Exodus 3:1-15 1 Corinthians 10:1-13  Luke 13:1-9 Psalm 63:1-8

When our daughters were completing the 3rdand 4thgrades, Roland and I made the decision to move them from the small rural Eastern NC elementary school, where they had been since kindergarten, to Raleigh. Thus, they began their school experience as 4thand 5thgraders in an entirely different environment from which they had been accustomed – where they had known everyone and their parents, to an urban environment where their many classmates were from an endless variety of backgrounds – where they knew no one.
Our older daughter, the academe, was devastated to be leaving her friends. This lasted for about 3 days, at which point she willingly admitted that for once in her pseudo adult life, Mama and Daddy were right about something; this change was for the better. However, our younger daughter, who at first was quite excited about the new adventure, grew more and more frustrated and melancholy. After a month or so, on a Saturday afternoon, when I went to investigate the sound of the blinds going up in her bedroom, I found her consumed in tears, her backpack packed and her heart determined to climb out of the third story window of our apartment and make her way back “home.”

A reality that I had failed to consider for this child who had grown up in her very small world and in the shadow of her academically gifted older sister was that from kindergarten through third grade, children learn to read; from third grade on, children read to learn. If children do not learn to read by third grade, school and life are difficult. Laura had smiled and stayed quiet, hiding her head in a book, and had managed to escape third grade without applying herself to the challenge of learning to read. Now she was in a foreign land where everyone and everything was unfamiliar to her, and she had no basic fundamentals to allow her to keep pace and find her way.
For most of us, our faith journey is comparable to one or the other of our daughters’ experiences. We could divide our faith journey into two stages. The first is the stage of our lives in which our image of Christianity is shaped and healthy fundamentals are tested and developed; our faith is somewhat legalistic and structure – Do this; Don’t do this. The second stage, is the stage in which we live into our life in Christ – where we really get down to the work of living and loving as God intends us to live and love – as Jesus Christ came to show us how to live and love. We wrestle with the big issues and listen for the little answers in our daily relationships.
Richard Rohr describes these as two major tasks of human life. “The first task,” Br. Richard says, “is to build a strong ‘container’ or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.”[1] Think of all the time we invest in the first stage of getting our education, finding our career, building a home, establishing relationships and community. Rohr suggests that it takes much longer to discover the second stage, which is “what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.”
As mature intentional Christians, we come to better understand what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing. With good nurturance and diligence, we move more quickly from one life task to the next, from the building-container-stage to the stage of filling ourselves or allowing ourselves to be filled with that that we are meant to hold.
Otherwise, we continue to struggle on and on to patch our faulty containers; expending our energy in directionless paths, mostly struggling unaware of the true reason for the underlying anxiety- anxiety that manifests itself in meaninglessness, in anger and bitterness, even violence. Too many in our world just keep trying uselessly to patch their leaky containers, allowing the fractures to grow larger and larger, never understanding that the problem is the misguided construction of their containers – the misguided understanding of God’s love and mercy for which there are no clear guidelines.
Lent is a time for this serious process of discernment. This time of self-denial of the traditional luxuries of our container allows us more focus on the existing contents and the potentially ever-broadening fractures of our container – what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing?
Through this Lenten discernment, we might find that, like the fig tree, what we often need is a good dose of manure. So, simply stated, Lent is the time we determine just how much manure we need thrown on us, manure that nurtures our fragile efforts toward growth in our understanding of what it really is to love and live as God intended. That manure is the basic fundamental of God’s mercy. With enough of the proper fundamentals we embrace God’s mercy, the burden of our past failures is lifted; we understand that we are fully and truly forgiven by God, redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is our sins that punish us, not God; God is merciful; God saw the suffering of his people and brought them out of Egypt to the Promised Land; God sent Jesus Christ to redeem us, to affirm his promise of mercy and redemption. Of all those in our lives who love us the most, God loves us more.

The second stage of our faith journey is our grasp of the reality of being filled with God’s love and mercy – filled to overflowing with God’s love and mercy – love and mercy for those who love us and for those who have hurt us, for those who have inconvenienced us, taken advantage of us – those who need to see what it is to be a container filled with God’s love and mercy.
Life is hard, perhaps hard beyond human endurance if our containers are not constructed with the nurturance and direction of God’s love and mercy, love and mercy that is only visible in our human relationships – we learn love and mercy from each other – we learn the absence of love and mercy from each other.

Truly grasping the miracle of God’s love and mercy, as best we can in our human state, is to discover the font that fills our containers as God intends. What we are meant to be doing when we are doing what we are doing is exemplifying the redemptive power of God’s love and mercy for those in need of healthier sturdier containers. In turn, we will move closer to a profound understanding of this Most Merciful God to whom we bring our confessions and find the full forgiveness of unconditional love. And, in turn, the world’s containers will overflow with unending love and mercy.

Blessed Lent.

[1]Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: 2011), xiii-xv, 2.