Dear Friends:

During this season of Lent I have begun each week spending some quiet time with our lectionary readings and paying attention to what word or phrase or concept strikes me the most. For those of you who read my message last week, it was the sense of resilient hope that permeates our stories of faith. This week, I’ve been pondering the difference between knowledge and wisdom, something that I am more aware of as I enter my 60s. As I grow older, the facts and statistics and standards that helped me navigate life’s demands and transitions are no longer serving me as they once did, and increasingly I’m aware of the preconceptions and assumptions I am shedding – about the world, about myself, and about God – as I work out life’s challenges and opportunities using skills and personal attributes that I never before would have considered. Things like openness, vulnerability, flexibility, …and the wisdom in “not” knowing.

If there’s anything the wilderness journey of Lent is teaching me this year, it’s that the place where we think we have something all figured out is the place where we should fall on our knees in humility and think again. Like a desert, Lent invites us into a space where seemingly wild contradictions hold together. This year, in particular, as we continue living in the uncertainty of a global pandemic, Lent offers us a season to draw close to the God who provides wellsprings in the wilderness, who brings honey from the rock, who offers beauty in the places that seem most barren. And who, Paul tells us in this Sunday’s Epistle reading, became wisdom and power incarnate in a man whose life ended, by the world’s reckoning, in utter defeat.

But we proclaim Christ crucified… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

—1 Corinthians 1.23-25

This God makes little sense in the world of conventional knowledge, facts, and statistics. So, in this season of Lent, I hope we will challenge ourselves to be present to the God who does not always seem sensible, and to trust that something deeper than sense is at work in our lives. These wilderness days of Lent are an invitation to us to stop, to look closely at our landscape, and to open our eyes to how God dwells in what may seem the unlikeliest places: in paradox, in mystery, in what appears to be contradictory, in what the world overlooks or belittles. This might mean confronting our own certainties and assumptions about how God should act and sitting with God’s contradictions until a door opens in their midst.

In the hope of becoming wise,

Amelie+