Who helps you to be brave? Who inspires you and keeps you going? Who pushes you past your doubts and misgivings? Who sees your potential when you don’t see it for yourself? What surrounds you and upholds you? Is it a blanket knitted or sown by a great grandmother? Or a gift from a friend that made you laugh? Is it a child whose love for you is limitless? Or a toy, book, or bowl lent to you from family friends? How do you remember that there is something bigger than you in this world, and that you are a part of it, inextricably?

You might feel – all the time, or through seasons of waning strength and growing loss and grief – like you cannot possibly handle all the things that are headed your way. Because – to be honest – you can’t, if you’re on your own: You simply won’t. But you’re not alone. You’re not all by yourself. You are not self-made or self-sufficient. You did not pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You are not alone. And you don’t have to feel like you’re on your own.

You were born into a world that welcomed you and nurtured you. You were formed and fashioned by people who took you in; you were taught and trained by people whose vocation was to care for you and to teach you. You were invested in. And at some point, someone took a chance on you. Someone courted you and married you. Someone hired you. Someone took a risk in taking you on board.

Even if the work you did – the work of keeping a family healthy and vital, the work of parenthood, the work of preserving your own wellbeing by your livelihood, the emotional work of learning to accept life as it unfolded – all of that work, was within a broader world made by a loving God who knows your name.   

And on a daily basis, we forget that. Throughout the hours, we can find ourselves feeling alone, vulnerable, insufficient, and worrying we are unworthy of love. Our shame in ourselves even drives us to disparage others, to shame them, to put them down, so that we might believe we are higher in some framework of deserving that we have devised. In this way, we can act so unlike God, so unlike Jesus. Disparaging others denies who we are as Christians and betrays our Maker and Savior.

There once was a woman who dared to touch Jesus. Then a man insulted her in her own home. Her focus remained on Jesus, who justified her, as he justifies all of us. And Jesus confronted the man, as he confronts all of us. The woman was right to treat Jesus with abundant and unexpected reverence. The man was wrong to condemn her; he was wrong to guilt the people around him into selling their possessions and giving money to his cause, only to pilfer from it to support his own habits, his own pursuits.

Jesus told the man to leave her alone, the woman, who was more aware of the significance of Jesus than the man who claimed to be one of the twelve disciples. The man was blind to the reality of who Jesus was and would forever be to the world. The woman knew something more of the deep truth about Jesus, the truth about his invitation, his mission, his challenge, his command.

Jesus invites you and me to discover God’s love for us, which is so deep that God took on flesh and literally tabernacled among us; set up a dwelling place in our midst; and revealed to us the kind of grace and truth that only come from God.

Jesus wants us to know that this kind of glory can be found, not just in the old and imposing stones of the Temple Wall at Passover, or in the rites and rituals that have bound a people together through tribulation and terror, but also, and even more so, in one’s own body, in his own person, in his own life – shared as extravagantly with the world as Mary’s perfume, poured out. His mission is for the world’s broken hearted, for those trod upon, to be made well.

Jesus challenges the entire world to realize that in Christ we have unending life, in Christ with have communion with God, in Christ we have unity with one another in love. In Christ we have belonging and connection and a possibility of wholeness otherwise impossible to grasp.

Jesus commands us to treat each other with a reverence we reserve for the holy spaces we pilgrimage to each week and year. He teaches us to see as special every person we encounter, to care for them the way we strive to care for the gravesite of a loved one, and to recognize the full worth and fleeting beauty of every person’s actions, words, thoughts, and inclinations.

In you and in me is the presence of God, at work in every moment of our lives. There is no distance between you and your Creator. There is no sacrifice you can make to be reconciled to God. There is nothing you can do to be any more beloved by the Source of love. We have what we were looking for all along. God gave it to us before we knew we needed it. It is already ours, if we recognize it. Do we recognize it?

Christ’s body is broken so that we might find healing in ourselves, a fullness that comes from God (John 10:10), an understanding that we want for nothing – no matter our station, our circumstance, our health, our past, or our prospects. You need offer nothing for God’s grace and truth to illumine and give life to you. But God welcomes you to surrender, in praise and with thanksgiving, everything that you are, all your misgivings, all your shortcomings, all your wrongdoings, so that you would stop standing in the way of the love which is abundantly offered to you and so that you might see each day more completely for what it is – a gift of God – to be revered and treasured, more than anything we might fashion for ourselves. So this Lent, will you give God your shame, your self-condemnation, your humiliation, your grudges, your defenses, your hopelessness, and your selfishness? Will you accept Christ’s acceptance of you just as you are?

I pray you will. Amen.