The Color of Lent

The other night, for bed-time reading, I was handed My First Message open to the crucifixion story   and told, “Here, read this.”  While it not unusual that the reading choice would be Bible stories, the choice of content was unexpected.  Usually we either skip right over the crucifixion in favor of the more happy and appealing resurrection story.  Or we just skip adult Jesus altogether and read about the annunciation and the nativity. Baby Jesus is so cute and the angels are so beautiful.

I was grateful.  Our usual mode for Bible story reading is the usual mode for many church-goers: we have a big festival at Christmas to celebrate and adore the baby Jesus, skip over his life and (maybe especially) his death to celebrating his resurrection with all things spring: new life, growth, color.  Reading the crucifixion story together was an opportunity.  We talked about Jesus’ offer of forgiveness, the way he loved the criminals who were crucified with him, that he was crucified because his love was threatening to people with power – that he hadn’t done anything deserving punishment.  And we often talk about what it means to follow Jesus.  This story and the conversation about following Jesus were an apt way to begin thinking about the following Jesus into the season of Lent.

We often think of Lent as a time to follow Jesus into the wilderness.  We think of the asceticism, the sparseness, of letting things go and giving things up.  We associate Lent with fasting and prayer and renunciation.  Although the liturgical color of Lent is a rich purple, if Lent were to be characterized by any color, it would (in my mind anyway)be the gray of the ashes we are marked with on Ash Wednesday. 

And yet, this year – year B of the three cycles of the lectionary – is markedly colorful.  It begins with the multi-hued promise of God to Noah and all creation that God will be present in covenant relationship.  That God’s mark of covenant would be the rainbow, a reminder to God like a string around a finger, that God will never again visit such destruction on the earth and that ‘every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth’ is included in covenant with God.

In fact the whole season of Lent is an assurance, turning our usual idea of Lent 'Upside Down and Inside Out'.  Using this theme throughout our Lenten worship, Sunday after Sunday, we hear that God’s covenant is for God’s creation – and for us, God’s creatures.  We will hear after the rainbow promise the covenant and promise to Abraham and then to the Israelites, a covenant written on our hearts, a promise that in love, God “did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”  The story of Jesus as we follow him to the cross and through the cross to Easter is the story of the new covenant, in which Jesus gave his very blood in an act of love that exposed evil and pointed to the triumph of life. 

That doesn’t seem gray at all!  That seems exciting, bright, vibrant.  An upside-down notion of victory - that violent death would lead to new life.  We in turn are invited to turn ourselves around, toward the God who love us and all creation so fully that in spite of the many times that humanity has failed, turned away, God continues to turn toward us.

I feel personally an extra turning upside down of Lenten seasons past.  Two years ago, I felt thrust suddenly and painfully into the gray wilderness of Lent after experiencing a miscarriage.  So it is feels wonderful to me to be anticipating new life in this season, that Lent is a time of waiting with joy.  And it seems right and good that date given for the triumphant entry of the little one we wait for is on Palm Sunday. 

This year, by all means, offer something up to God for Lent in an act of letting go and fasting.  But consider taking up something that will color your Lent experience.  Pray in color, create something, plant something new, take pictures, visit galleries, get to know the colors and cultures of God’s people.  God’s colorful promise to all creation is still alive and growing and waiting for us to  be drawn in and turned inside out.

The Voice of the Gardener

"I’ve been through childbirth, I can handle this." I thought, as I lay on on the table in the gynecologist’s office, trying to relax and breathe and hold it together through the pain I was experiencing.  And then I thought, "But then I was rewarded with a baby.  This is like giving birth to nothing.  To death."

 

I was taking the final step in physically moving on from my miscarriage.  I was in on the doctor's table having a D&C to remove the ‘products of conception’ that had been stubbornly hanging on (even multiplying, as if there was still a life to support) even though it had been two weeks since I learned of my miscarriage and likely at least a month since it had happened.  I say it was the final physical step because although I had been thinking about 1:00 Friday, March 1 being the end of it, of course it’s not the end at all.  I had been mostly avoiding thinking about it, diverting questions about how I was feeling (I’m fine, let’s get on with the meeting) and focusing on work and the medical follow-ups.  So I was a little caught off guard by my own powerful grief during the D&C.  I knew it would hurt physically.  I was unprepared for how much it would hurt emotionally.

I had met with a midwife once early on, and although I cancelled this month's appointment with her, I got in touch with her because it was important for me to hear her perspective and her thoughts on miscarriage.  I thought, and I was right, that she might offer a somewhat more holistic sense of what might be happening in me.  And when I talked to her on the day before the D&C and she said to me, "You’ll always remember the due date.  You’ll always get a little pang."  She reminded me that might keep feeling it in different ways.

A congregation member whose sister died this past summer asked for prayer this week as she and others encounter new levels of grief now, these many months after the death.  I can’t really equate the loss of this pregnancy to the death of a beloved wife and sister.  But in terms of the way grief lingers and presents itself in nuanced ways, perhaps there is a correlation.  That pang will return and I will feel it in different ways when I remember the loss of this one-that-almost-was, this dream of someone to be.

The midwife also told me (it was almost the first thing she said), “It’s not your fault.”  I think it was after I heard that that I began to realize that even though I knew intellectually that there was nothing that I had done or not done that had caused the miscarriage, that I was feeling shame and guilt at the loss.  I have for so long conditioned myself to not be ashamed – not of who I am, not of what I feel, of my actions – that I am still somewhat incredulous that shame could be an emotion that I feel at all.  I feel shame that my body failed me, I feel shame that what I announced with joy and excitement turned out to be a lie, shame that there was indeed nothing I could have done to prevent this loss.

It may have been these feelings of shame that fueled the internal voice that asked, ‘Does this mean maybe that more kids just aren’t in the books?’  I tell myself that I don’t believe in signs, but on the other hand I was thinking, 'Maybe what we’ve said all along – that we’re just a one-kid family – is what we need to keep saying.'  I told myself, that maybe my body just doesn’t want to do this – can’t do it.  And maybe God doesn’t want us to do it either.

In the midst of all of this, in preparation for writing a sermon, I have been dwelling with the Luke 13 parable of the barren fig tree, the owner who wants to root it out and the gardener who asks for one more year to dig around it, add fertilizer, tending in with the hope of fruitfulness in the future.  The beauty of Jesus’ parables is how their meanings can have a depth that you never would have anticipated.  I need this parable this week.  I was hearing the voice of the fig tree’s owner in the shame of a failed and ended pregnancy and in all my questions and doubt.  I needed the voice of the gardener.  And I heard it, again from the mouth of my midwife, saying that perhaps I could understand this as a sign not of failure but of my body’s readiness.  My body has told me of its ability to be fertile and that it was only the timing that was not right.  The garden only needs to be further tended.

The pain is still pretty near the surface.  The doubt has not gone away.  Unearthing shame?  Way easier said than done.  However, having heard the gardener’s gentle challenge, I have an easier time understanding the grace that is offered by Jesus in this parable.  There still room and time and means for the tree to bear fruit.  I need to keep listening to that voice. 

Knocked Up Like Mary

This year in advent I sat through a sermon about Mary and Elizabeth that was preached by a man, all the time thinking, 'that should be me preaching this sermon.' It had never bothered me before. Last year during advent I had been so frustrated with the birth imagery, the reminders in the daily devotion (for women) that I was doing that for women creativity is like birth. Even then, a little over a year ago, I still felt very ambiguous about giving birth and about my own role in bring new life into a crazy mixed up world.

And then I got pregnant. It's not that I don't have doubts about the presumption of bringing yet another human life into an already busting-out planet. Nor do I have complete confidence in my ability to raise and nurture a strong and confident daughter in a world that is still so misogynistic in many ways. But I also now realize that all those things people say about the miracle of pregnancy, and the hope of childbearing is true.

My openness to bringing my daughter into the world speaks to my hope both for her and in what God can do here. And her growing in me makes me constantly amazed at the actual fully unique human being that God is creating inside. In spite of my worries about the future, the tension I feel about being a parent, I cannot wait to meet my baby, to discover how she is like me and my husband, to see how she is totally her own person, to get to know her. And there she is in me, two months away from coming into the world and it is an indescribably feeling and joy every time she moves - even when it's in the direction of my already squeezed bladder.

I hear the Luke passages about Mary and Elizabeth and the babies jumping in their wombs in a whole new way. Jesus was just like the baby growing in me, and that blows my mind. God's greatest hope for the salvation of the world was just like my own daughter.