Ancient Practices for Chaotic Times

I don’t know about you, but for me it feels like Lent is right on time this year.

And as a pastor, I have a feeling the practices of Lent might be just what we all need, especially as a community of folks trying to follow Jesus in challenging times. 

Maybe it's because I have always found myself drawn to the cross. Maybe it is the beauty (and weirdness!) of ashes marked upon our heads on Ash Wednesday. Maybe it’s the focus on a radical kind of discipleship that leads toward the cross but also toward revolutionary resurrection.

Whatever it is, this season and this day, Ash Wednesday, have captured my heart and imagination over the years. Maybe that’s why I feel there might just be something about this particular Lent.

Or maybe it’s because the world is on fire. In many places, literally. In others, it’s still a metaphor. But a terribly apt one. You don’t need me to tick off a list of all the things going on around us in this reflection. That would be a harsh litany indeed.

But it might be helpful to name some of what so many are experiencing: fear, anger, despair, sadness, uncertainty. For me at least, and maybe for you too, one feeling stands out above the rest—the sense of being overwhelmed by it all, by the sheer volume of tragedies and challenges coming at us, driven by a nonstop news cycle that never follows through on a story before it’s off chasing the next big thing.

It's so much that it leaves us disoriented.

Lent is a time to reorient, reground ourselves, and renew ourselves, our communities, and our world.

As a preacher, it sometimes feels impossible to break through all the noise. And even if I break through, it might just be momentary. 

But practices can carry us beyond the moment and into a new way of living. Lent offers us three tried-and-true practices to take up as we wind our way through the scriptural stories that lead us toward the hope of a resurrected world: prayer, fasting, and doing mercy.

At a time when the powers that be not only seem to have the upper hand but appear nearly unstoppable, Jesus reminds us that these ancient practices are ways of making justice, not just familiar but ultimately pious rituals.

Prayer is stopping, if even for just a moment, in order to hold our hearts and bodies in God’s presence. Maybe there are words. Maybe not. But it is the intentional holding of space to recognize God that is the basis of all authentic prayer.

Fasting isn’t just giving something up. Fasting is protest anchored in personal sacrifice. It is a cry to God for peace, for healing, for the world to be set to rights.

Doing mercy is not just alms, an offering given to care for the needs of others. Doing mercy is a way of living in relationship that seeks to honor all the ways that we are bound to one another as human beings, especially the most vulnerable in our communities. 

We can’t just run away from our world, though we might wish we could. And we aren’t called to fight against the world on its own terms, mimicking styles of engagement that will never lead to reconciliation. There is, and always has been, a different way.

We find that way when we tend to our heart. Not the blood pump we need to keep us alive. But the essential core of our humanity we need to lead us toward life. 

These ancient practices shape our way of living by cultivating room within our hearts for a clear-sighted love of God and neighbor (and even enemy). They can give us space to breathe again. They can soothe our anxious thoughts and quiet our fearsby helping us to see that as sin-sick and chaos-wracked as our world seems to be, it is also unfailingly awash in the grace of God—if we have but eyes to see and ears to hear. 

When we reclaim our hearts, we regain our ability to perceive our world and ourselves as we truly are.

So this Lent, whatever level of disorientation you are feeling, I pray these practices may make time for you to breathe, to feel whatever you are feeling, and to entrust it to the God who loves you boundlessly.

Whatever you are holding onto, or wrestling with, may you know the God of mercy is with you in the messiness, in the uncertainty, and in the glimpses of grace all around us.