Still Time

For Lent, I was going write about Lent. Well and often. And then, I found that I didn’t have much time to write.

Which is ironic/telling/poetic–because my Lent sermon series is ABOUT time. How much we have, how much we waste; the blessing and burden of it; the things that hijack our sense of it… Time is complicated and beautiful and holds within its grasp the expanse of human experience and all of creation. We can totally cover that in six weeks, right?

Right?

But anyway. Here we are on nearly week 5 of the journey, and I am just now getting around to this realization–the clock is ticking.

Jesus knows it, too. Throughout John’s gospel, Jesus goes through a range of responses to his impending death—denial, despair, request for deliverance–but by Chapter 12, he is resolved. He realizes that this is how it must be, and he no longer thinks of asking God to deliver him.

Was Jesus really so willing to accept his death as this important, transformative moment in history? Or does John just tell it this way because it makes a better story? I lean towards the latter, because John is the English major’s gospel. The hero’s steely resolve gives the tale a mythic proportion. Which is clearly desirable, as John points toward Jesus’ death as a pivotal moment in the human narrative. Like Harry walking into the woods to face Voldemort, the willingness of the sacrifice is what MAKES the story.

So did it really happen that way? Or did John just take some good notes from J.K. Rowling?  Either way, it makes me wonder…

What kinds of discomfort do we try to escape, rather than waiting them through and discovering what the pain might have to teach us?

Culturally speaking, our skewed sense of time urges us toward instant gratification/explanation. If a project or conversation isn’t holding our attention—our cell phone can immediately “deliver” us from our boredom. If life isn’t going as planned—we can easily pick up and move and start over somewhere new. Between reaching for Candy Crush in the middle of a long meeting; and leaving a place we love to ‘start over’ when the going gets tough; in a thousand little ways a day, we are tempted into the comfort and safety of non-being.

Technology and global communication and hyper-mobility have done wonderful things for the world… but those things also make us vulnerable to very short attention spans; and give us a low tolerance for ambiguity.

Where is the space for waiting? For being shaped and molded in the Spirit? For deepening our relationships through seasons of uncertainty? Jesus and Harry Potter teach us that those things only happen when we are willing to die—in one way or another—and let something new grow out of the space that remains.

I lived in Arizona for seven years; now I find, without the literal desert to guide me, it is much harder to find the kind of spiritual terrain that this season requires. Much harder to sit with the tension of being a compassionate person in a suffering world; a spiritual person in a physical world; a person of privilege in the midst of so much need. But once I find that small piece of wilderness, I find that I still know– there is life in the waiting, the not knowing, and the emptiness.

There’s still time.