sermons

Air - Lent: A Spring Season

Slow Down for a Minute (or 6 weeks)

Steve Watson

Mar 09, 2025

Today I’d like to begin with a reading of a few words Jesus said to a tired, discouraged community. He said:

Matthew 11:28-30 (Common English Bible)

28 “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.

29 Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves.

30 My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”

Pray with me, if you will.

Burden-bearer, load-sharing God who carries us all, spirit of gentle and humble Jesus, please encourage us this day through your words. And in this season of Lent, could you help us slow down? And in this season of Lent we enter, could you renew our faith, deepen our hope, increase our love, and strengthen us in resilience, we pray. Amen.

For like three or four days of this week, my family of five is all under the same roof together, and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. You all are cool, but my wife Grace, our three children, are the great joys of my life. And I smile bigger and breathe deeper when we’re together. Family is not always like that – I know that well. So it’s a grace of my life that I’m part of one that is to me. 

One of the things we’ve done as a family a lot over the years is get out into the woods together and do some hiking. We’ve all done this in different combinations. My daughter Julianna and I have especially taken to this, though. When she was a child, we hiked all of New Hampshire’s 4,000 foot peaks together. There are a lot of them. When we finished the last peak a few years ago, when she was 16, we got special certificates to commemorate our journey and I keep mine in one of the matching photo books I had made for us. 

I can’t speak for my daughter, but on my end, I did this for two reasons. 

1. I love this girl – now this woman – more than words can say. And I wanted to start a habit with when she was crazy about spending time with me that we’d keep, even when she grew up and I wasn’t the bee’s knees to her anymore.
2. And two, I love walking in the mountains and the woods. Moving your body at walking speed, breathing the fresh air, smelling pine scent carried on the wind, getting away from daily responsibilities and strong cell phone reception, you slow down. And in slowing down, the pace of breath and pulse slow a bit, the conversation deepens, sometimes burdens don’t feel so heavy, and I find I have a chance and receiving again the depth and truth of Jesus’ words – that we were not made for uninterrupted stress and fear. We were not made for harried, hassled, distracted lives. We were not made to bear burdens alone. We were made for sustainable, right-sized lives. A yoke is a harness oxen wear while they plow. It constrains and directs them so they do their job, and the goal is for it to be the right size, to fit well, so the labor is suitable, even easy, for the animal. In Jesus’ Jewish faith and culture, a yoke was a metaphor for God’s guidance and direction and leadership, given through the Law, and now Jesus says, given through him. God’s leadership in our lives is suitable for us, it is a light burden – purpose and direction, a Way of life that is good for us and good for others, and gives rest to our souls.

In one of my favorite essays, the late theologian Kosuke Koyama asks,

“What is the speed of God?”

We know the speed of light, but what is the speed of God? Well, Koyama says God was incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, and so God’s speed is the speed of human walking. God is, Koyama says, the three-mile-per-hour God. God who moves at walking speed, at our speed, not at the speed of panic or rush or hurry, but at the speed of love. 

We begin the holy season of Lent today with an invitation to slow down for a minute and move at a suitable speed again. Slow down and be found by our three-mile-per-hour-God who walks with us. Slow down and move with God at the speed of love.

This metaphorical minute to which I invite you to slow down is actually six weeks long. Lent is the English word for the six week period before Easter that traditionally begins this past Wednesday and that we formally begin today. It’s a season for the renewing of our faith, the deepening of our hope, the increasing of our love, and the strengthening of our inner selves in resilience. 

You can mark this season by fasting – removing certain distractions like social media from your life if you feel led, or consuming differently. Skipping a meal once a week, skipping desserts, skipping shopping, skipping anything really. It’s not about being stoic or holy, it’s certainly not an endorsement of dieting, it’s an invitation to break our rhythms in some way, to lessen our distraction, and to slow down for a minute.

We also at Reservoir always invite us to a season of prayer – guided by the sacred texts of our scriptures and sometimes by other voices and prayers and art. This year’s guide to the season completes a four year Earth, Wind, and Fire, Last Avatar-like holy jam through the elements of Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. 

Use your paper copy of the guide or the digital version at our website at least once a week, preferably a little bit each day, and please make sure whether it’s a community group you’re in or a friend or family member you ask to look at it as well, that you share with someone else how you’re reacting to this season. 

The guide is anchored by a single verse from a single poem in the Bible’s prayer book called the Psalms. 

That verse is a blessing spoken from God to us that we will lengthen each week, as a blessing said over us:

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am God. 

And this first week we start today is just the first word: Be. 

Just be.

Let me read the whole psalm, and share a few more comments of invitation to this season. 

Psalm 46 (New Revised Standard Version)

To the leader. Of the Korahites. According to Alamoth. A Song.

1 God is our refuge and strength,
    a very present help in trouble.

2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
    though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea,

3 though its waters roar and foam,
    though the mountains tremble with its tumult. Selah

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
    the holy habitation of the Most High.

5 God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
    God will help it when the morning dawns.

6 The nations are in an uproar; the kingdoms totter;
    he utters his voice; the earth melts.

7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah

8 Come, behold the works of the Lord;
    see what desolations he has brought on the earth.

9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
    he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
    he burns the shields with fire.

10 “Be still, and know that I am God!
    I am exalted among the nations;
    I am exalted in the earth.”

11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah

Our God – large and mighty and far away as the most distant and enormous starts. And our God who is as near as the air between us, as close as our breath, speaks: Be still to us. 

In the midst of nations in uproar, kingdoms tottering, the earth as we know it melting, God says:

Be still and know that I am God.

In Hebrew, this phrase: Be still is a little less gentle. Referring to human propensity to war and violence in the previous verse, God’s like:

knock it off. Desist! Cut it out. Take a break from your scheming, your plotting, your getting and taking and grabbing. Desist.

Be still.

Be. 

I read this slowing down, this stillness as connected to four things in this Psalm. Let me name them briefly and then extend today’s invitation and pray for us again. 

Breaking rhythm, being still, practicing Lent is connected to resilience. God knows that we are weak, but God also wants us to be renewed in inner strength. 

We get this in verse four, where the psalmist says there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God. Now metaphorically, this means God is the provider of water – life, nourishment, cleansing. And spiritually, God is the provider of life, nourishment, all that we need for inner strength. But literally, that stream in Jerusalem that inspires the psalmist is not a mighty river like the Mississippi, or even a mid-sized stream like our Charles River. It’s actually an intermittent spring called the Gihon. Sometimes it looks dry and seems like there won’t be water for the city again. But like the season of spring, it does reliably return.

This happens with our experience of God. Sometimes God seems distant or absent to us. Our faith can shrink smaller than our doubts, smaller than our struggles. So it helps to at least one season a year, slow down and look for the river again. To mix water metaphors a little, dip our bucket into the well, and see what God has for us. 

Daily or weekly, prayerful reading of the guide is a way to dip back into the spring, to seek God’s nearness, refreshment and encouragement again. 

So lent is for resilience and two, lent is for recommitting to the way of non-violence. This psalm starts to paint God in classic ancient imagery of unbridled power – see what desolations God brings. But then it says God turns God’s power against power against war-making and bows and spears and shields and drones and stealth bomber planes and all. To be is also to desist! To stop our raging aggression and violence. 

Lent starts formally with Ash Wednesday. The ashes some of us had placed on our head last week are a reminder of our mortality and eventual death, for sure. They are an ancient image of grief, to welcome God with us in our sorrows for sure, as well. But they are also an image of repentance. Of acknowledging where we have lost the way of love, and making an effort to return to God, to return to the face of our neighbor, and to return to our right selves as well. 

Lent is always an invitation to repent from our violent ways. And in our world, we need that more than ever. We see Russia’s years long war of violent aggression in Ukraine and spirit of God would say:

desist!

We see Hamas’ violence done to Israel, and then Israel’s far disproportionate violence they have done and are doing to the Palestinian people, in Gaza and also in the West Bank, and spirit of God would say:

desist!

And we look home here to this country, and see the five trillion dollars spent on 20 years of post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we could ask:

what has been gained? What has been lost?

Or we can look at the trillion dollars in annual US spending on our military, more than three times more than any other nation, and ask:

how can we return to God and return to our right minds and repent? 

Personally too, Lent is an invitation to repentance, to slow down enough to notice any ways our lives are going off the rails, any ways our lives are falling short of love and tell the truth about that and return to God. 

Friends, our weekly communion in worship here is always a great moment to tell the truth to God about your life and make an intention to return to God, return to the way of love. If you ever need a more focused way to do that, a pastor is always available to hear a confession, to assure you of God’s forgiveness, and to pray you’ll have the strength to return home to your best self. It’s a holy honor to receive a moment like this. We’re here for that if you need it. 

So, Lent is for resilience, and for repentance. And three, Lent is for resistance. The psalms like to call God the Lord of hosts. Literally, that’s like

“God of the armies.”

In the imagery of this psalm, God is both a shelter and a general. 

God is our refuge, a place of hiding and comfort and retreat when things get too hard. And God is our general, because who are God’ people God can mobilize to do justice and mercy and good work in the world if it’s not humans who would listen to God’s call, receive Jesus’ yoke of leadership upon us, and do what we can to be light in this world, to be God’s hands and feet. 

I’m not going to say a lot about this because we just spent the winter called to Radical Hospitality, which as I preached one last time last week, is a powerful resistance to the cruelty and inhospitality of the present age. And friends, I trust that as we slow down in this season, as we shift gears a little, as we turn to God, there will be ways for us to be people of love and truth and mercy in a world that too often drifts toward cruelty and lies and hate. When the moment comes, be ready. Be people of mercy and truth and love, my friends. 

So lent is for resilience and repentance and resistance. And lastly, Lent is for the renewing of faith, the deepening of hope, and the increase of love in our lives. 

In the first week of our Lenten guide, I tell the story of when in 2003, I suffered a traumatic break to my larynx and underwent emergency surgical repair. I’ve still got a scar from it. The doctor told me if the injury had happened an inch lower, I could have died. Had I not had access to such great medical care, I could have lost my voice for good. 

I think about all that it took to repair the injury and I’m reminded about the public trauma we have all suffered in recent years. We’ve lived through a global pandemic. We’ve witnessed devastatingly violent wars. We’ve watched videos of horrifying police brutality – moments where lives were violently cut down, pleading for air, as with Eric Garner’s last words,

“I can’t breathe.”

We still endure toxic and polarizing politics. We’ve been disillusioned by our country. 

Some of us have lost sleep. Some of us have lost family or friends. Or we’ve seen our children suffer. Some of us have been shunned by family, shunned by faith communities. Many of us know people who have lost their lies. It’s all been a lot. It’s been enough to question our faith, to lose our hope, to turn inward and away from love. 

It’s all been enough to knock the wind right out of us. 

Lent is a balm for such a season. It’s an opportunity to hold our hands open to God together, and even if our hands are empty, to hold them before God and say: here is my little faith, here is my shaky hope, here is me with whatever love I have left in me. And to walk with our three-mile-per-hour God, to trust the slow work of God in renewing our faith, deepening our hope, increasing our resilience and love. Can we pray in this Spirit now? 

First, Teihlard de Chardin’s prayer called Patient Trust and then we open our hands together:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Open your hands if you will.

Here we are God, in the anxiety of our incompletion, we of little faith, of shaky hope, of faltering love. 

Be our steady and good God. We commit ourselves to you in this season. 

Renew our faith, restore our hope, revitalize our love, we pray. Amen.