Navigating the Beautiful and the Broken: A Lenten Reflection

By Rev Steve Tulloch

This has been a winter to remember in my little world! Snow has been in abundance. It has been cold but manageable, and we’ve enjoyed far more sunshine than in recent years. Although it has been glorious, it has also been difficult for our family. Covid, abdominal infections, and a skiing accident limited our activity significantly, and the placement of my aging mother in long term care has been logistically and emotionally demanding. These personal challenges have occurred, of course, within the wider context of provincial, federal, and international complexity and conflict.

As I reflect throughout this season of Lent, I am conscious of the reality that life frequently contains a similarly wide mix of beautiful and broken moments. Much of our life experience is a mix, or a cycle of responses to the ever changing, and often difficult situations we find ourselves in, or fear that we will. We experience personal pain, or look around at the stuff happening in our world, and our response at any given time might be fear, or trust, lament or praise, despair or hope. We move back and forth between the different responses, or sometimes feel them all at the same time.

One of the lectionary readings during this Lenten season was from Psalm 27, which has provided encouragement to scores of folks through the centuries. It serves as a perfect example of this response cycle, and has long been a source of comfort and encouragement to folks who are experiencing difficult situations. The fact that this Psalm moves back and forth between these various reactions of confidence and fear, praise and lament, has even caused some Bible scholars to suggest that it was originally two different psalms. I simply think it is a very real example of the way people process the realities of life, and is comforting because it ultimately captures the essence of the Christian faith, which is that God cares for us, is Present with us in the midst of suffering, and offers hope for ultimate restoration and redemption.

In the first stanza, the Psalmist alludes to a currently painful, or feared situation which was shaking to his hope or faith. In his situation, the fear was generated by his enemies and the threat of war or violence. Several times he reminds himself that he does, or at least is trying to, place his trust and confidence in God’s ability to bring clarity, protection, and rescue in the face of this threatening situation. At this very moment, we Canadians are feeling a sense of fear and uncertainty, as long-trusted alliances are being threatened. We aren’t sure how seriously to take our southern neighbour’s threats to our very existence as a country, and feel uncertain about our future, our way of life, and even our safety and especially that of our historically marginalized and vulnerable populations. A close friend told me recently that when she was a young woman sneaking down the back alleys to get into gay bars, her worst fears were that someone would just beat her up. Now, she feels even more afraid of what the future holds for folks like her within the queer community.

We acknowledge and sit with this kind of fear and uncertainty during this Lenten season, but also allow ourselves to embrace the Story that God is living and loving, good and great, powerful and present. In fact, in the next stanza the Psalmist specifically says that his desire is to always be in the house of the Lord to sing and declare these reminders of God’s loving care. This serves as a good call for God’s people to declare with one voice, and act out with creative commitment, the all-encompassing nature of God’s goodness and love. Of course, our declarations and actions bring healing and hope to others, but serve also as salve and solace to our own selves, during challenging times! It is in moments like this that we turn to God and cry out, like the Psalmist did in the middle stanza of the Psalm, “Do not hide your face from me”.

The irony of faith is that moments of uncertainty and trouble blur our eyes. Suffering can consume our attention, damage our perspective and result in us duplicating the harmful behaviour and passing the hurt on to others. In one of this season’s Gospel readings, Luke describes Jesus’ response to a warning from the Pharisees, “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.” Jesus replied, “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’ In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!” Luke’s two-fold repetition of Jesus’ commitment to live a life of healing and helping hurting folks, ‘day, after day, after day’ is instructive. Jesus’ promise of Presence in the midst of suffering, and comfort in the midst of our pain, echoes the final stanza of Psalm 27 which ends at the same place it started, with a reminder of God’s care, and invitation to lean and trust during every difficult situation.

In a few weeks, I will be grieving the 10th anniversary since we lost a young man whose life intertwined powerfully with our family and who taught us a great deal about the complexity of trust and faith and suffering. He came into our lives in his mid-teens, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, abandoned at birth by an addicted mom, a product of an inadequate foster care system, and a regular in youth detention facilities. In a loving foster home and church at 16, he began to trust a loving God and attempted to pattern his life after Jesus. For the second half of his life, he tried as hard as anyone I know, to live well, love generously, believe zealously, and behave responsibly. For a person as broken as he, this was a constant challenge, and his brokenness produced erratic and inconsistent behaviour at best. For a guy who thought stealing $250k of Hell’s Angel’s drug money, or posting the badge numbers of crooked police officers on Facebook, were good ideas, I think he taught me more about genuine trust in God than I had learned in 9 years of post-secondary Bible training.

I learned from this man that a legitimate faith in God can’t be simplistic and certainly doesn’t solve or easily remove the complex of pain and difficulty in our lives. He never quit trusting or trying. He was excited on his 33rd birthday because he had managed to live as long as Jesus! His unsolved, and violent death at the end of April that year, broke our hearts. The expectation that God will always, or even usually, remove the suffering of faithful folks is inaccurate and unhelpful. The truth is that we live our lives in a complicated reality, in which we constantly seek to remind ourselves and others with our songs, our words and our loving actions that God is caring and Present with us and through us in the midst of the fear and pain that is the common experience of us all.