by Bishop Mariann | Mar 6, 2025
After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.
Luke 4:1-2
Among the biblical images that speak to our life experiences, surely wilderness is particularly helpful now. I am grateful for Lent this year, the season patterned after the forty days Jesus spent being tested in the wilderness and the forty years the people wandered in the wilderness.
In whatever wilderness you find yourself in, I pray that you experience Lent this year as a gift. May you know Jesus’ presence as a source of consolation and strength, even as this season touches upon the harder sides of life and invites us to practices of confession, letting go, and acknowledgement of our mortality.
There is nothing easy about being in a wilderness, particularly when it is thrust upon us by circumstances beyond our control. Yet there is strength and hard-won wisdom that comes to us there, and gifts that God longs to give.
The first—and perhaps hardest—wilderness task is to accept that we’re there. Acceptance doesn’t come easily, and in my experience there are always setbacks. I still wake up in the middle of the night grieving where we are now as a nation and for the suffering of so many. It’s tempting to look away, think of someone else to blame, or fall into despair, but no matter how we got where we are—as individuals, families, communities, or the nation—the fact remains that once we’ve landed in a wilderness, we can’t do anything constructive until we accept our new reality.
One reason why acceptance is so hard is that we don’t know how long our wilderness time will last. In the Bible, forty is a symbolic number, signifying a long, uncertain time. We can take some consolation in knowing that wilderness experiences, however long, do not last forever. Like the people of Israel, we are moving through it, however slowly, even when we can’t see our destination.
We’d like to move quickly through the wilderness, and sometimes that’s possible, presuming all goes well. But when things don’t go as we had hoped, the get-through-it-as-fast-as-possible mindset can lead to added frustration, anger, and despair.
Those who have been through years of wilderness teach us that it’s best to begin with the sober realization that we may be here for some time. It’s a hard truth to accept, but it allows us to breathe, look around, and become curious about wilderness terrain. Acceptance gives God more room to work within and through us, changing us in the process, that when we leave, we will have grown in important ways. Sometimes it feels as if we’ll never leave, but by grace, we learn to make our peace with that prospect too.
It turns out that there is good work to do in the wilderness. We begin by simply paying attention—not necessarily doing anything right away, but listening and observing the world from this new vantage point. There’s something about the wilderness that stops normal life in its tracks, that for all its difficulty, can lead to good. It enables us to see and hear truths we would otherwise miss, which can’t help but broaden our understanding and deepen our compassion.
Another wilderness task God invites us to is to take stock of our lives. The Benedictine author Joan Chittister puts it this way: “Courage, character, self-reliance, and faith are forged in the fire of affliction. We wish it were otherwise. But if you want to be holy, stay where you are in the human community and learn from it. Learn patience. Learn wisdom. Learn unselfishness. Learn love.”1 As we learn these things, we can face almost anything, and we also let go of some of the things that, in the end, don’t matter. In the wilderness, our focus becomes clearer on what we have time for and what we don’t.
Most importantly, the wilderness is where we learn to place our trust in God—not because we are suddenly so spiritual, but because there is no other choice. We don’t have the answers; we can’t see our way; we stumble and fall. There are hard days when nothing goes right, and we lose things that are precious to us. Yet somehow, we are still here, and by grace, we keep going.
We’d all like a clear roadmap through the wilderness, but as the Rev. Sari Ateek reminded his congregation in a recent sermon, what faith gives us isn’t a map, but rather a compass—spiritual truths to guide us, and Jesus as our North Star. “Trust the compass,” he said. That’s what we hear Jesus do in his wilderness time. In the face of temptation, he held on to what he knew was true.
Thus we make our way. Stay close to your faith community this Lent, or if you are without one, now is a good time to find a church. We are stronger when we travel together.
1Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages (Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004), 33.
by Keely Thrall | Feb 26, 2025
As the Lenten season of reflection and renewal begins, we invite you to a special Evensong service at St. John’s Norwood on Sunday, March 9, at 5:00 pm.
Experience the profound beauty and spiritual depth of traditional Anglican choral music, interwoven with prayers and readings that draw us closer to the heart of God’s love and grace. This contemplative service will feature choral selections by English composers, including the Phos Hilaron “O Gracious Light” by modern English composer Andrew Walker, which is sung as the chancel candles are lit. While the choir sings on their behalf, worshippers are free to listen reflectively and offer to God their own thoughts and prayers—an appropriate start to the Lenten season of self-reflection and repentance.
We warmly invite you to join us live for this special Lenten service, followed by a reception in the Parish Hall. If you cannot attend in person, join us online.
More information is available at on our website.
by Bishop Mariann | Mar 25, 2024
Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Mark 8:31-38
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If you’re the note-taking type, you might want to take out your bulletins, or a piece of paper and a pen, or your phone. In a few minutes, I’m going to invite you to write something down to reflect upon during the coming week.
My topic this morning is what I believe to be the greatest paradox of the Christian faith. We find it expressed in the gospel text for today and also in the closing prayer of the marriage liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer:
Most gracious God, we give you thanks for your tender love in sending Jesus Christ to come among us, to be born of a human mother, and to make the way of the cross to be the way of life.”
That’s the paradox–the way of the cross as the way of life.
We just heard Jesus tell his disciples:
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
There it is again: the way of the cross as the way of life.
What on earth does that mean? How can a means of death be a way of life?
First a story, to remind us all of the meaning of paradox:
When our sons were in high school, we spent one family vacation mountain-biking in Costa Rica, which was every bit as adventurous as it sounds. It was also a lot harder than I had anticipated. Nothing in my years of tooling around on paved roads had prepared me for the terrain there. Riding uphill was exhausting; riding downhill was terrifying. Staring down vertical trails covered with enormous rocks and marked with huge holes, I would ride my brakes all the way down.
Our tour guide gently tried to teach me basic mountain-biking skills. “I know it doesn’t seem logical,” he’d say, “but the safest way to ride down a steep, rocky trail is to accelerate. You need speed to carry you over the rocks safely.” Intellectually, I knew that what he was saying made sense, but I could never get my body to believe that I wouldn’t be killed if I pedaled fast going downhill.
Such is the nature of a paradox. It’s something that goes against our common sense–a statement that seems contradictory, unbelievable, or absurd, but is, in fact, true.
We live with paradoxes daily. Our perceptions tell us that the earth is still and mostly flat, but the truth is that we live on a sphere spinning through space. In relationships, our instincts may be to rush in to help those we love in whatever way we can; but the truth is that there are times when doing so is not the most loving thing, that love also can look like holding back, creating space, allowing those we love to find their own way.
Conversely, our instincts sometimes tell us to pull back when a situation becomes too painful, when in fact what is needed is deeper engagement even when it hurts. I once heard an athletic trainer tell a group of aspiring young athletes that if they wanted to excel in their sport ( fill in here any other endeavor you would want to excel in), they would have to find “a new definition of fun,” one that included long, demanding hours of training and the sacrifices such training demands.
That’s the essence of a paradox–when what doesn’t seem true on the surface, in fact, leads us to a deeper truth or way of being to which we aspire.
Applying these insights into the realm of faith, we begin by simply acknowledging that the paradoxes of faith are many. They are, as the Prayer Book describes them in our Eucharistic liturgies, the mysteries of faith, those things that on the surface seem impossible, contradictory, or counter-intuitive, and yet we come to believe that they are true.
Surely Jesus expresses the ultimate paradox of faith in his assertion that those of us who want to save our lives must lose them, and those who lose our lives for his sake and the sake of the gospel will save them. He sounds like the Buddha when he matter-of-factly informs his disciples that he must undergo great suffering. For Jesus, suffering is not only a part of life, but essential to the spiritual path. He assumes that everyone has a cross to bear, and so the only question is whether we will rail against it or choose to carry it with some modicum of grace and find the life it brings.
But let’s drill down on suffering for a moment, for there are many kinds of suffering, not to be confused with each other. For example, some suffering is unnecessary and avoidable, and thus should be avoided. There’s nothing to be gained by needless suffering, senseless suffering, or what some psychiatrists call false suffering, that is, the pain we experience as a by-product of avoiding something else. Carl Jung once wrote that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. In other words, sometimes we’d rather choose one form of suffering that isn’t necessary in order to avoid the cross that is ours to bear.
Nor should the universality of suffering make us complacent to the sufferings of others and the harmful ways that we cause suffering, or benefit from the dehumanizing suffering of others.
How, then, can we distinguish needless suffering from the suffering of our own particular crosses?
One distinction might be in the fruits of suffering, whether or not the suffering takes us anywhere or keeps us spinning in place like a hamster on a treadmill. Is it suffering that makes us more of who we are or confirms our fears and keeps us small? The kind of suffering Jesus endured and that he encourages us to embrace always has redemption of some kind on the other side. In contrast, the pain of false suffering, while real, is pain that goes nowhere. “Choose your pain,” a wise person said to me at an important crossroad in my life. “Whichever path you choose will involve pain. The question is, which pain carries the promise of life?”
There’s a fair amount of language in the Scriptures that refers to a process of dying to self in order to live for Christ, or sacrificing self, as Jesus says today, in order to gain eternal life. But I clearly remember what someone told me in my early twenties, “If you don’t have a self to give, then there isn’t much sacrifice involved.” It’s important to remember, particularly in youth or stages of immaturity, that if we rush too quickly to the part of faith that involves sacrifice without knowing who we are or what we have to offer, then we’re simply avoiding the hard work of becoming a self in the first place.
So with all those caveats firmly in place, let’s move now to the hardest way to determine whether a cross is ours to bear. It’s the one that comes to us and we must accept, no matter the sacrifice required, because we have no choice. These are the crosses thrust upon us and the only question is that of our response. The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister writes that “the will of God for us is what remains of a situation after we try without stint and pray without ceasing to change it.”
These crosses require us to let go of something–something that we love, or hoped for, or worked toward–and to let it go for the sake of a greater love, or, because life demands it, even though we wished for something else. And it hurts. It hurts as much as cutting off a limb would hurt. But the paradox, the mystery of faith is this: in the bearing of our cross, when it’s ours and we know that it’s ours, God gives us more of ourselves in return, selves grounded in the love of Christ, for us and through us.
I don’t know how this works. I only know that it does.
The key is to accept the cross for what it is—the hardest possible thing asked of us—and to embrace it as our destiny, even if we didn’t choose it and would run far from it if we could.
The journey of acceptance is a long one, and there is nothing to be gained from shaming ourselves for struggling to accept the suffering we would never choose.
Two close friends of mine have lost their spouses recently, both of whom had been married for over forty years. They both speak of how hard it is to accept that their life-long partner is gone. They aren’t reconciled yet to the cross they must now bear, though one, whose husband died last summer, has fewer days when she wakes up in acute grief when she remembers that she is alone.
On the path of acceptance, we feel a gradual shift inside, as we take in this new, unwelcome reality and befriend it. Doing so, we become larger inside, with room for this pain to be a part of us as a source of grace for others. We make room for Christ within, a room that he occupies with characteristic humility and love, helping us to become even more of the self we were created to be, even as we’re being stripped away of parts of ourselves that we hate to lose.
Lent is a particularly fruitful time to consider your life through the paradox of the cross, and to consider the particular cross that is yours to accept, through which God’s grace may flow.
We’ve come to the note taking part now: I ask you to write down, or hold in your heart, and name for yourself, if you can, the particular cross that is yours to bear. Don’t worry if nothing comes to mind, or if the examples that surface seem trivial in comparison to the suffering of others. Be honest with yourself, and with God.
Think, too, of the people in our society or in the wider world whom you admire for doing the same thing, those who have embraced the suffering thrust upon them for the sake of a greater good. By taking up their cross they are a part of Christ’s on-going redemption of the world.
In closing, I’d like to read to you a portion of an article that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in the early years of his public ministry. “Suffering and Faith,” was published in the religious journal The Christian Century in 1960. This was after the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and three years before the March on Washington. The editors wrote King back because in his first draft of the article, he never mentioned his own suffering, and they wondered if he might. He hesitated to write of his own suffering, he responded, but given that they had asked, he added a few paragraphs. They didn’t arrive in time to be included in the main article, but were printed later.
He wrote:
Due to my involvement in the struggle for the freedom of my people, I have known very few quiet days in the last few years. I have been arrested five times and put in Alabama jails. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not the recipients of threats of death. I have been the victim of a near fatal stabbing. I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer bear such a heavy burden, and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But every time such a temptation appeared, something came to strengthen and sustain my determination. I have learned now that the Master’s burden is light precisely when we take his yoke upon us.
As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.
There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation. The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God.
With whatever cross you are struggling to accept, remember that Jesus is here for you to help you shoulder it. Trust that God’s grace will not only sustain you, but honor your suffering and help transform the loss you experience into a way of life. Rest assured that others will know something of grace and love because of the cross you accept and carry. Amen.
by Bishop Mariann | Feb 22, 2024
Jesús llamó a la gente y a sus discípulos y les dijo: “Si alguno quiere seguirme, niéguese a sí mismo, tome su cruz, y sígame.”
Marcos 8:34
En los primeros días de la Cuaresma, es apropiado que nosotros, como cristianos, consideremos las prácticas que podríamos adoptar en observancia de este tiempo santo. Al hacerlo, en consonancia con la metáfora principal de la Cuaresma, optamos por entrar en un desierto espiritual–es decir, cualquier lugar de desafío, aprendizaje o vulnerabilidad–donde podamos crecer.
Las prácticas que elegimos para la Cuaresma reflejan y refuerzan esos momentos en los que nos entramos por voluntad propia en el terreno salvaje de la vida. Lo hacemos, me parece, cuando sabemos que ha llegado el momento de hacer un cambio. Tal vez estemos preparados para afrontar algo que hemos estado evitando o para dar el primer paso hacia la reconciliación. Tal vez haya llegado el momento de hacer las paces con una parte de nuestro pasado que no deja de resurgir en nuestra mente. También puede ser la llamada de una aventura anhelada, o una voluntad renovada de arriesgarnos por amor, tal vez negado durante tanto tiempo que hemos olvidado lo que se siente al dar un paso hacia el deseo de nuestro corazón.
A decir verdad, una parte de nosotros preferiría quedarse donde estamos, pero vamos al desierto de todos modos, porque sabemos que ha llegado el momento. Una forma de ver la Cuaresma es como una oportunidad para practicar la vida en el desierto, aceptando o abandonando voluntariamente algo para desarrollar los músculos de la vida en el desierto, de modo que estén ahí cuando los necesitemos.
Eso es todo para el bien, y como resultado seremos más fuertes.
Pero hay otro lado de la Cuaresma que normalmente sale a medida que pasan los días y las semanas. Tiene menos que ver con nuestras prácticas espirituales y más con cómo es la vida cuando el desierto viene a nosotros. Ocurre cuando nos acordamos de las luchas que siempre nos acompañan, justo debajo de la superficie, como la famosa “espina en la carne” del apóstol Pablo, que nunca lo abandonó sin importar cuántas veces oró a Dios para obtener alivio. O tal vez se trata del resurgimiento de una pena con la que creíamos haber hecho las paces hace tiempo. Tal vez ocurra algo que nos deje sin aliento y nos recuerda nuestra mortalidad. O el sufrimiento de este mundo nos golpea de un modo que no podemos evitar y nos preguntamos cuánto tiempo puede resistir el corazón humano.
Estas experiencias cuaresmales reflejan y refuerzan los momentos del desierto en la vida en los que no hay otra opción. En un instante, la vida tal como la conocíamos desaparece. Suena el teléfono con noticias que no esperábamos. La salud que hemos dado por sentada falla. Una mañana nos presentamos en el trabajo solo para que nos muestren la puerta. Muere un ser querido.
A diferencia de las disciplinas de incomodidad elegidas, el desierto que se nos presenta es desorientador, humillante y, a menudo, muy solitario. Seguimos buscando a nuestro alrededor aquello con lo que normalmente contamos, sugiere la predicadora Barbara Brown Taylor, y nos encontramos con las manos vacías.
Cuando llega el desierto, nuestra primera tarea es aceptar que estamos allí, lo cual no es fácil. Pero debemos aceptarlo, porque no podemos abrirnos camino a través de él si no reconocemos dónde estamos.
Este domingo, en la iglesia, escucharemos a Jesús decir a sus discípulos que, si quieren seguirlo, deben tomar su cruz. Lo que llama la atención es la visión realista de Jesús sobre el sufrimiento, no sólo como parte de la vida, sino como una dimensión esencial del camino espiritual. Él asume que todo el mundo tiene una cruz que llevar, y la única cuestión es si nos opondremos a ella o elegiremos llevarla con un mínimo de gracia, aceptándola como nuestra y encontrando la vida que trae.
En el misterio de la fe, hay buenas noticias, aunque “buenas” no es una palabra que utilizaríamos para describir la experiencia, al menos no al principio. Y nos hacemos un gran perjuicio cada vez que descuidamos el dolor que implica aceptar algo que hubiéramos dado cualquier cosa por evitar.
Estas experiencias en el desierto pueden llegar en cualquier momento. El tiempo de Cuaresma está destinado a darnos la gracia y la perspicacia necesarias para abrirnos camino a través de ellos. El primer paso es siempre la aceptación. Cada Cuaresma, independientemente de lo que ocurra en mi vida, me encuentro cara a cara con las cruces que todavía me cuesta aceptar. No puedo decir que me alegro, pero estoy agradecida por los recordatorios semanales en la iglesia de que no estoy sola.
Con cualquier cruz que estés luchando por aceptar, recuerda que tú tampoco estás solo en el desierto que no elegiste. Atrévete a confiar en que la gracia de Dios no sólo te sostendrá, sino que honrará tu sufrimiento y te ayudará a transformar la pérdida que experimentas en una forma de vida. Es más, otros sabrán algo de la gracia y el amor de Dios a través de ti, debido a cómo estás siendo cambiado a la semejanza de Cristo en el desierto que te ha llegado.
