Lenten Preaching Series: Barbara Brown Taylor

14:55 Grace and peace to you in the name of God's beloved Jesus Christ, who after all these years has plenty of both to spare. There's a lot to like about the season of Lent, the lowered volume of it, unlike the seasons of Christmas and Easter. The invitation to turn inward for a while, weeks, not minutes, living closer to the bone of your place in the family of things, asking where you fit, thinking more about your part, noticing how often you show up for your part and what happens when you don't putting some skin in the game by taking something on for weeks, not minutes that might help you learn the difference between wanting to grow your soul and doing something about it when I started asking around I found people who had given up all kinds of things for Lent no meat eating no shopping online or in store no sleeping on bed pillows no lazy speech not gonna don't want to cuss as much T-Y very much LOL One gave up the need to be right during Lent.

16:16 Another gave up reading because she loved that more than scotch or dark chocolate, she said. Other people took on things instead of giving them up, like driving to work in silence every day or selecting out a small part of their wardrobes and wearing the same clothes day after day, picking up trash from the roadside. or praying for one person in particular every day for a long time. I tried praying for my enemies, but I couldn't stick with it.

16:52 Though my 92-year-old mother-in-law had taught me how, once when she told me about a pastor at her church who was using the pulpit to divide people, to set them against each other, I asked her what she could do about it, and she said, I pray for him. I pray that God will trouble him. This never gets old, even when it doesn't last, because like dry January, there's an end to this season, a finish line in sight. On Easter morning, just 11 days from now, a cross that's been bare for six weeks gets covered in flowers, and everyone's free to leave the desert singing hallelujah until Lent rolls around again. Hot sauna, cold plunge, big glass of water, warm towel. What's good for the body is good for the soul, plus the extra goodness of doing it together.

17:49 What feels different this year is not the substance of the season, but the timetable of it. Because there is not a chance the world will be out of the wilderness 11 days from now. It feels like Lent has been going on since COVID, at least. Most of our souls are tested every time we listen to the news, Gaza, Ukraine, Israel, Iran, school shootings, church scandals, bitter politics, AI, ice, global warming. The world pours through screens we can hold in one hand, telling us terrible things we can't fix. They show us videos of other human beings during the worst and sometimes last moments of their lives, imprinting the backs of our eyes with images we may never forget. It's an unnatural state of affairs. It's trauma by proxy, with no treatment plan attached.

18:46 I've heard it called media fatigue, which sounds too benign. I've heard it called epistemic exhaustion, which sounds too academic. In biblical terms, what we're suffering from is a large serving of divine omniscience with no divine omnipotence to go with it.

19:07 My worry is that the two most common responses to this state of affairs, outrage and despair, they can burn a soul right out. I'm seeing it in people I know whose red zone anger levels are starting to make them sick and that are sending their friends packing? Other people whose speechless melancholy has slid right into serious depression? Is this the way of life? Or is it our cue to recalibrate? Within the limits of being human, how shall we live? We talk about sustainability in so many other contexts, guarding our natural resources, so that they and we can go the distance, maintaining a balance between input and output that prevents complete depletion.

20:05 That's why I decided to talk about spiritual longevity today, about sustaining the soul through unseasonably long periods of Lent, when the testing is only fruitful for those with the means to stay alive. It feels like flipping the script on the season, making in some way less of Jesus' hard spell in the wilderness. But if you think about it, the point is he survived. The point is he left the desert to go do all the things he became famous for doing because his 40 days came at the beginning of his ministry, not at the end. One minute he was standing in the river Jordan with John the baptizer, wet from head to toe, and the very next, according to the Gospel of Mark, he was being driven into the wilderness by the Spirit, where he was tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.

21:09 The testing that followed, the fasting, the emptying out, all of these cleared the way for Jesus to take hold of his purpose, his place in the family of things, and exit the desert hungry enough to tip the world's scales toward more life any way he could. I asked my friend Mimsy Jones to please help me think of a text to go with this talk, because all I could think of were New Testament passages about laying down your life, not sustaining it. And she, brilliant, has always said, Torah? the Bible of Jesus, not the part about him. Specifically, the part you heard, where Moses has come through his own 40 years in the wilderness, when he's at the end of his long service to God, 120 years old, having led the people through the desert to the land of promise at last.

22:10 They weren't in it yet, but they could see it. and Moses knew he would not be going with them when they left. It was the opposite of Jesus' situation, in other words. Jesus was at the beginning of his ministry, and Moses was at the end of his. Moses' purpose was fulfilled, and his time was at hand, but he still gave them the best he had going forward. Most of the book of Deuteronomy is what one rabbi called Moses' retirement. speech, in which he summed up everything God had taught the people from the beginning with one clear commandment ringing through them all. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.

23:05 Choose life so that you and your descendants may live. So that's my proof text. Thank you, Mimsy. Choose life. It's not always our choice to make, and some lose their lives guarding the lives of others. But when it is within our power, we're commanded to choose life, that we and all our planetary descendants may live. So what does that mean? Choose life. It sounds like one of those commandments, you should really just leave alone. it's so full of meaning, it would be a shame to decide on one meaning instead of many. So what I did instead was to think about what nourishes life, the vitalities that can bring it back to life. When any kind of death is banging on the door, spiritual death, sure, but also the physical kind, the emotional kind, the communal kind, the global kind, I can't make anyone else's list for them.

24:12 since God made each of us from a fractal of the divine image, no two of us alike. But what I can do is get you started by listing a few nominees that might help you choose life. First, when it's lent outside, claim your lineage. It's so easy to feel alone in frightening times. You know fear diminishes us, even as it calls us to do something. in a culture that gives more press coverage to one firefighter running into a burning building than it does to a long line of people who've passed life-saving water from hand to hand through generations. This bucket brigade is our lineage. It's full of your ancestors, your descendants, your saints, and whether they're kin to you, to me, or not, they've adopted us.

25:09 and they know that meaningful change can take lifetimes. When they see you coming, they step back to make room for you and hand you your own bucket, teaching you the songs they sing to keep each other's spirits up. This morning I drank from a clay coffee cup that said, Arise and be radiant. That was on the rim, and down at the bottom it was signed, Isaiah the prophet. When Jesus entered the wilderness, he knew the names of the ancestors who had been there before him. There's great vitality in knowing your lineage.

25:50 When things get way too heavy, divest yourself. When Jesus told the rich man to sell all he owned and give the proceeds to the poor, he may have been setting a high bar for discipleship, discipleship, but he was also looking at someone who could hardly get off the ground for all the stuff on his back, which included his possessions, along with the time it took to care for them, repair them, keep people from stealing them, deal with how those possessions separated him from those who had less, get over feeling bad about that, and then decide who would get them after he was dead. Jesus offered the man a way out but he couldn't do it so don't be too hard on yourself if you can't either still I think if it sounds like there might be some vitality in divestment why not go through those saved up stacks of precious expectations and valuable certainties bejeweled biases and solid gold judgments to see if there are any you could pawn Freud said, we can lose nothing without replacing it.

27:00 But if that's so, why can't we replace too muchness with enoughness? Why can't we swap crowdedness for spaciousness? There's a lot of life in that. It also helps to stay curious. I've never talked to a Lyft driver the same way since I heard the humorist Dave Sedaris talk about the difference between small talk and big talk. He says, why ask drivers how bad they expect the traffic to be when you can ask them if they've ever touched a monkey? or how long they've known their dentist or whether they've ever been locked in the trunk of a car.

27:44 Stay curious, Sedaris said. Better questions lead to better stories, and the better the stories, the better you get to know someone even in a short amount of time. I don't know if you've ever thought about how many times Jesus answered a question with a question, but there were a lot. When a lawyer asked him what he should do to inherit eternal life, Jesus said, what's written in the law? How does it read to you? When his disciples asked him where they could get enough bread to feed 5,000 people in the wilderness, Jesus said, how many loaves do you have? When some of his critics asked him whether it was lawful them to pay taxes to Caesar or not, Jesus looked at the coin they held out to him and he said, whose image is this? And whose inscription?

28:38 His questions were more substantive than Dave's and more subversive as well. But he too knew there was more vitality in a question than in a straight answer. Curiosity keeps you thinking, rethinking, reading, reaching out to others, listening to what they say. Rabbi Jonathan Sachs once chief rabbi of the United Kingdom once said the greatest single antidote to violence is conversation speaking our fears listening to the fears of others and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering a genesis of hope staying curious is a reliable source of revelation and there's a lot of vitality in that When your spirits are low, you could also make something. A meal, a bookshelf, a garden, a fancy design in the front yard with your riding lawnmower.

29:44 While back, I visited someone with the most fantastic woodpile I have ever seen. It was a perfect circle of split logs about 10 feet in diameter. Three or four feet high, it looked like the foundation of a wooden dome. The woman who made it said it was a Scandinavian woodhouse, Holtshausen, and she built it herself. Her cheeks got really pink when she said that. Why is it so thrilling to make something beautiful that would not exist if you hadn't brought it into being? Whether it's a three-layer carrot cake, a clay cup for a friend or a real live baby. I think it has everything to do with joining the creator in creation. I don't think anyone cares whether you think you did a good enough job of it. It's the vitality of the process that brings the pink to your cheeks.

30:45 Above all, go outside. Touch grass. And if you can't do that, at least open a window. At first, all you want is the breeze, which ruffles the hair on your head like a beloved invisible hand. The difference between a closed room and a room with a breeze is the difference between bottled water and a bubbling spring.

31:08 If you can go outside, it will get even better. A white pine may sigh for you, teaching you that even trees have voices. a patch of tiny wild irises may drop you to your knees. If you look long enough at a rock, you might see what the earth was made of before it cooled off. There's so much out there that you didn't make that it's a great comfort. There's beauty to spare in life that insists on coming back through five major mass extinctions so far, evolving every time into something more adaptable, more resilient, and more diverse. You're not the alpha and omega of this.

32:02 You're smack in the vital middle of it, connected at every point to everything else that is. Take a breath and see. There's so many more vitalities I could add to these nominees, such as courage, forgiveness, friendship, passion, plenty of rest, a ready sense of humor. But you got the idea, right? I can let you go with this, and you'll come up with some of your own. There's just one left that I can't leave off, if only because it sounds so antithetical to wilderness. And that's this. Come to the fiesta.

32:45 I could have said celebration or communion, but it was John O'Donohue. Raise your hand if you love him like I do. See, you got a cue. Here's somebody to love. He called it fiesta instead, and he said, think festival, think carnival, reunion, jamboree. After Jesus left the wilderness, he went to a bunch of parties, which we largely overlook, I think, because we're searching for the symbolism in them, the hidden messages in them encrypted by God.

33:19 The message is God goes to a lot of parties. O'Donohue says, there's nothing more beautiful that can be put on the table of your mind than the feast of your own life. He said, to put it another way altogether, and to use a Catholic metaphor, every person's life is a Eucharist, an individual Eucharist, and you are the priestess or priest who makes the sacrament of your own life happen, And so we should get dangerously into celebrating. It's such an invitation. Only how do you celebrate? In the face of all that's going on in the world, some days just waking up with a light heart feels downright disrespectful. You've checked out.

34:10 I know a career hospice worker who legally changed her middle name to Joy just so she had a reason to say it every day. But if O'Donohue is right about every person's life being a Eucharist, that's not something you only celebrate on days when nothing terrible is happening. You do it no matter what. You do it to take part in the miracle of death turning to life, which the world needs every single day. I have not seen nor ear heard what the Lord has prepared for those who love him. That's what O'Donohue said his father, his direct predecessor in the bucket brigade, that's what his father used to say to him all the time.

35:03 It must have sunk in too because O'Donohue spoke with great vitality vitality, about the divine party that awaits us all, though his own invitation came way too soon when he died at the age of 52. Here's what he left behind for the rest of us, O'Donohue, which I trust he found true. So there's a great fiesta time ahead, and we would want to be practicing if we haven't been any good at it in this world. We would want to be practicing, even against our will, a certain little bit of happiness, because we could be really deluged with pleasure in the next life. In this one and the next, I wish you all the life you can stand, not only for yourself, but for those who come after you as well and every creature who shares this planet with you, a blessed Lent to you for the 11 days left, and may you be deluged with pleasure when Easter comes at last.