comfy and may test our limits. It is not for our affliction but to clarity our affection. Our annunciation is that of Mary’s, whose exclamation of praise doubles as a denunciation and indictment of the present world’s disorder.

Jan Richardson writes a blessing based on Jesus being baptized, hearing God call him “Beloved,” and then the Holy Spirit immediately driving him into the wilderness for forty days. In her blessing, she reminds us that during this journey, it is crucial to remember our identity as God’s Beloved:

“If you would enter into the wilderness,
do not begin without a blessing.
Do not leave without hearing who you are:
Beloved, named by the One
who has traveled this path before you.”

Add to this a primordial memory: The first doctrine of Scripture is God’s absolute delight with Creation. That original blessing has certainly been obscured the first couple’s expulsion from the Garden and history’s subsequent wreckage; but the blessing has never been retracted. We are imago dei, made in the image of God.

So, find an honored place in your soul, where you pass by frequently, to display this admonition. Put a flashing neon light as its background. Enclose this reminder as in a mezuzah on your doorpost, touching it in your goings out and your comings in. Wear it around your neck as an amulet, pressed against your skin, leaching its reminder directly into your bloodstream: fear not, fear not!

Then lace your heart with its heavy-duty boots as you venture into this wild terrain of your own soul, unvexed at the prospect of danger and fear, hunger and thirst, scorching sun and the night’s dark threat. All the while, expect that you are being tracked by the Hound of Heaven who will guide you at the edge of every precipice, who will find you, and remind you, who and Whose you are.

Live in the bare nakedness of your incompleteness, reclothed by this assurance: The Loveliest One’s own heart palpitates with delight at the very sound of your name.

So let this Word be heard among you, the Word that was present from the beginning, who now awaits to be born anew in every human heart, whose promise of deliverance stretches across the cosmos, who journeys with you in the midst of tribulation, light’s eclipse, and hope’s frailty, even to and through death’s dominion, whose demise is sure, world without end. Amen. Amen.

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Benediction. “Jesus I trust in You, / I love You, have mercy. / Deep from Your wounded heart, Pour out Your grace and mercy.” —Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles “My Mercy: A Lenten meditation”

Recessional. “God Almighty here I am / Am I where I ought to be / I’ve begun to soon descend / Like the sun into the sea / And I thank my lucky stars / From here to eternity / For the artist that you are / And the man you made of me.” —Kris Kristofferson, “Feeling Mortal”

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(or any time joy is highlighted by the day’s lection)

Ken Sehested

Processional. “Ode to Joy” (“Ode an die Freude”). —from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, flashmob performance, orchestra and choir, in a Sabadell, Spain public plaza

Invocation. “Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of these days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

Call to worship. “Then young women will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow.” —Jeremiah 31:13

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I recently had occasion to correspond with a friend in the Republic of Georgia. Few here in the US know much about the country, on Russia’s southern border, snuggled between the Black and Caspian Sea in Caucasia. Formerly a satellite republic of the Soviet Union, declaring its independence in 1991, two of the country’s provinces have since been occupied by the Russia army since 2008 (years before Russia invaded Ukraine).

In my note, I offered an Advent benediction, wishing him “tidings of comfort and joy.”

He responded, “Unfortunately, our Advent season will not be filled with ‘tidings of joy and comfort,’ nor will Christmas, as we find ourselves engaged in an unequal struggle against the tyranny of power. Please keep us in your prayers.”

Media here rarely if ever reports the thousands of protestors nightly filling the streets for the past weeks in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, in opposition to the new prime minister (whose election is disputed), who announced the government would cease discussions of joining the European Union and instead move closer to alignment with Moscow.

Why discuss geopolitics in an article about joy?

Glad you asked.

Luke’s nativity tales squarely places Jesus’ birth in a geopolitical context: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness” (3:1-2).

Faith is mere sentiment and vacuous rhetoric if it fails to question the way things are—and is a living parable testifying to a future whose conclusion is beyond every existing premise.

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Hymn of praise. “This joy . . . this strength . . . this love . . . this peace that I have / the world didn’t give it to me / and the world can’t take it away.” —Resistance Revival Chorus, “This Joy”

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Joy is commonly associated with happiness, glee, cheeriness. And don’t we all relish these brushes with delight? (My eldest daughter’s pecan sandies are my annual Christmas season treat. When I was young, it was my Mama’s fudge.)

“What is joy when it’s not promiscuously tied to happiness, Hallmark, or hedonism?” Rose Marie Berger asked in an essay. Or elsewhere, as N.T. Wright complained, “Made for joy, we settle for pleasure.”

Consider three things about joy.

1. If joy is subsumed as pleasure, and happiness as secure bounty, the rich would have cornered the market. My experience is just the opposite: the most truly joyful people and communities I know are those whose pleasures are nominal, whose security is frequently at risk. Joy is available to those whose hands are empty of things that can be purchased or produced (or stolen).
2. The capacity to risk much in devotion to the Beloved Community does not come from moral heroism. Beauty, not duty, is what sustains our efforts in the face of adversity. By beauty, I mean a beatific vision, a foreshadowed glimpse of what the psalmist mentions, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of God in the land of the living (27:13); of the day when wolf and lamb will lie together peacefully (Isaiah 11:6); when swords will be forged into plowshares (Micah 4:3); when outcasts are gathered (Zephaniah 3:19); when the hungry have plenty to eat and the land itself rejoices (Joel 2:19-26); when all tears will be dried and death comes undone (Isaiah 25:8, Revelation 21:4).

As Richard Foster insisted, “Joy, not grit, is the hallmark of holy obedience.” Likewise, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asserted, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” Joy creates and sustains the capacity to face the squall of sorrow’s assault without being crushed by it.

3. Joy is the acknowledgment that our struggles and sorrows are seen by God; that history, in the end, conspires but fails in its purpose to give us over to the invisibility of fate and certain destruction. And we humans participate in that godly work when we accompany those in desperate straits.

Our congregation is partnered with one in the small village of Oliva, Cuba. For months a group has been planning a January visit. Not as patrons (or any of the many forms of colonizing impulses) but as friends. But given what we know of the dire conditions there—severe shortages of food, electricity, gasoline, even potable water—we asked if we should reconsider, lest we be a burden. “No,” was the emphatic response from the pastor. “We need the encouragement you bring with your presence.” No doubt our takeaway will be, in the lines of that old hymn, “And the joy we share as we tarry there / None other has ever known.”

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Hymn of resolve. “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart.” —“Joy,” Latifah Phillips, in a moderated and minor keyed praise song, adds a new refrain, and splices “It Is Well With My Soul” as a coda

Word. “It’s the Joy, my friends. Our Holy Practice. That Practice of the Holy in a crazy world that doesn’t realize its own holiness.” –Marc Mullinax in a “faith story” during a Circle of Mercy Congregation service

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I responded to my Georgian friend, saying “Be assured of our vigilant intercessions; and we ask for yours, on our behalf, as well.” And continued, saying “The fruit of the poet’s ‘tidings’ is not cheeriness, but blossoms as enduring resolve to not grow weary in the face of duress and persistent threat. It is joy’s provision that keeps the heart alive, the resolve vigorous, when everywhere there is spiritual famine.” And the accompanying social disruption thereby caused.

Joy Sunday in Advent is smack dab in the middle between the season’s first Sunday and Christmas Day. It serves as a reprieve from the gravity of a dangerous birth, pagan dignitaries and field hands visits, the desperate migration of a campesino family, amid the outbreak of political intrigue and terrorism. But more than a reprieve—joy is the hinge upon which gnarled and contentious history swings: afflicted, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Corinthians 8-9). Joy calls our attention to the holiness that still persists, and enlarges our horizon to the approach of an unclouded day, when all shall reside “under their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid” (Micah 4:4).

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Benediction. “Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one’s mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.” —Frederick Buechner

Recessional. “After all / after all / after everything I’ve seen / thank God I still have joy. / Through the storm / And the rain / Through heartaches and pain / Thank God I still, still, still have joy.” —“I Still Have Joy,” Reverend Freakchild

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Ken Sehested

Every lit and lively season (Christmas, especially) comes, for some, with heartache, usually over the absence of a beloved whose remembrance still cuts to the quick and pickles the heart. In addition, Nativity’s season unfolded with ancient Palestine’s writhing under the oppressive heel of Rome’s imperial boot. The poem below is set in these parallel moods.

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Do not fear grief. She comes, unbidden, with a word hard
but essential. The rocks beneath your feet are bruising and
unrelenting. The wind, sharp as a razor. The moon casts
threatening shadows, each a hissing dragon or fearsome
reaper’s scythe.

The dark throws its spell and bids you to bow and shiver.
Neither bow nor quake. Let every weak knee be steeled; every
back, steadied; every mind, restored; every tongue, loosed;
every arm declaring its strength. Say to the rocks: Do you best!
Speak to the dark: Take me, if you dare. Say to the moon:

Your light is for lovers, not thieves. To the meadows and
mounts that witness this interrogation, say: Speak the truth.
To the streams and rivers who run, say: Your wet wonder
precedes all living. To the friends who scatter, say: Be gone.
To those who linger, say: Give me your blessing. For under grief’s

skirt are angels who say: You are enough. Who say: You have
what is needed. Who say: The years lost to the locusts will be
restored. Who say: Weeping endures for the night, but joy
comes in the morning. The Promise and Presence of such joy,
sustained by the One who can neither be named nor tamed,

runs deeper, farther, surer than every sorrow-sullied current
or casting wave. Give yourself to the bewildering news of Earth’s
upside-down, inside-out future and the begetting power of the
bewilding Spirit, alternately comforting and afflicting in
accordance to the terms of the reconfiguring covenant uplifting

the lowly and toppling the pretentious. Stake your life in this
Promise. Abide in this Presence. Align your attention with this
Purpose. Join the caroling community whose anthems of praise
—in the face of threat—disclaim every tear’s stain and death’s
reign, world without end. Amen.

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Ken Sehested

¶ Processional. “Who then shall stir in this darkness, / prepare for joy in the winter night. / Mortal in darkness we lie down blindhearted, / seeing no light. / Lord, give us grace to awake us, / to see the branch that begins to bloom; / in great humility is hid all heaven / in a little room.” —“What Is the Crying at Jordan,” The Miserable Offenders

¶ Invocation. “Let us consider how to incite one another to love and good works . . . encouraging one another. . . .” —Hebrews 10:24-25

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I can think of no better set of New Year’s resolutions than this trilogy:

1. Resolve to be a minister of encouragement.

The ministry of encouragement is the most overlooked, least expensive and most effective thing we can do for each other. It takes no special training, no claim to authority or office, no brilliance of mind or eloquence of speech. Only an awareness that courage is contagious.

In particular though—if you are a member of a congregation whose pastor(s) is a source of nurture, send them a note of encouragement. Being a clergyperson has always been a challenge, but even more so in this cultural context. Here’s a note we just sent to our pastors:

“In case you don’t hear this enough: We are deeply grateful for the many ways you each bring insight, comfort, and inspiration—week after week, through the text and to the world, in both high holy and ordinary days, in spoken words, sung lyrics, prayerful invocation, and shared engagement—not to mention the innumerable hours you spend orchestrating the gifts of others in the Circle who also have testimony and discernment and energy with which to animate our little flock of Jesus.”

[For more see “The ministry of encouragement”.]

2. Resolve to keep seek opportunities to actively resist the marketers of fear and to be an advocate for public justice—in whatever ways those engagements cross your path, and however daunting the steep climb needed for a flourishing community, in ways bold and bodacious or incremental and behind the scenes. Yes, ours is a threatening age, given the prospect of climate collapse, the implosion of democratic institutions, the continuing scourge of racial animus and economic inequality, to name just a few. But despair is often a disguised form of narcissism. Get over yourself, and give in to something bigger, more grand than consumer indulgence and entertainment.

And in so doing, consider this invitation from Rivera Sun, novelist, activist, trainer in nonviolent social change: “There is a place between passivity and violence. I’ll meet you there.”

3. Resolve to be an intercessor. If that sounds overly pious, that’s because our language has been hijacked. Here’s how New Testament scholar and activist Walter Wink speaks of such work:

“Intercessory prayer is spiritual defiance of what is in the way of what God has promised. Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current forces. History belongs to the intercessors. . . . By means of our intercessions we veritably cast fire upon the earth and trumpet the future into being.”

It is primarily in our communal worship—however formal or folksy, however clearly defined or fluid the membership—that we practice such imagination. It is from others that we receive crucial information about who we are, the contour of our gifts, and when and where to practice them. We are not autonomous, self-made, solitaries or sovereigns, but rather are built for relation and communion. Not even the dirt is self-made: A single gram of forest soil can contain as many as a billion bacteria, up to a million fungi, hundreds of thousands of protozoans, and nearly a thousand roundworms.

It is no cause for qualm that we are each such small creatures in the scheme of things. Rather, it is a wondrous revelation that we are part of such a colossal unfolding of spirit into flesh, flesh into spirit. Reweaving the torn and mangled parts, however anear or afar, is our joyful calling.

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Hymn of resolve. “I Wanna Be Ready,” Amos Machanic.

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             3.5. Finally, the point-five: Instead of a fourth recommendation, because this one is neither the same
as the third nor is it separate, unmoored, or optional.

In the course of our intercessions, concrete possibilities for interdiction will open, when we actively, in sometimes granular detail, and fearlessly work to forestall the powers of shaming and maiming and nudge, however incrementally, beggarly life toward its promised flourishing, when “each will sit ‘neath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid” (Micah 4:4).

It is an exculpatory illusion to say “I love everybody.” Nobody loves everybody. You can only love this one, that one, the other one. Love requires the expenditure of assets—time, attention, security, reputation—and (I say with constant regret) we all have limits.

We each invest our paltry assets as best we know how, and make adjustments or redirection as circumstances indicate. The goal remains: that, someday, scarcity gives way to bounty, sorrow gives way to rejoicing, the hungry are fed and suppressive thrones will tumble. Our primordial mothers—Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1-10) and Mary (Luke 1:46-53)—testify to this uprising of Heaven’s intent for Earth’s reconstitution.

So we live, as best we can and with all our imperfections, as if this truth is even now springing from the ground. And we pray: Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

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Benediction. “A prayer for the New Year.” (2:30 video)

Recessional. “Benedictus.” —Karl Jenkins from “The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace,” performed by Hauser with the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir Zvjezdice  of Zagreb, Croatia

[For more on the topic of new year’s resolutions, see “New Year’s Resolutions: Promise-making in response to the Word of God”]

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