I don’t know how it was for you but this past week the transition from Fat Tuesday to Ash Wednesday was a bump I couldn’t miss. The Mardi Gras meal last Sunday, and then my family’s annual Mardi Gras meal with the feminist theologians – king and queen cakes this year and 6 babies to find! The Epiphany season was ushered out in style.

By Wednesday morning it was a faint memory as I prayed Ash Wednesday prayers with the Anabaptist prayer book: “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?” I blithely prayed the psalm as I have many times before, with no fears at all.

Before the day was over we needed to make an abrupt change to the church email system and website, leaving some questions about communication in the coming weeks. Then a nasty email arrived (criticizing our service last Sunday.) A lot of deep breathing ensued. “Whom/what shall I fear?” Most of the time I do not fear but it did make me stop and realize how intense the past few months have been. I am a tad tired these days.

How much more so then for Jesus. He went from the high of his baptism – with the Holy Spirit like a dove upon him – to being led by that same Spirit to the wilderness, to be with the evil one.  Forty days of testing, of no food, of wandering and wondering how things could change so quickly. Did he fear? Did he really experience God as light and salvation?

The particulars of the 40 days in the wilderness are a bit of a puzzle.  In the passage we read from Luke today Jesus is led to the wilderness and there he stays with the evil one and presumably the Spirit was there since she led him there. In Matthew, it is just Jesus and Satan and at the end some angels come and minister to Jesus; in Mark, Jesus meets Satan in the wilderness but there are no specifics about the temptations like Luke and Matthew give us.  Mark does however say the wild beasts and angels were there to comfort Jesus.  And in the gospel of John? As usual, John tells the story with a different slant; there is no wilderness episode at all.

I am tempted to focus on these discrepancies, to get distracted by what might really have happened. I get preoccupied by the short hand of 40 days and wonder whether it was really 7 days, or 15 or 26, in the wilderness. But this year I am letting that all go, giving it up for Lent. Instead, I want to wonder what it means that we have this story in the synoptic gospels at all.

The theme for Lent this year, as suggested by our sisters and brothers from Mennonite churches in Saskatchewan, is “Ashamed no more.” Give up shame for Lent? Ours is not a shame based culture so in some ways it seems irrelevant to an accomplished crowd like us.  What in the world would we have to be ashamed about?

According to researcher Brene Brown from the University of Houston, we who pretend to have it all together still struggle with shame; we feel like we are not enough. We may feel ashamed of the way our clothes don’t fit, the way our bodies are not fit, our less than perfect relationships with our children, friends, partners, work colleagues.

And since this is church, we may feel ashamed that we don’t pray enough, don’t know the bible all that well, and also that we envy, gossip, get angry, drink too much, and waste time on any number of time sucks. We are so accomplished that we are probably really good at beating ourselves up.  (This is all hypothetical of course.)

But here’s the thing: We can turn that shame, that feeling of not being enough (even though we are created in the image of God) we can turn that around. And here in church, as followers of Jesus, we have amazing examples of how shame is turned on its head.

Because the bible is full of stories of people who totally screw up. It starts in the beginning with Adam and Eve, with shame so deep they have to deface the trees to cover themselves. And then Abraham is so afraid he passes his wife off as his sister – twice.  And Jacob so fearful and ashamed of his past behavior that he sends a huge retinue of animals, servants, children and wives as a buffer before he meets his brother Esau again.

We could go on and on with the imperfect people that God uses. The biblical heroes of the faith have their metaphorical warts depicted, sometimes quite graphically but they are loved by God and show God’s presence in the world anyway.

The biblical characters feel shame because they are afraid – afraid of not being connected, of having broken connection with those they know and love – and broken connection with God. The same is true for us today, thousands of years later. When we feel disconnected, when we are afraid of losing connections we feel vulnerable.  We wonder if we are worth loving. We may try to cover up the shame or numb ourselves to it, but it is still there. (http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html)

Jesus models another way.  During those 40 days, he is tempted over and over to break the connection he has with God. The evil one even quotes scripture to try and convince Jesus that he should take the situation into his own hands: the stones are there waiting to be turned into bread; the power is there to grab; God will save him even if he does something ridiculous like throw himself off the temple.

But Jesus will have none of it. He doesn’t break connection with God and interestingly enough Jesus does not break connection with the evil one. He doesn’t say, “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus just keeps saying no, that is not the way and the evil one eventually leaves, though Luke promises it will return.

Somehow Jesus is able to say, “I am enough.” He is able to say even in the face of hunger and perhaps disorientation, in a vulnerable state, “I am going to live into God’s light and salvation.”

The story from Deuteronomy gives us the children of Israel, as the end of their wandering draws to a close. It took forty years until they were ready to enter the new land. And now they get directions about how to make offerings of gratitude when they enter the land so long promised. Part of making these thanksgiving offerings is to retell the story again – how they got into slavery in the first place. They recount the shame in which they lived and the way that God provided light and salvation.

As a congregation we have been in an in-between land, for over 7 years. I hesitate to call it a desert as life has been so good, abundant even, in these years. But the reality is that in 2005 a majority of our conference delegates decided that who we are as a congregation and how we experience God at work among us is against the teachings of Mennonite Church USA. They said loudly, “Shame on you.”  With their words and delegate action, the delegates tried to cut us off and cut us out of the conference.

Even though we suspected this was coming, we were devastated. We felt pain. We clung to each other and wondered what the future might bring. And stubborn as we are, we said we will not live in shame. We will not lose connection with you. We will not wander alone. “The Lord is our light and our salvation. Whom shall we fear?”

So we keep showing up at delegate sessions and conference events. Some people find it annoying – and others have noticed that we are still connected. We keep sending money to the conference which leaves us open to criticism from inside and outside the congregation. And the people that track the money notice that we are still connected.

Instead of feeling shame we have allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, by showing up over and over. I am not sure we really knew what we were doing but our stubbornness led us to vulnerability – which Brene Brown says is the birthplace of connection, courage and compassion. We are learning how to have courage with people with whom we have disagreements. I think some of us are even learning how to have compassion for those with whom we disagree.

On March 2, seven non-voting delegates from our congregation will once again go to a conference delegate session.  On the agenda is discussion of a “reconciliation discernment committee.”  It took six years for conference leadership to feel a calling to explore reconciliation with Hyattsville. Now a year later we are moving from the idea of reconciliation to forming a committee to talk about it. And it will take several more years to actually imagine together what reconciliation might look like.

I hope it won’t take 40 years but we don’t have to fast and we do feel the Spirit leading us. If we can stay connected to God and to each other we can continue developing courage and compassion. “The Lord is our light and our salvation. Whom shall we fear?”

 

This whole business of being in community with each other, staying connected with God, can be tough stuff. It certainly isn’t easy to admit that there are times when we cut ourselves off from God.  But if we can acknowledge that we have lost connection then there is the option of regaining that connection, reconciling with God and with neighbor.

In the Mennonite tradition we don’t have a very regular way to reconcile with God, other than the confessions we read together on Sunday or the silence that we share. This winter I got to participate in a ritual of reconciliation as it was planned by some of the children at Christian Family Montessori School and their catechist. As they prepared for their first communion they also prepared for their first reconciliation (or as it used to be called “first confession.”)

(Most of the children celebrated their first reconciliation and communion last week at St James Catholic Church but our own Charlotte Krisetya is having communion today, with us for the first time.  She and some friends made the bread for communion this morning and Charlotte helped to prepare the worship arts with Sara. We welcome Charlotte’s friends and their families and as well their catechist Jodi-beth to worship this morning.)

In preparation for reconciliation and communion the children learned the saying of Jesus about the true vine. We wondered together who the vine is and who the branches are. We sang a song “You are the vine, we are the branches, keep us abiding in you.”

We wondered what happens if the sap can no longer flow freely through the vine to the branches.  What might be those things that block the sap from flowing?

How amazing to learn as a child that the love of God flows through the vine to the branches and sometimes we do things to break that flow that connection. Even more amazing is that we can name what blocks the flow of God’s love, then receive forgiveness and move on.

This is a different way to deal with shame than some of us might have learned as children (or adults.) What a gift to receive assurance that God’s love still flows toward us and through us – if only we will allow it.

This Lenten season we are encouraged to set aside the shame and the messages that tell us, “You are not enough.”  We are encouraged instead to see the opportunities for growth that are inherent in vulnerability, to set aside fear and to claim God as our light and salvation.

These are not easy lessons to absorb.  It’s good that we have 6 weeks to practice. And then the rest of our lives – to live into the love of God that is always there for us, flowing freely through the world and through us.

“The Lord is our light and our salvation. Whom shall we fear?”