From the Pastor
In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard tells this little story: Once upon a time, an Eskimo hunter went to see the local missionary who had been preaching in his village. “I want to ask you something,” the hunter said.
“What’s that?” the missionary asked.
“If I did not know about God and sin,” the hunter said, “would I go to hell?”
“No,” said the missionary, “not if you did not know.”
“Then why,” asked the hunter, “did you tell me?”
I suspect a lot of us might ask that same question. Would anyone even think about something like sin if preachers didn’t preach about it? And yet, I wonder if the abandonment of the language of sin would really make sin go away. For, in the words of preacher and author, Barbara Brown Taylor, “Long before there were preachers, churches, or even organized religions, there were essential human experiences of community and alienation, of connection and disconnection from the divine…Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human beings will continue to experience alienation, deformation, and death no matter what we call them. Abandoning the language will simply leave us speechless before them and increase our denial of their presence in our lives.”
And perhaps that is at least part of what Lent is about…finding the language to express the alienation and disconnection in our lives and finding the hope that new connections can be made. I once heard the forty days of Lent described as an “Outward Bound for the soul.” Lent is an invitation to take some time to go it alone with God; to join Jesus in the wilderness and look deep into our own hearts and souls. The struggle with evil and pain and brokenness in our world begins with the struggle with evil and pain and brokenness within ourselves. I would rather not go there, but I must go there. The journey begins. And know this: there is One who walked that lonesome valley before us and who walks it with us even now. And on the other side, life, true life, awaits.
Gene
