temptation – By Another Road

Original Home: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 22, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church. The lectionary text cited is Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7.

One of the truest things I have learned in life is that we don’t fully appreciate home until we have to leave it.

Now, I’ve moved around a lot—at one point I counted that, thus far in my 42 years, I’ve lived in approximately 28 different dwellings. Which means that on many, many occasions, I’ve engaged in that moving-day ritual of taking one final walk through the now-empty rooms you’re about to vacate.

You check the corners and the closets, making sure you haven’t forgotten anything. You see the nail holes in the walls; you notice the small cracks and scuffs that will soon be the only traces of you left behind. And you realize, in these final glances, that you will never again see that particular slant of light through the window pane ; you will never make dinner in that kitchen or hear familiar footsteps stomp down those stairs.

And, in my experience, it is always in this moment I feel that maybe I didn’t ever truly appreciate all the life that was lived within these walls. Maybe we just don’t know how to appreciate something fully until it’s time to let it go.

And so it’s right then, in the moment of departure, that we finally understand the preciousness of what we must now leave behind.

Why am I going on about this? It’s true, Matt and I are hoping to find a house at some point in the near future, so maybe I’m thinking about move #29. But it’s more so because of our Scripture readings this week, and especially that reading from Genesis, which I think is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood sacred texts there is. Stick with me a minute and you’ll see what I am getting at.

For millennia, this ancient story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden has been used to try and explain all of our problems, all of our pain, all the reasons why we need a holy Lenten season and why we are looking for a Savior in the first place.

And the familiar interpretation of the story usually goes something like this: Eve and Adam did a very bad thing. They disobeyed God’s instructions; they ate the fruit that was not for them, and they were punished accordingly. And we, as their descendants, apparently still bear their punishment in every fiber of our being. It’s the notion of original sin, as St. Augustine called it.

Because of that one primordial mistake, so this interpretation goes, all are inherently guilty and blameworthy, forever and ever. Bad news for us, and so we’d better pray that the God who made us will rescue us from a place of punishment which God also made.

I confess that this take on the story has always left me unsatisfied, like a phrase that doesn’t quite rhyme. I acknowledge the power of sin, but I also believe that love is the stronger force at work upon us.

And I especially struggle with the conventional approach to this text and its emphasis on original sin because it has been used, variously, to stereotype women as tempters who lead men astray; to depict creation as something flawed or suspect; and to make people feel guilty for simply being born or for daring to be who God made them to be.

So here’s the thing, and I am probably going to ruffle some theological feathers with this, but so be it: what if there was another way to understand Genesis?

Because I don’t think that original sin or crime and punishment are the primary lenses through which we should view the story of Eden or, frankly, anything else in the Christian story. We can respect them as one lens to consider, but I think we would do well to remember that some of these theologies were developed centuries after the gospels were written, millennia after the origins of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that there are other ways we can engage this text.

And I think you know this about me, but I am always looking for the Good News, for the story of God that speaks a true word to our deepest hopes and longings, and not just one that plays into our insecurities and fears.

So I’ve been asking myself, if not ‘original sin,’ then what else is this story of Eden really trying to get at? Why does it haunt us, follow us, shape us, even thousands of years on?

And that’s where my reflections on leaving home come to bear.

Maybe the key to the story is not the snake in the grass, or the forbidden fruit, or the blame game between Eve and Adam. Maybe instead it’s that bittersweet moment when their eyes are opened and God tells his children that they have grown too wise for Eden now. That they must go out and make their way into the the world as it is, with good and evil both.

And I thought of how the two of them, as I myself have done 28 times, must have taken one last glimpse of Eden before they left it. How they might have noticed the cracks in the garden soil or the certain slant of light through the trees. How they might have traced their fingers across the branches and the flowers and the garden gate and realized they would never again call this place home. And that they were therefore the first to understand the preciousness of what we must leave behind.

And I realized that this longing is our true inheritance from those first ancestors. Eden is not primarily a story about punishment. It is a story about leaving home.

This makes better sense to me as a foundational human story. Because let’s be honest, we don’t need the Bible to reveal to us that life is full of hardships and compromises. They are all around us, every day.

But it is helpful to know that, hard as life is, all of us carry within us this lingering sense of something deeper, something more true—not an original sin, but an original home. A place that was ours, once. A shelter whose walls and corners and certain slants of light still haunt our dreams. A place that we are trying to find again somehow.

For me, the Eden story tells us that the deepest issue of the human heart is not depravity so much as it is loneliness and lostness. We just want to go home again. To stumble back through the garden gate and collapse into someone’s waiting arms. And what’s expressed in this story of Adam and Eve is the fear that we never can.

If this is true, then the whole texture of the Biblical story begins to reveal itself in a different way. Suddenly we will see the notion of ‘home’ everywhere: the promise made to Abraham; all the wandering through various wildernesses; the dream of a land of milk and honey; the stories of exile and return; of invasion and liberation; of tumbling walls and rebuilt temples. And finally, the story of Jesus, who stares down the temptations wrought by our deepest insecurities and shows us what home actually is, and where it is: in him.

And maybe someone is wondering: so what? Why would it matter that we set aside original sin for a minute and read Eden in a different way? Greg mentioned in his sermon on Ash Wednesday that part of Lent is reflecting anew on Scripture, and I would suggest that the stakes of the foundational stories we tell are actually quite significant.

Because consider this: a church shaped only by the notion of our original sin will inevitably become a Christianity focused on purgation and punishment and a pervasive sense of unworthiness. It will invite us to look into the eyes of our neighbors (and at ourselves) and ask, are you saved, including from your own self? Are you good enough? Are you pure? Do you actually belong here? Or is the seed of the forbidden fruit still on your lips?

But if our life in the church is about seeking home, about walking each other home, as the saying goes, with Jesus as our guide, then perhaps we can simply look into the eyes of our neighbors, and at ourselves, and say, oh yes, my friend, I know what it feels like to be hungry. To be far from wherever you started. I, too, am trying to find my way back. I, too, am still looking for the garden gate and for that certain slant of light. I’m still hoping there is some place where we can truly appreciate life as we live it. A place we don’t have to leave behind.

So maybe, friends, this Lent, we can look for the way back there together. Maybe we can find home in each other, if nothing else. Maybe that’s what this whole story was trying to tell us all along.

And, call me a heretic if you will, but I think when we can speak less of original sin and more of original home to one another, and believe in it, and try to build it, then wherever they may be, Adam and Eve will breathe a sigh of relief. And they will say to each other: finally, finally, our children understand what it was actually about.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll make it back to Eden after all.

Sandwich: A Sermon

Preached on the First Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

Matt and I started new diet and fitness routines this past week. Our wedding is coming up in just a few months, and we decided we’d both like to be looking and feeling our best as the big day approaches. So we’ve committed to a plan and we’ve mostly got our groceries stocked up for it and our exercises mapped out. And it’s Lent, no less, so the perfect time for a little healthy self-discipline, right?

Yes, it’s all lovely in theory. That is, until I have to measure out my little bowl of oats for breakfast and then put together my grim little sandwich for lunch—no cheese, no mayo, no meaning in life. And let me tell you, by about 3PM I start to get a wild look in my eyes. Right about now I’d give just about anything for a big sandwich with all the fixings.

Maybe you can relate; self-discipline of any sort is hard work. My only consolation in this instance is that it’s something we are doing together and we’re encouraging each other as we go. And maybe we won’t be perfect in our efforts, but we’ll give it our best. And at the end of the process, it will be a beautiful wedding day no matter what.

But in the meantime, in the spirit of what I preached on Ash Wednesday, I am hungry. And so, maybe unsurprisingly, I was particularly struck this week by the story of Jesus and his fasting and testing in the wilderness, a version of which shows up every year on the first Sunday in Lent. There were absolutely a few rocks I spied here and there this week that I was wishing would turn into bread. And maybe because I was feeling rather “hangry,” as they say, I will confess to you that this time around with the text I found myself a little bit annoyed by Jesus’ stoic forbearance.

One does not live by bread alone. Oh really, Jesus? Sure. I love that for you.

But, my own selfish appetite issues aside, I did also wonder: what of all the people who literally don’t have enough bread to eat each day? And the people who could use a little more human comfort and safety? Aside from the sense that Jesus is really good at fasting, what sort of good news is this story supposed to convey to the rest of us?

Because what occurred to me in my caloric deficit, maybe for the first time, really, is that on their most basic level the things that Jesus is tempted by—food, authority, and safety—are not inherently evil things. They are the things that all of us need to survive and operate in this world. We need our daily bread. We need some ability to exercise agency and authority in order to keep things working and to pursue necessary change. And every single one of us, when we’re in danger, want to be protected and preserved. These are not intrinsically bad things. They are just human things.

So what, then, is the purpose of Jesus being tested by the devil in this way? Is it a reminder that our basic human desires are easily corruptible? Or is it simply that we are supposed to be impressed by Jesus’ holy restraint and realize that we ourselves are not as strong as he is? That we need to pray for superhuman levels of detachment and determination in order to follow him to the Cross?

Maybe. There are probably good lessons to be found in some of that.

But I have seen and heard some of the fruit of that kind of theology, the kind that denigrates human needs and bodily realities, and too often it ends up diminishing people or telling them to deny their basic worthiness. And maybe it’s because I am tired of heavy-handed, hypocritical moralizing in the world…or maybe it’s because I haven’t had a carb in seven days…but I am really not up for any theologies of shame this Lent.

So I was thinking there must be something more tangible and human and humane for us here, right? Love must have been at work in the wilderness, right?

I think so, yes, and again it comes back to a sandwich—though not the sandwiches of my recent obsession.

You see, this story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness—which, if you only read today’s lectionary, comes across like the solitary, noble quest in the archetypal hero’s journey—is actually part of a broader whole. It is sandwiched—get it?—between two really important pieces of the gospel narrative. We miss this when all we hear is today’s reading. As is often true in Scripture, we have to step back and look at the bigger picture.

On one side of this story sandwich in Luke, there’s the account of Jesus’ baptism and then his family tree. Then, on the other side of the temptation story, we see Jesus preaching in his hometown of Nazareth and calling his first disciples. And this sandwich structure is nearly identical in the other Synoptic gospels. It’s a literary structure that’s actually used many times, especially in Mark, called the Markan Sandwich (really), lest you think this whole sermon is just some hunger-induced rabbit hole.

So in today’s case, on both sides of Jesus’ experience in the wilderness, we find him embedded in stories of community—the community of the baptized; the community of Jesus’ ancestors; the faith community he grew up in; and this new Kingdom-oriented community he sets about to build with his disciples.

This pattern is not accidental. The gospel writers are trying to tell us something with this sandwich, something that our individualistic culture could easily miss: Jesus’ time in the wilderness only makes sense in the context of community. It is not about going it alone and conquering ourselves through force of will in order to be perfect and pure. It’s about remembering who we are and where we come from and the vision of community that sustains us when we come up against the inevitable deprivations and challenges and urgent questions of life.

The true test of the devil here is not actually about food or authority or safety—it is whether Jesus will succumb to the temptation to pursue these things by himself or for himself alone.

And Jesus could resist this temptation because he already carried within himself the one thing that the devil doesn’t understand and cannot defeat—that deepest and most communitarian sort of love which is the love of God. Jesus was full of the Spirit of the communal, Three-in-One God, which means he knew he never truly alone in the wilderness, but knit into everyone and everything else, and responsible to everyone and everything else, always.

Community is what strengthened him. Community is what kept him focused. Because Jesus knew:

Bread is good; but it is meant to be shared in community so that none go hungry. Power and authority can be good to get things done; but they are meant be balanced and guided by the wisdom of diverse voices in community. Safety and protection are good; but everyone should be included in the circle of care that is community, because everyone deserves to live without fear. That’s what the Kingdom of God looks like.

And by the way, don’t talk to me about the notion of a “Christian nation” unless that’s the sort of thing you have in mind. I’m a man who *hasn’t had creamer in his coffee for a week* and my patience for nonsense is stretched thin.

Now, we are not Jesus, of course. So how do we stay true to all of this, especially when things get scarce or scary like they might feel right now? Well, as it happens, that’s what church is for. It is this community that both reminds us we are not alone, and that we cannot and should not trust only in ourselves. It is this place where we are sandwiched in by grace, communing with our ancestors in faith through the liturgy, and building the future together with God’s help. And how deeply nourishing it all is.

So if we would renounce anything this Lent, let us renounce the lie of a rugged individualist Jesus. And let us renounce the lie of a go-it-alone salvation. God came to be in community with us. And God came to help us build a new community of hope with bread for all who need it.

And yes, God knows and loves and calls to us each, intimately and closely, and God walks with us through our own private wildernesses, but the Christian story is not a “me, myself, and I” story, and it is not an “us vs. them” story. It is an “all of us” story.

And right now, what all of us are being called to do in perilous, exhausting times is to build this community and make it stronger and more vibrant than ever. To baptize and confirm and study and pray. To show up and speak out and make calls and advocate and supply basic needs. To dream and wonder and connect and listen. To receive Sacrament and to become sacramental people, together. For each other. For the world that God so loves.

And if we do that? Well, then even in our present wilderness, it might just be enough to send the devil packing.

And for those of us who are feeling a bit hungry for hope and purpose and possibility—well, I suspect it will be…like a big, glorious sandwich. With all the fixings.

Jesus & Johnny Appleseed: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on the First Sunday in Lent, February 18, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 1:9-15.

I love quirky historical sites and stories and figures. So you won’t be too surprised to learn that back in 2019, when I was getting ready to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana to serve at my former parish, I was deeply excited to learn that the city is the final resting place of John Chapman, better known to the world as Johnny Appleseed.

Many of you know probably know who Johnny Appleseed is, but just in case you don’t recall, he was a real person in American history who has taken on a somewhat legendary status. He roamed the countryside in the early 1800s, starting in his native New England and moving westward, introducing and cultivating apple orchards in regions where apples were previously unknown, including much of the Midwest.

And after a lifetime spent wandering about with his bag of seeds, in 1845, while visiting Fort Wayne, he died unexpectedly. So you can visit his gravesite there, and there is also a Johnny Appleseed Park & campground and a Johnny Appleseed Festival and the local baseball team is the Tincaps, in honor of the tin pot that Johnny supposedly wore as a hat.

And I recently discovered that there are a number of towns in Ohio, too, associated with Johnny: the Johnny Appleseed Museum is up in Urbana, and the last surviving tree planted by him still grows on a farm in northern Ohio. So there are a couple more road trips my partner, Matt, doesn’t know he’s signed up for yet!

But hopefully he’ll be fine with it, because the very first picture that Matt and I ever took together, the first documentation of our relationship, right after we met, is a selfie of us sitting on a bench with a statue of Johnny Appleseed. So he has a very special place in our personal history, too!

And if you’re wondering why on earth I am going on about Johnny Appleseed on the First Sunday in Lent, well, one of the reasons I find him such fascinating figure–one worthy of our consideration here today–is that John Chapman, while unusual, was not just an eccentric driven purely by some strange obsession with apples.

No, it so happens that he was a missionary, too, and by most accounts a kind and gentle one. He was a member of the Swedenborgian Church, a small Christian denomination that still exists, and as he traveled, planting and raising up small nurseries of apple seedlings, Johnny also distributed information about his Church, which was, especially for his time, a remarkably progressive and inclusive expression of Christianity.

And these two things—his love of the land, his desire to carpet it with fruitful plantings; and his love of humanity, his desire to offer people a fruitful and life-giving message: these were all bound up together in his years of roaming the hills and valleys we now call home, and the sweet fragrance of his mission lingers even today.

But you know, long, long before John Chapman ever set out with his pamphlets and his seed bag, there was another man who set out on a similar sort of mission, out beyond his familiar homeland, out into the world, out into the wilderness, for purposes deemed strange by some at the time and yet which have left their own lingering sweetness.

Of course, I am talking about Jesus of Nazareth, whom we encounter in today’s Gospel, driven by the Spirit, driven by the mysterious designs of God, out from the river’s edge an into an unknown, untamed place. He did not wear a tin cap, but we can be assured that people still didn’t know what to make of this man on a mission, propelled by his unconventional, radical form of love, his vision of a harvest that nobody else could quite imagine.

But we might wonder—if Jesus was the Son of God, if he was already God in the flesh, why did he first go on this journey into temptation we hear about today? What was the point of these 40 days in the wild?

We could interpret it a number of ways, but it has not been lost on some observers that, especially in Mark’s version of Jesus’ trip into the wilderness, where he is tempted by Satan and is in the company of both wild beasts and ministering angels, that Jesus is, in some sense, not going somewhere new but going back somewhere that God knows very well. He is returning back to the Garden of Eden, where humanity first met the beasts and the angels and Satan, the one who tempts us away from our God-given place in creation.

Let’s do a little imagining together. In this unnamed wilderness we hear about today, a tangle of wild plants and harsh sunlight, we might imagine Jesus stepping back through the rusted, broken gate of that original garden, now long abandoned. We might imagine the cherubim guarding the lost portals of Eden, lowering their flaming swords in deference to the Son of God passing through.

We might imagine him walking amongst the derelict seed beds and the withered trees, meeting the wild beasts who no longer remember the names once given them by Adam.

And perhaps we might imagine, too, Jesus encountering that ripe fruit of the tree of knowledge on an old gnarled branch—the fruit once bitten by the children of God, when they did not know the price of their hunger.

And if this is so, if Jesus is, somehow, in the wilderness, also standing in the ruins of Eden and holding the fruit, bright and beguiling as a ripe apple, considering what to do with temptation,

perhaps this is the purpose of his journey: to discover what Adam and Eve did not—that the fruit of the sacred tree, the fruit of the mind of God, wasn’t meant to be consumed for ourselves—it was meant to be shared. It was meant to be broken open and given away. It was meant to be spread throughout the world. Its seeds were meant to be planted far and wide.

And so:

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming (we might say sowing) the good news of God… “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Jesus is what John Chapman would become and what we are invited to be as well: planters of the seeds of God’s Kingdom. Our journey through Lent, our journey through life, isn’t meant to be one where we stay indoors and gorge ourselves on private spiritual insights, as if heaven were an apple pie baked for us to eat all by ourselves.

No, we, too, are participants in the planting of a future harvest. Following in Jesus’ footsteps, we are the propagators of the seeds of Eden, the seeds of a paradise that is no longer lost to us. We, too, are a people called to carpet the land with the fruitful plantings of love and truth and mercy and knowledge and care—day by day, step by step, seed by seed.

Now, I don’t imagine that most of us will take this Lent as an opportunity to put a tin cap on our heads and head out to roam the world as missionaries and seed-planters—though maybe the world would look a whole lot different if more of us did so in our own community.

But what Jesus and Johnny Appleseed can teach us today is that small, faithful choices have transformative impacts. So maybe this Lent you will volunteer at our burgeoning neighborhood Laundry Ministry. Or maybe you will attend a Thursday Eucharist or a Bible study.

Maybe you will write to your representatives and tell them to advocate for the poor, the hungry, the war-torn, the forgotten. Maybe you will call someone who is lonely or invite someone to church with you. Maybe you will simply tell someone that you love them, that you forgive them, that you see how hard they are trying, how far they have come. Maybe you will tell yourself these things.

Maybe you will prune the overgrown bushes of paradise.

Maybe you will teach the wild beasts their long-forgotten names.

Maybe you will remember your own long-forgotten name: beloved Child, disciple, seed-bearer of the Kingdom of God.

And maybe, come Easter, we will already see the green shoots of something new growing up from the earth, from our hearts and our souls. If so, it will have been a good and holy Lent.

…

You know, there is one more memorial to Johnny Appleseed, just down the road in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. There is a statue of him, holding an apple sprig up to the sky, as if seeking a blessing upon it from heaven. And carved into the stone, there is a fitting summary of all that he was. It says:

SAINTLY IN HIS DAILY LIFE. HE LOVED LIFE IN ALL ITS FORMS AND HAD A JOYOUS WILL TO HELP THE EARTH YIELD ITS FRUITS.

The same could be said about the seed-planter from Nazareth.

And someday, we pray, it might be said of us, too.

No Regrets: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 6, 2022, the First Sunday in Lent. The lectionary text cited is Luke 4:1-13, Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

We inhabit an unsettled moment. That statement is true on many different levels, but in this instance I am referring to something deeper and more elemental than the news headlines. I am thinking instead about the changing of the seasons that accompanies our entry into Lent in the northern hemisphere. Amid the turbulent moods of early spring, when we are caught up in the vacillating space between ice and dewdrops, between dirt and blossom, between the cradle and the Cross, there is a keener sense perhaps, of the fertile mix of decay and growth that characterizes our lives on this earth. On Ash Wednesday, the cold mud of winter was imprinted on our brows, and eventually on Easter Day we will convulse with joy among the fields of lilies, but for now we are held in the tension of the time-being, suspended in the middle of frost and flower, mortality and miracle.

Lent is the pungent season when life and death speak to one another. Too often we keep these two realities isolated in separate corners of our minds, so it is good for us to listen to their conversation over the next several weeks, to notice how life and death layer upon and fertilize the other, both in the Liturgy and in the world around us. Lent is when this life—the delicate, earthy existence we have been given—is brought into clarity and focus by accepting its brevity and, indeed, sometimes its cruelty and brokenness. But it is also a season for celebrating that life, for rediscovering the urgency of living deeply and well while we have the chance, before it is too late, and we go down to the dust once more.

There was an article that became popular online several years ago, written by a hospice nurse. In it, she reflected on the conversations she’d had with the countless people she’d cared for in the final weeks and days of their lives, and she shared the top five regrets that people expressed as they prepared to die. They were as follows:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

And while these five regrets might not be true for every person in every time and place, I think they are striking, because they point to the heart of the things that matter when everything else falls away, when there are no illusions left to hide behind, when the wind blows cold across the bare fields and we remember the trace of that muddy cross on our brow. We might say they are the insights of a Lenten spirit, from the passage between life and death, the unadorned space between the seasons of the soul.

And they reveal that when we die, the thing we might grieve the most is simply that we never allowed ourselves to truly live. That we didn’t connect with others. That we didn’t connect with our deepest selves. And that, having been tempted by other distractions, we might face the great mystery of eternity without having deeply savored the great mystery of now.

God knows this is our struggle. God has always known this. And that is why, I suspect, we see the same struggle woven through God’s own life among us in Jesus. Consider today’s gospel passage from Luke, when Jesus is compelled by the Holy Spirit to enter the wilderness and submit to the temptations that humanity has always faced—the temptation to control our own destiny rather than trust in God’s providence, to adorn ourselves with the false security of power and prestige and material comfort; to laud safety and strength rather than vulnerability and humility.

These were the same temptations that Israel faced in the wilderness and again when they reached the Promised Land. They are the same temptations that each of us must contend with in our own particular way. And if and when we succumb to them, the result is the same—disconnection, distrust, inauthenticity, the cultivation of a brittle and strident spirit, and then, at the end, a litany of sorrows that might sound something like:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d expressed my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

But Lent is an opportunity to pull back from this trajectory in our own lives. And Jesus, in a Lenten moment of his own in this Gospel, shows us how to do so. He faces the temptations of the devil—those temptations to pattern his life in self-serving ways, to become something that he is not, and he chooses, instead, to be exactly who he is, exactly who his Father wills him to be. Which is to say, he chooses relationship, he chooses simplicity, he chooses depth, he chooses trust, he chooses love. And the words he speaks are a ray of light burning away the frost, a budding promise to us, even now, as we wait for the spring:

One does not live by bread alone.

Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.

Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Simple, ancient words, drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures. True words. Words that are almost like a death, in that they remind us of the fleeting nature of most of the things we fixate upon and obsess over, and instead call us back to what is eternal. These are the words that allowed Jesus to stay focused on who he was, and they can do the same for us whatever our journey looks like. They are the words that invite us to a life—and a death—that is the opposite of regret.

How do we get there? How do we live as Jesus chose to live? How do we die as Jesus chose to die?

1. Have the courage to be yourself. Abide deeply in the love that is inside of you, the love that God gave you to share with others.

2. Don’t work so hard, at least not for the things we usually give away our lives for. Work for God’s kingdom, and rest in knowing that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. You were created for wonder and praise more than you were for achievement.

3. Express your feelings. Jesus certainly did. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable, to be wrong, to show your weaknesses, because they are part of what will save you. We worship a God who was crucified before he was glorified.

4. Stay in touch with your friends, and with all of the important people in your life. They are the most likely place where you will experience the love of God firsthand, and are thus the true treasures of this world.

5. Let yourself be happy. Let yourself love this imperfect world, whether it’s deep winter or glorious spring or the messy middle with all of its unanswered questions. Let yourself be dazzled by the mystery of existence, by the mystery of God’s love, embrace it while you live, and then you will regret nothing, because you will experience everything.

This is the life Jesus chose in the wilderness. This is the life he invites to choose. And this is the strange, holy, in-between season where we must make our choice. This is Lent.

And so here we stand, with a trace of mud on our brow, leaning into the light; children of the broken earth, children of God. Tempted, yes. Stumbling, sometimes. Seeking, always.

But loved, always loved, in death and in life, in winter, and in spring, and in the glorious mystery that is beneath and beyond all seasons.

And with a love that powerful, that eternal, that true, there is nothing to regret.