This is the Lenten devotional that changed my life - the one I read when I was first becoming an Episcopalian. It’s called A Season for the Spirit and the author is former Society of St. John the Evangelist brother Martin L. Smith. In Chapter two, Martin remembers sitting alone sobbing in an Oxford movie theater. As the scene of Jesus’ baptism played across the screen, Martin realized for the first time what the typical depiction of Jesus’ baptism had obfuscated. In all the stained glass he’d ever seen, images of the baptism featured just the two holy cousins standing in beautiful, clear water in a sort of private ceremony. But in the film, Martin finally saw Jesus’ baptism portrayed the way it is told in each of the Gospels: happening right in the midst of great throngs of folks wading into a muddy river, with hundreds more crammed waiting on its banks. A couple of verses before our reading, the Gospel of Mark reports, “The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to [John the Baptist]. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” John had so convinced the people of their need for radical transformation in their lives that all these ordinary folks came to receive the same cleansing fresh start that gentiles did when converting to Judaism. And they came by the hundreds. All the people of Jerusalem.
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| A depiction of the Baptism of Jesus in a Mormon Temple |
Of course, Jesus, being sinless, did not need such a cleansing or any sort of repentance. But instead of holding himself apart and morally superior to all these other sinners, Jesus joins in, in solidarity with the rest of humankind. “Jesus plunged into the waters with them and lost himself in the crowd,” Smith writes. The Son of God jumped into the fray, the messiness of what it is to be human and seeking a new start. It is in response to that loving act that the God the Father’s delight in Jesus spilled out over him in the form of a dove descending and a heavenly voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
One of my fellow Episcopal priests and friend, Father Lizzie McManus-Dail, pointed out on her podcast that a dove is literally a type of pigeon. Exact same word in the original Greek. Doves in the wild are not the pure holy white heavenly creature in, again, all those stained glass images, but look just like pigeons - an ordinary, common bird, the cheapest option for sacrifice in the temple. Folks who couldn’t afford much at all - a goat or bull or one of the bigger animals - could at least afford that. This is the animal God chose to represent the Spirit descending - the bird associated with poverty, humility, and ordinary folk. Jesus’ baptism is the ultimate act of being with us, the least of us.
This year in Lent, we’ll be focusing on the theme of loneliness and reconnection as a parish. It’s an interesting time of the church year to focus on coming together as a community. Lent is often contrived as an intensely individual journey with an especially inward focus on one’s own relationship with God. There’s good reason for that. As the prayer book invites us on Ash Wednesday, an observance of a Holy Lent is to be marked by self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial. Each of these involve solitary spiritual practices.
I’m actually finding it quite difficult to figure out preaching this Lent because I keep realizing how extremely particular and personal each person’s struggles with temptation really are. For every person grappling with gluttony and arrogance, there’s someone plagued by self-restriction and low-self-esteem. You may need to be encouraged to focus on others’ needs less, while your pewmate could stand to focus on others more. There’s no one-size fits all way to do Lent because we’ll all need different things from our spiritual practices. That’s why we are each charged with self-examination - an honest look at the barriers that get between us and loving well. And yet, it matters that we do this both apart and together. That we commit to our practices for the same forty days, that we are all journeying forward at the same time. Because the eventual goal is not about being our best individual selves off on our own with God - it’s about our whole community lifting one another up to God.
Look again at the Gospel narrative of the baptism and fill the crowd back in. This moment is about Jesus’ relationship with God, but it’s also about Jesus’ relationship with the ordinary people for whom he will eventually give his life. And even the forty days of fasting in the wilderness - they’re not as solitary as we might think.
Yes, the Spirit immediately drives Jesus out into the wilderness. But the few details in Mark about his time there - that he was tempted by Satan, with the wild beasts, angels waited on him - are all about how Jesus was not alone. He contended with the devil, he communed with creation and God’s wild creatures, he was accompanied by God’s servants.
Most of all, the purpose of Jesus’ foray into the wilderness was not a self-focused, self improvement journey. It was preparation for greater solidarity with and compassion for God’s people. It was to steady himself, to ready himself for great acts of teaching, love, and ministry.
The Christian faith enables - and encourages - extraordinary personal transformation. But that is not its goal. I would even go so far as to claim that the ultimate goal of a life of faith is not your own personal salvation in the afterlife. The purpose of striving in faith is right relationship - learning to love God, love our neighbor, and love ourselves. Jesus’ greatest commandments. Jesus comes to save us from isolation - to rescue us from separation from the divine and separation from other people.
Here’s how Martin L. Smith puts it, “The barriers that hold us back from one another in fearful individuality are the identical barriers that block the embrace of God and insulate us from the Spirit. It is one and the same movement of surrender to open ourselves to intimacy and personal union with God in the Spirit and to open ourselves to compassion and solidarity with our struggling, needy, fellow human beings.” In other words, spiritual loneliness and social loneliness share the same root cause: a misunderstanding of our own individuality and independence. The skills and practices that break down spiritual loneliness break down social loneliness, too.
I do think that the labyrinth is a great metaphor for our Lenten theme - the intertwining of our individual relationships with God and our relationships with each other. When we use the labyrinth, we each walk at our own pace, perhaps using our own mantras and focusing techniques, our own patterns of breathing and resting and prayer. But we are journeying toward the same center - union with God in Christ. We take the same path. We walk alone. Yet we are never walking alone.
One last caveat: being in community won’t solve everything - in fact, it creates all sorts of headaches and issues and stresses. As I’ve been continuing to explore the theme of loneliness and disconnection in contemporary society, I came across an interview with Rhaina Cohen, the author of Other Significant Others. Her book explores the importance of expanding and deepening our friendships. She makes a case for choosing to go above and beyond the typical American cultural norms that currently define romantic partnerships, the nuclear family, and modern neighbor dynamics.
Her interviewer, Ezra Klein, chimed in about his friend who lives in an intentional co-living community – a commune basically. “And I was asking her about this once, about these trade-offs,” Klein said, “And she said something that is always stuck with me, which is that she’s decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community. She wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection.”
You better believe that quote reminded me of church. Because no community is without trade-offs and downsides and conflicts and annoyances, no parish is ever ideal. But I’d rather be mired in the muck of community, a surge of imperfect people all striving together, wading around in the Jordan River, than standing alone in the cleanest of sanctified pools.
And it turns out, God prefers that, too. God chooses to plunge in with us.
Welcome to Lent. A time of purposeful solitude that points us back toward community. A time of reconnection with God and with each other.
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