Through the Wilderness

March arrives in Ohio the way Lent itself arrives, quietly, without fanfare, still carrying the chill of winter even as the first hints of something warmer stir beneath the surface (and in typical Ohio fashion we get, cold, warm, cold, warm…). It is a month that holds its breath. And in the life of the Church, it is a month that invites us to do the same.

Lent is one of the oldest seasons in the Christian year, and one of the most misunderstood. Many people grew up thinking of it primarily as a time of giving something up: of small self-imposed discomforts that somehow honored God. And while fasting and self-discipline have their rightful place, that way of thinking can miss the real heart of the season. Lent is not fundamentally about deprivation. It is about orientation.

The word itself comes from an old English word for spring - lengthening days, light returning. Lent is a season of preparation, of repentance, of renewal. It is the Church's ancient practice of accompanying those preparing for baptism at Easter, and of inviting all the baptized to return to the waters of their own baptismal identity. Who are we? We are people who belong to Jesus Christ. Which isn’t a claim we earn; rather it is a grace we keep learning to receive.

The Heidelberg Catechism - that beautiful inheritance from our German Reformed ancestors - opens with a question that has echoed across centuries of faithful living: What is your only comfort in life and in death? (I refer to this often in sermons because it is so important). The answer points not to anything we have accomplished, but to the simple, astonishing fact that we belong - body and soul - to our faithful Savior. Lent is the season when we allow that truth to sink deeper into us than it has gone before.

Our tradition at St. John's is shaped by this German Evangelical and Reformed heritage, a stream of faith that has always insisted on holding Word and Sacrament together. We are people of the Book and people of the Table/Altar. Lent, for us, is not a retreat into private spirituality - though it certainly invites personal reflection - but a journey we take together as a congregation, as the body of Christ, embodied and accountable to one another. The historic liturgical seasons do not simply mark time; they form us. They pull us into something larger than our individual lives and remind us that we are part of a long, living communion stretching back through the centuries.

Think of Lent as a refining fire, not one that destroys, but one that clarifies. Or think of it as a gardener's pruning: something is cut back not to diminish the plant but to encourage deeper, truer growth. We are invited, in these forty days, to let God tend to us in ways we might ordinarily resist.

Saint Patrick and the Courage of Faith

On March 17th, the world puts on green and raises a glass to Ireland. But behind the celebration is a man worth knowing more honestly. Patrick was a fifth-century missionary bishop who had been kidnapped as a teenager from Roman Britain, enslaved in Ireland, escaped after years of captivity, and then, astonishingly, returned to the very people who had enslaved him, carrying the Gospel.

What drove him back was not masochism or nostalgia. It was faith, a deep, Trinitarian faith that he famously expressed through the image of the three-leafed clover, a earthy illustration of the great mystery of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Patrick's faith crossed the most difficult of boundaries: the boundary between captor and captive, between oppressor and the one wronged. He went anyway. He built bridges where walls might have been more understandable.

There is something here for us, in a world still learning how to cross its own divides. Our calling as the Church is always toward the other, toward the stranger, toward the one from whom we might have reason to turn away. Patrick's example, whatever legends have accumulated around it, points toward a courage of faith that costs something and means something.

The Feast of the Annunciation: Mary's Yes

March 25th brings us one of the oldest feasts in the Christian year: the Annunciation of the Lord: the moment when the angel Gabriel appeared to a young woman in Nazareth and asked her to carry the Son of God into the world. And Mary said yes.

Our tradition, shaped as it is by the Reformation, has sometimes been hesitant around Mary, not wanting to give the impression of elevating her above Jesus Christ. That instinct is understandable. But the Annunciation is not really about elevating Mary. It is about what God chooses to do through willing, ordinary, vulnerable human beings. God did not enter the world as a philosophical concept or a distant decree. God entered through flesh, through risk, through the trust of one young woman who said yes when she could have said no.

In the middle of Lent, the Annunciation arrives as a remarkable interruption. It asks us: Are we open? Are we willing? What would it mean to say yes to what God is asking of us - not when we feel ready, but now, in the wilderness of our own unreadiness? Honoring Mary's courage does not diminish Christ. It magnifies what God can accomplish through any heart that remains open.

Palm Sunday and the Walk into Holy Week

On March 29th, we gather with palms in our hands and a parade in our hearts. Palm Sunday is one of the most liturgically vivid moments in the entire Church year, the moment Jesus enters Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna, riding not a warhorse but a donkey, humble and deliberate, fully aware of what awaits him.

But Palm Sunday is also a doorway, not a destination. Within days, the same crowd that shouted Hosanna would call for crucifixion. The contrast is not comfortable, and it is not meant to be. The Christian faith does not paper over suffering. It walks through it.

I invite you (urgently and warmly) to participate in our Holy Week services. Every day of Holy Week including Maundy Thursday. Good Friday. The Great Vigil of Easter. These are not optional appendices to the Christian year. They are important. We cannot rush to Easter morning without walking through the cross. If we skip straight to the resurrection, we have not truly understood what was overcome. The hope of Easter is made deeper, more real, more hard-won, by our honest confrontation with suffering and death.

We live in a culture that moves quickly past pain - that prefers the highlight to the whole story. The Church, at its best, offers something different: the courage to sit with what is hard, to name what is broken, and to trust that even there, even in the tomb, God is already at work.

Walking Together

There is a reason the Church has observed Lent for nearly two thousand years. Not because suffering is good in itself, or because God demands our misery, but because transformation is real - and transformation takes time, attention, and community. We are not meant to walk this journey alone.

At St. John's, we have inherited a faith tradition that takes both the ancient and the living seriously - that values liturgical depth and a justice-shaped welcome, that honors the wisdom of those who came before us while remaining attentive to the world and the neighbors in front of us today. In that spirit, Lent is both a personal and a communal discipline. It is a season for pruning, for honesty, for quiet, and for the slow, patient work of becoming who God is calling us to be.

So, I invite you: walk with me through this March. Come to worship. Come to the Table. Bring your questions and your weariness and your hope. Let the season do its work in you. The light is already growing longer. Easter is coming. But first - and faithfully - we walk through the wilderness together.

In faith and in fellowship,

Pastor Oliver