Theology

Such a Messy Ordeal

The Part of Christianity We Want to Tidy over

Guest Contributor / 2.24.23

This article is by Kae Evenson:

Just when you think you have everything under control, the skies darken and the clouds roll in and the color is drained out of all living things. I was told by someone who knows these things that at this time of year the sky is at its bluest. I’ve been watching for this but then the rain keeps coming, changing the landscape. Last Friday’s rain was cold and its presence was icy and sodden and any future it offered seemed reluctant to abandon itself from its wintry roots.

Here we are, the church, in the grimy honesty of Lent. It’s a tough time of year because Lent speaks a truth most of us would prefer not to acknowledge — that we are dust and ashes. Though we might long for some other reality, Christianity, if told in all its weakness and foolishness, won’t let us escape the hard realities, the muddied truths, the questions that have no clear answers. People who prefer to be in the driver’s seat and like things tidy must let go a little. They won’t get those things here. Not in Lent. Not in the Christian story.

There are those among us who would prefer the Christian story to be a little different, a little more reasonable. They’d like a little more control. There are those among us who offer up all sorts of better game plans than the story we’ve been given. But what we forget when we get the urge to tidy these truths and desperately try to move the couch to hide the mud on the carpet is that at the core of Christianity is a bodily vulnerability that we all share. It is, in fact, not what divides us, but what binds us.

For better or worse, we are each other’s flesh, made of the same stuff, created from the same matter: the livid, blind newborn, the grumpy and hopeful adolescent, the undignified illnesses, our messy, problematic deaths.

Last Friday, an icy, messy rain came that felt heavy and cold (although the weatherman on TV cheered us on by reminding us that it is a sign of spring). Those of us with the Lenten ashes still stuck in our pores are reminded that, beneath this canopy of sky, we have been summoned into a two-framed story of death and life. Though we might resist it, this is where it all starts. The cross.

Such a messy ordeal. The cross, where the love of God and the suffering of being human meet. It is at the cross where we are let into God’s dirty little secret. The covert disclosure that sin, death, suffering, and evil are not just our enemies, they are also the enemies of God. What is revealed is that when we are called in baptism into the story of Christ, we also enter into God’s story: the story of death and resurrection.

The hard part, the messy part we want to tidy over, is the cross. But if we claim that God is here, in the cross, then we also must make the claim that this is who God is. The cross is an act of solidarity with creation. The cross is God’s decision to be one with us. At the cross Christ, both flesh and divinity, takes into God’s self all that plagues us, all our doubts and restless hearts, all our loneliness and fear, all our suffering and our death. God, in Christ, takes on the things that soil and stain us, all that mucks up our lives, and then God refuses to let us go.

Because of this cross ,the secret that is revealed — God did not want to remain in the heavens, tidy, unsoiled. The spotless Lamb has entered our dust, taken on our ash. God, in Christ, has chosen to become earth and die. Cleansed in this radical decision, this God, a creator beyond all our measures chooses us in a wild and magnificent love.

The rain comes again and again, but now because of Christ, time and space shudder in gospel illumination. Infinity folds in upon itself as the universe is stunned. Dust and ash are saturated with water and promise where we are cleansed in Christ’s death and resurrection, and our sorrows and our hopes are taken into God. In this strange covert undertaking of the cross, truth is revealed and it is good news: we have no control. This is truth we are given but it is the only truth we need. For we, Christ’s beloveds and heirs, are called beyond the murky apprehension of every cold sky, each of us by name.