This is the first Sunday of Lent 2021, but as Diana Butler Bass has named, in some ways, the entire last year has felt like a season of Lent. Lent is that liturgical season of forty days (not counting Sundays) prior to Easter, in which Christians have for centuries taken the time to examine our hearts and work to prepare them once again for the new life of the risen Christ.
There are many ways in which people have done this. Fasting is traditional, either abstaining from food altogether for set periods or abstaining from “luxury” foods like meat, chocolate, and so forth. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is often marked with services where foreheads are given an ashy black cross, the ashes made from burning last year’s Palm Sunday palms, mixed with a little olive oil. (I’ve done this myself!) Tearing of rags, as an echo of the repentant folks of scripture who rent their garments, is also done in some faith communities.
Taking time each day for scripture reading and prayer, perhaps utilizing a devotional like the ones from Brethren Press, is also a characteristic way to journey through Lent. But this past year. Oh my goodness. We’ve been isolated and social distanced. Watched the death toll and permanent health damage toll from Covid rise higher and higher. We witnessed George Floyd’s murder and lamented along with communities of color across the country, asking how much longer will systemic racism be allowed to claim the lives of our Black, Latinx, Native, and Asian brothers and sisters. Wildfires raged across the West like never before. A horrifying violent insurrection claimed the lives of half a dozen people at our nation’s capitol. One of the worst winter cold snaps in decades hit, which millions in Texas had to face without electricity or running water, in some cases even the grocery stores were closed and real hunger became part of the tragic equation.
And since Lent is a time to face our own sinfulness and mortality, it doesn’t really feel like we’re shifting away from anything else in order to do that this year. We have faced it, and faced it, and faced it, crying again and again, how long, O Lord? Will you hide your face from us forever? Do we really even need Lent this year? Can we just skip ahead to the resurrection and spring? Please???
I don’t know how helpful it is to remind ourselves that human beings have lived in periods of extended Lent throughout history. The persecution of the early Church and the last stand of the Jewish people as a nation at Masada. Pogroms and witch burnings and hundred years’ wars. Famine and earthquake and plague. The Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia. Genocide in Armenia, Rwanda, Darfur. When we cry out to the Lord, we are really only joining our voices to the millions upon millions who have cried out in desperation, agony, sorrow, and grief around the world and down the centuries.
There has got to be some good news in all this. Give something up for Lent? Give me a break.
The lectionary readings for the first Sunday in Lent this year match up the story of the rainbow as God’s promise to creation never again to destroy it through flood, and the story of Jesus’s baptism from the gospel of Mark, along with a snippet of the first letter of Peter that brings the two into conversation: describing how the building of the Ark saved Noah and his family “through water,” and baptism saves all those who believe in Jesus Christ “through water.” This passage begins by talking about Christ’s sacrifice, and includes a statement that to this day, biblical scholars find incredibly puzzling: “in which also [Christ] went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.”
Huh? What spirits? What prison? What on earth is Peter talking about, and how does this proclamation that Christ made (that isn’t really referred to anywhere else in scripture) connect with his sacrificial death and victory over the grave by his resurrection?
I’m glad you asked! Scholars, theologians, and preachers have answered the question of what on earth I Peter 3:19 means in an assortment of ways. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches especially, it is believed that during the time Jesus’s earthly body was dead in the tomb, he went down into hell – which for the Jews and the early Christians was conceived of less as a place of punishment than just the place where the souls of all dead people go – Jesus went down into hell on a jailbreak mission. He broke out all the souls of the faithful, from Adam and Eve to the thief who repented on the cross next to Christ, so that they might be reunited with God in heaven. The icons in the Orthodox tradition that depict this occurrence are known as the Anastasis, in Greek, or the Harrowing of Hell, in English.
In this icon, Jesus is standing on the gates of hell, reaching out to Adam and Eve in their tombs to bring them out and up into heaven, while other souls who have awaited their redemption after death are gathered on either side. The figure of Jesus is surrounded by a mandorla or body halo, and it’s got three layers: dark blue closest to Jesus’s body, light blue in the middle, and white with stars in the outermost layer. This is to indicate that Christ descended into hell in his transfigured state – the way he appeared on Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John, and was joined by Elijah and Moses, at the Transfiguration. The mandorla with the three successively lighter-colored layers is how iconographers depict what is called “taboric light” – the light of Mount Tabor.
Taboric light is very special. Most kinds of light are brightest at their source, right? If you turn on a lamp to read by, you want to sit right next to it, not across the room. But taboric light, the light that emanates from Jesus, is the opposite – it gets brighter and brighter the further it travels from Jesus, because it is reflected and amplified by all those who faithfully follow Jesus. I think that’s kind of cool.
You see, the death of Jesus looked at first like a victory for the powers of darkness, of sin and evil and death. The Son of God had taken on human form and lived among us, and was tortured and executed as a common criminal. The light went out. Evil won.
Except it didn’t. And I Peter 3:19, and the icons of the Anastasis show us, that even before Jesus was resurrected on the first Easter morning on earth, he was busy redeeming the souls of those who had already died.
This is very good news.
Have you ever wondered, or even worried about, what happens to those who die without ever becoming reconciled with God? Even if you’re a pluralist, and believe that there are many paths to God, it’s still a little troubling to realize how many people in human history have died without taking any of those paths. And if you’re not a pluralist, and have people you care about who are not Christian but follow some other faith tradition, or are “spiritual but not religious” or even atheist, this can be even more worrying.
What I Peter 3:19 and the Anastasis icons of it tell us, is that we do not need to worry about this.
This is because God’s time is not our time. All moments in time are equidistant from eternity. And the resurrection of Christ demonstrates that for God, death is not the last word.
Jesus went to proclaim redemption to the spirits in the prison of death, the tomb, hell – however you want to phrase it – because they hadn’t missed their chance. No one ever does. Alexander Mack was a universalist; he believed that all souls would eventually be reconciled with God. And if you accept this interpretation of I Peter 3:19 depicted in the Anastasis icons, that is a way to be both a faithful Christian, believing in the uniqueness of Christ, and a universalist. It might not have been exactly how Alexander Mack made the connection, but that’s okay. As I am fond of saying from time to time, if you think God doesn’t love diversity – including diversity of theological opinion! – you have not been paying attention.
What does that mean for us? It means that all of the covenants made by God with the Hebrew people in the First Testament were and are valid – the covenant made with Noah on behalf of all creation signified by the rainbow; the covenant made through Moses and signified by the tablets of the commandments; the covenant made through David and his descendants for the chosen people of Israel to be a blessing to the nations.
This especially includes the covenant made by each of us through baptism into the life of the Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. It means that even when it feels like life is a perpetual Lent of Covid and racism and subfreezing temperatures, of violence on the streets, in homes, and even in the halls of government, of depression and anxiety and cancer and kidney disease, of wars and rumors of wars, Jesus stands ready to take each of us by the hand and pull us out of the tomb.
Okay, you might be thinking, I could genuinely use Jesus’s hand right now, but he’s a little too incorporeal for me to find at the moment. I mean, hello, it must have been nice for Mary Magdalene and James and John and Mary and Peter and Thomas and all the rest to have been able to literally reach for Jesus’s hand, but we’re about two thousand years late for that option.
To which I say, of course you are not – of course we are not.
Jesus promised his disciples that after he left them physically, whenever as few as two or three were gathered in his name, he’d be there. Here’s how that works: if you have even one other person with you, even just as a voice on the phone, that person can be Jesus for you. And you can be Jesus for them.
The Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen is about a high school student who learns this truth in a painful but powerful way, and teaches it to others. One day Evan, depressed and lonely, climbs a tree in an apple orchard, intending to jump out of it and kill himself, but he manages to only break his arm. But a few days later, another student at Evan’s high school, named Connor, is not so fortunate – Connor succeeds in killing himself.
At the school assembly to address Connor’s death, Evan gives a speech about how when you feel most invisible, hurting, and alone – like the way he felt when he decided to try to jump to his death from an apple tree – if you call out or reach out in that moment, you will be found. In the musical, this “speech” is actually a song, and it is sung again at the vigil for Connor, effectively telling Connor that even in death, all is not lost – he is not lost. He will be found.
It’s very Jesusy. It’s almost like a 21st century Broadway version of the Anastasis icon.
But, but, but, you might be thinking. What if I reach out or call out, or both, and nobody comes running? What if I’m just stuck there in the tree, under the tree, under the bed, and nobody answers?
Even then, Jesus promises. You are not lost, you are not alone, you will be found. And the way to access that – this is very mysterious and paradoxical – is to reach out to help someone else in need.
I just finished reading the novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott, and there’s a wonderful passage where Rosie, the high school senior who is the main character, is told a story by her adult friend Rae, who has recruited Rosie to help out with her church’s Vacation Bible School:
“On Rosie’s first day there, Rae told her a story she’d never forget, about a girl who was very close to her grandmother. Once a week, the girl and her grandmother walked from their house to the beach, where a lot of starfish would always wash up onshore. The grandmother had taught the girl that if a starfish was flexible, it was alive, and so you should throw it back into the ocean. If it was stiff, you could take it home.
“The day after the grandmother died, the girl was in such deep grief that she could not bear hanging out with her relatives at the grandmother’s house, crying, reminiscing, eating, offering up prayers. So she walked down the road to the ocean by herself, and started lifting starfish off the sand, to see if they were alive. She was still crying, but she felt better. Then someone in her family came to find her, and said, ‘Honey, you need to be with your relatives now. We have to stick together. What you’re doing here is just not really significant.’
“And the girl replied, ‘It’s significant to the starfish.’
“Rae said the whole Vacation Bible School was about this theme: that you were tended to, by tending to.
“Rosie thought a moment. “The girl was the starfish she was throwing back,’ she said. Rae nodded.”
We see children do this: caring very tenderly for dollies or teddy bears or the family dog or cat, that in some mysterious way also works to help them calm, soothe, and care for themselves. It’s why emotional support service animals can be so helpful to people with anxiety and other mental health challenges: stroking the soft fur of a dog or cat or horse, and feeling them absorb the affection and become calm and content, also serves to calm and content the stressed person.
Reaching out to help another person creates a connection. An opportunity to see Jesus in another person and have that person see Jesus in you. And when someone sees Jesus in you, that is an incredibly powerful and healing experience.
And it doesn’t have to be at all a big, dramatic experience. Send a text to someone saying, “I was just thinking about you, wanted to send you some love and light.”
Wait an hour or two, then pick up your phone and read that text again. Understand that at the exact same moment that you sent that text to your friend, Jesus sent that same text to you.
You can get really good at this and not even need to use your phone. If you look out the window
and see the sun breaking through the clouds, that’s another text message from God. – but a .gif this time. The cat being goofy at your feet while you’re trying to make dinner, or just trying to work up the energy to get yourself up off the couch – another text message from God.
You see, the word “covenant” means “relationship.” And once we begin to be in relationship with God, God can get downright annoying with all the moments of beauty, love, kindness, and joy that God wants to share with you.
You are not alone. You will be found. Jesus is right there, ready to break you out of prison and pull you out of the tomb. Happy Lent. Amen.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.
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