The trajectory of Lent this year mixed its metaphors, but that’s ok. We’re right at home given the zig-zagging, no-two-weeks-alike experience we’re presently living. Four weeks ago, we were taken into the wilderness and introduced to this time-away-from-time, a place-away-from-place, and were told this time and place will enable us to have a deeper sense of who we are, who we were created to be, and how our very beings are linked to the Divine Source of all. It’s a tall order for a 40-day journey and sounded a lot more exciting when it was a poetic invitation and not such a literal one.

Now we really do find ourselves in time-away-from-time and place-away-from-place. And the prospect of being alone with ourselves and our thoughts and our spirit and our connection to God for weeks on end…may not sound as inviting. Almost as if he can hear our moaning doubts about all of this aloneness, John offers new metaphors.

The scripture laid out over the past three Sundays, had we followed them all, each had to do with light and dark, sight and blindness. Nicodemus, esteemed religious leader and curious seeker, reaches out to Jesus in the dark of night to ask his questions about the Way Jesus is not just describing but embodying. This is the story that gives us the most famous verse of the New Testament—John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…’ In this late night visit, Jesus tells Nicodemus he has to be born again, born in a different way, born from above by Spirit and wind and the breath of God. Nicodemus is, rightly, frustrated and confused and mesmerized by Jesus’ dancing responses to very straightforward questions.

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It’s an ancient scene with dusty roads, shadowed streets, and nothing but open flames to light the path. The sun has almost set as he leans against the door; peering through the window every few minutes to watch the neighbors finish their evening chores. One by one, he waits until the last street lantern goes dark then starts to get that nervous flutter in his stomach. How long has it been since he felt that intoxicating mix of nervousness and excitement? What was he doing? What was he thinking? This was foolish and reckless. How would he explain this to his colleagues and his students if someone found him in that part of town? He had practiced the route and knew now was the time to move. With no one left outside and the depth of darkness to hide him, he throws on a cloak, grabs a bag, and steps into the night that changes everything.

“Perhaps,” writes Ginger Barfield, “there is no story in the gospels that spells out the conundrum of belief as does the account of Nicodemus.” He is rooted in the ways of establishment. By our modern accounts of success, he has made it. He’s a member of the Jewish ruling council. He has some level of power, respect, and authority. In a period when Judaism was robustly debating its essence and future, Nicodemus was a central part of the action. Something happens as he watches Jesus’ work and life that makes him question everything. Something about the Way Jesus is laying out makes his life seem awfully safe and routine and something like a pair of shoes that are suddenly a size-too-small.

John doesn’t tell us much about pleasantries or introductions or who is listening in on the exchange. Given the depth of their discourse, I suspect this isn’t the first time Nicodemus and Jesus have broached some heavy questions about what the life of faith is all about. In fact, maybe Nicodemus already knows the acceptable answers to the common questions and Jesus is actually teaching him to ask better ones. Nicodemus is there that night because he trusts Jesus. He has seen the work Jesus does and heard the way he speaks before a crowd. He knows Jesus is talking about life and Spirit and faith in a way that resonates with a truth that Nicodemus has privately felt but never publicly taught. And he’s trying to figure out how you go from sensing the rightness of a thing to living it out, particularly when you can’t prove the rightness. And especially when making that leap in faith and of faith comes at the cost of letting go of so many old ways of being and doing and living.

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One week ago today, many of you were with our friend Sr. Alison McCrary at the Solomon Center for the annual Women’s Retreat. Welton Gaddy was preparing to lead worship at St. Charles with the remnant of those remaining in town. We were all bemoaning the time change as the greatest inconvenience we’d recently known. What could be worse than losing an hour on a Sunday morning!!!

I was with my family in Birmingham. By now, I had already preached at Baptist Church of the Covenant (who worships at 9 a.m.—8 a.m. with time change) and stood in line shaking hands and hugging and loving on people for over half an hour. Even a week ago I was feeling very nervous about that level of physical contact and immediately slathered my hands with hand sanitizer after the greeting line was over. A COVID outbreak in New Orleans still seemed like a mild-but-certain possibility, and I was still hopeful that limiting things like our coffee and refreshment time would be enough.

You’ve lived the past week with me, so you know how rapidly developing every day has been. Sometimes everything has changed within an hour. Or even within 15 minutes. On Sunday, I mentally debated whether or not it would be safe to all touch the same coffee carafe. By Friday, my children are out of school well into May, and we are learning to worship and gather virtually.

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Some of you have heard me fondly recall the day I spent with Gordon Cosby many years ago in D.C. A small group of us toured the community sites that make up Church of the Savior—every group worshiping, studying, and gathering for community at their place of direct service and ministry in a neighborhood. We saw a dream come to life as we toured each space and listened to Gordon talk about his vision for what church is meant to be. Late in the day, I mentioned becoming disillusioned by church as I had always known it, and he replied, “Good! That means you’ve been living under an illusion, and now you’re not. That’s when the real work begins because you can see things as they really are.”

This is our work during the season of Lent. Well, let’s be honest, this is work we do across the decades of our lives, if we’re fortunate enough to live that long. We fall under the comforting haze of illusion and then wake up again. And again. And again. The real work begins when we see things as they really are. These weeks of Lent invite us to the annual practice of letting something go or taking something on. We prune our habits and commitments not for self-flagellation but for releasing what prevents us from being our truest, fullest selves. We take on a new practice not for our performance and perfection to be graded but to discover ways that make us come alive. We have set out to see things as they really are, and that includes our lives.

In the pair of texts before us this morning, we listen in on conversations with a trickster serpent and the devil. In both cases, the ultimate question is about who the people in the conversations are truly called to be. Who are the woman and man called to be? Who is Jesus called to be? Calling is about identity and way of being in the world, and the options laid out before both the pair in the garden and Jesus in the wilderness are tempting misdirections that take them farther away from the truth of who they are.

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we would wear and then woke up fresh without an alarm clock. We made it down to the Bywater just in time to catch everyone else in costumes, snatching up the very last, really good parking spot. We ran into friends all along the way, ate great food, witnessed the creativity and beauty and untamed brilliance of the city amidst the flashes of life’s complexities—addiction, poverty, elite wealth, waste. We walked and walked and walked, and danced, and laughed, and walked some more. All on a Mardi Gras day.

Splashed throughout the Quarter were the Jesus Sign People. The ones who have visited us here before; the men with the tall, angry signs: “Hell is real! Do not delay! Seek Jesus!” “Repent or Perish!” “Hell is horrible—no warning is too strong!” (which needed some help with punctuation because it really read as: Hell is horrible. No warning. Is too strong.) My very favorite of their signs read, “Warning: Rebellious women, Pot heads, Drunks, Lewd Women, Homosexuals, Sports Nuts, Baby Killers, Jesus Mockers, Mormons—Hell Awaits You.” That sign got lots of attention and became a selfie magnet, but I’m pretty sure not a single person was MORE intrigued about divinity and spirituality and mystery and the pulsing rhythms of the universe by reading their signs. Certainly no one walked by and felt loved, truly loved, deeply loved.

Some people calmly argued with the man who yelled, “Bible! Bible! Bible! Read the bible!” into a megaphone. Several people yelled passionately and angrily as they walked past, and I couldn’t turn my pastor heart off. Their yelling came from pain. These Jesus Sign People were far too much like every church they’d ever encountered, every church who told them they weren’t good enough, pure enough, lovable enough. At first blush, the Jesus Sign People make me want to change my name and distance myself from church altogether because the subtleties and nuance of THIS church versus ALL THOSE OTHER churches is too hidden for most passersby to notice. The Jesus Sign People have ruined a lot for all of us, and their message is part of what I’m glad to watch burn in the rubbish pile of history as Old Church dies forever.

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I love the wild rhythm of Mardi Gras. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, I experienced a similar, if scaled-down, version of this season of parades and parties. It’s the high school marching bands that get me every time, that catch in my throat when I can feel the drums from down the street, the race of my heart as the horns begin to blast their way into the night. Those are the moments when the best of my childhood swirls into my middle-aged, parenting life as I enjoy watching my own growing children embrace the seasons.

However, this is a carnival unlike any of the seven I have now spent as a New Orleanian. The wigs have still come out and the gold lamé leggings are presently laying across a chair in my bedroom. I most definitely have sequins on beneath this robe. Our house is littered in beads and koozies and blinking light foam stick things that make no sense at all outside of a night parade. The wagon and chairs and cooler of snacks have been hauled for blocks and blocks to a barrage of parades and are ready and waiting in the back of my car. In some ways, it’s Carnival as usual.

But there is also a somber tone to everything as not one but two neighbors have lost their lives in the midst of the celebrations. Yesterday, in between catching sunglasses and waiting for purple, green, and gold colored toilet paper to fill the oak trees, folks were talking about tandem floats and the element of obvious danger in what we do each year. I watched my children inch closer and closer to floats and wondered if it was a foolish freedom to grant them. In addition to the tragic and gruesome loss of life amidst city-wide celebration, perhaps what is jarring to us is the shattering of our illusions. Mardi Gras is a fantasy season. Adults throw off their suits and high heels, leave their laptops at home, and rush the streets to play alongside children and strangers and friends. It is, at its best, a world-as-it-could-be season.

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