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Confession: mornings are not always my best time. And Sunday mornings, when I’m trying to get myself and my children up and moving, are especially not always my best. As much as I am loathe to admit it, there are many Sunday mornings when we finally get to the car after having yelled myself and my children there.

These words are hitting differently this year as we reimagine faith. In fact, these verses are so well-known to those of us who have been Christians for any length of time, I wonder if their power has diminished for us. Or at the very least, if we have stopped getting curious about how they speak to our lives.

Sometimes Paul can get so wordy, and the 4th and 5th chapters of Romans are prime examples of this! However, in this two-verse nugget, I was struck today by how my faith comes to me as a gift in part because of one person – Abraham – who trusted God’s unbelievable promise.

The Lord will preserve you from all evil and will keep your life. The Lord will watch over your going out and you're coming in, from this time forth forevermore. —Psalm 121.7-8

For the most part, living as we do in a wealthy country with virtually anything we could want within a click, it is easy to get lulled into a sense of self-reliance. In fact, self-reliance has become a value in our culture, as we hear of people living the American dream wherein they start with nothing and become anything they want to be through hard work and persistence.

[Jesus answered,] The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” ~ John 3.8

Do you hear it?

If faith for Abram looked like taking the next right step into an unknown future, then Nicodemus coming to ask about Jesus was certainly a great act of faith – stepping out in the dark of night to learn more about who Jesus was.

How much did Abram lose when he responded to God’s command to leave his home and family, trusting that ‘the land God would show him’ would provide a future? I imagine the grief was palpable, and the fear great. Yet, in faith, Abram did the next right thing. He took the first step, then the next, and then the next. He couldn’t see the future, didn’t know what it held, but he knew who held it.

I was recently at worship and noticed that the series of stained glass windows in the sanctuary highlighted several important stories from the Hebrew scriptures. What struck me about the image of Adam and Eve in the garden was that the only things visible were their hands, and the serpent’s body was wound around them like shackles, resulting in the poignant picture of what it is to be ‘bound to sin.’

One Sunday a parishioner came to me and said, “I don’t think our worship is very welcoming. We say, ‘Good morning!’ and then proceed to talk about how awful we are with the confession and forgiveness. What must visitors think when we force them to talk about how bad we all are?”

Lent calls us to repentance, to turn from that which does not give life. This week I invite you to write or make a list of all that is getting in the way of you experiencing the fullness of life in Christ. What are those things in the congregation that no longer give life?

What defines you? What defines your faith community? Or rather, who defines you? In the gospel lesson for Sunday, the tempter tries to identify Jesus as the Son of God by the acts he performs rather than simply by who he is.

“In these post-COVID years, I find myself wondering if church is experiencing just such a wilderness. Everything has changed, and our communities are doing their best to pick up the pieces and carry on, only the pieces we have don’t seem to fit our world anymore.”