This is the season of Lent, the forty-day period of time, counted without Sundays, that most immediately precedes Easter Sunday.  This year, Lent began on March 1, and it will end on Saturday, April 15, the day before Easter.  From today, it is exactly four weeks until Easter.  Most non-liturgical churches, including most Baptist churches, do not observe Lent as a rule.  They prefer, quite honestly, to pole-vault from Christmas to Easter, from the birth of Jesus to his resurrection, without paying much attention to what lies in between.  Maybe it is time for us, as a church family, to rethink that and to lose the vaulting technique.

Lent has its roots in the ancient church, which observed the forty days to commemorate the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness just after his baptism and just before he entered the long journey to Jerusalem, where he would be crucified and then resurrected three days later.  It is what happened in the life of Jesus in those forty days in the wilderness that Lent calls on us to reflect upon in our own lives.

For Jesus, those forty days were a time of reflection, of temptation, of separation and profound loneliness and of coming to terms with the call of God on his life.  A time separation from the voices of humanity that might have otherwise distracted him or called him to lesser things.  It was a painful time.  Certainly those forty nights in the wilderness contained their fair share of frightening moments.  Strange voices in the night, perhaps.  His body weakened from fasting, and he almost certainly lost the ability to keep his emotional edge that we all like to have when we are frightened.  Whatever, it was a time about which we almost certainly would have never known of Jesus, who died for our sins and was resurrected three days later.

With each passing year, I’m coming to discover that the kind of reflection and coming to terms with God that Lent calls on us to experience is essential to spiritual health and vitality.  We lose way too much when we jump from Christmas to Easter, always skipping our vegetables and eating our dessert first.  The sweetness of the resurrection is lessened unless we have first tasted the bitterness of the cup of crucifixion.

We do, unlike most Baptist churches, celebrate the Lord’s Supper once a month, and always on Sunday morning, not Sunday night.  We bring it to the forefront because we are saying by doing so that we believe there is no such thing as truly living without dying first.  The more I think about the sacrifice of Jesus, the more his resurrection means to me.  The more I am caused to think about what my sacrifice should be, if I am to experience his resurrection power.  As I am experiencing it this year, it seems that there is one Lenten question that continues to press itself upon me:  How?  How in the world will we all get along?  I find that question facing me at virtually every turn of life.  I find it creeping into my preaching, my writing, and, on some level, virtually every conversation.

Of course, there is the global question of how we are going to get along.  Just this past week, I heard someone say that, in the two centuries since Napoleon, humanity has been learning that the power of war is less and less an effective means of achieving security.  Really?  We’ve really learned that?

In this city, “How?” is the question in virtually every news report you hear.  How will communities that are becoming increasingly diverse find ways of getting along together without increasingly isolating themselves from each other in socioeconomic and racial enclaves that utterly destroy any chance of genuine human community?

Surely you have heard by now about the controversy over the widening of Mockingbird Lane as it extends through the Highland Park area.  Steve Blow, in one of his recent columns in the Dallas Morning News, pointed out that the resistance of the Highland Park community to the widening of that road is more about a fear that it will let the world in they meant to isolate from than anything else.  Now, before we rush to judgment of those folks, we should ask first whether we have our own fears to face about letting more of the world in as we widen our “Mockingbird Lanes” at Cliff Temple?  I could go on and on, but this is where I find myself landing for just this moment this morning, at this particular point in the Lenten season.

Since last Sunday, I’ve had more than the normal number of conversations, some with church members, others with people in other cities, and even one with someone out of state, trying to answer the question, “How?” with relationship to their marriages.  “How are we going to get along?  How are we going to make it?”  “How?” is a good Lenten question to ask.

Now, before it appears that I am going to preach just a marriage enrichment sermon, please rethink that for just a moment.  It could certainly have that application, but, as we think about Jesus and the sacrifices he made to answer the question of how we will get along, between ourselves and God, and each other, there is a broader meaning.  Let the answers that come to you this morning as you reflect on that question apply to any relationship in your life, whether it be your marriage, or your parenting, or friendships, or work, or whatever.  Or, heaven forbid, some relationship at church.

I will go so far as to say this.  If you intend to have meaningful, deep relationships with anyone, even with God, you will eventually have to face and answer these three questions that are a part of the bigger question of how.  When I am being honest with myself, when I am listening to the voices I only hear in the wilderness of my soul, these three questions swirl around each other, creating a vortex of powerful opportunity for change and growth in my life about how we are going to get along.

So, if “how” is important to you in your life, if you find yourself in a desert this morning, if you would describe the most important relationships of your life as wastelands of bitter, soul-starving disappointment and loneliness, with me this morning, would you consider answering these three questions?

If you really want to get along, how important is it for you to be in control?  In his letter to the Corinthian church, the Apostle Paul, modeling his words after the life of Christ, laid the foundation stone for the Christian definition of love, agape love, for these twenty centuries since.  He wrote, “If I give away all my possessions, and I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I am nothing.  When I was a child, I spoke like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  And when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”  There is what we do in life, and there is why we do it.  If we do the right thing but for the wrong, manipulative reason, then what we have done loses its meaning, and worse, in the eyes of God, its eternal value.

From a child’s perspective, all of us grown-ups are the ones in control.  Right?  But those who are truly grown up know that “in control” is the last thing we are.  And that growing up, as hard as it is to believe, is about letting go and losing control.  With rarest exception, the happiest people I know have this one thing in common, among others.  They are not too worried about who is in control.  With rarest exception, all of our relationships stand or fall on this one question alone.  How important is it to be in control?  The more you personally need to be in control of the outcome of your life’s journey, the less likely it will have the outcome God intended it to have.

I shared with you not long ago about a woman in a church I pastored some twenty years ago who had enlisted me in her campaign to rid that small community and the church of a football coach whom she believed to be an alcoholic.  I would not participate with her in her campaign.  Her ways of expressing anger at me were very passive-aggressive.  She would participate in all the events of worship until I got up to preach, and then, sitting at the back of the sanctuary, she would turn and brush her granddaughter’s hair throughout my entire sermon, attempting to distract me.

It’s hard to believe that a grown-up would act so much like a child, especially in a worship service, unless it is true for all of us that, just because we look old enough to be grown up doesn’t mean we are.  This person needed so badly to be in control that she finally drove away virtually everyone who wanted to help her and to love her and left the church one of the most embittered people I’ve ever known.

We find the example of Jesus in these words.  “Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Philippians 2:5-7).  If we are going to be serious about following Jesus, that is going to force us to ask the hard, painful, death-experiencing questions about how much control means to us.  Love means letting go.  Paradoxically, despite all I have said, love means becoming childlike again in this one way.  Childlike in the way we trust God, who promised never to forsake or abandon us.

How will we get along?  How important is it for you to be in control?

Second question:  How do you handle conflict?  Someone sent me one of those emails this week about, “You know you’re a real Texan if. . . .”  One was, “You know you’re a real Texan if the tornado warning siren is a signal to go outside and look for the funnel.”  Who hasn’t?

Have you ever seen a tornado?  Tornadoes are the result of two forces of nature coming into conflict.  A cold air mass from the north and a warm air mass from the south crashing into each other.  They are frightening things, destructive things, because they are the point at which two forces that cannot coexist in the same place and time collide.  They destroy anyone and everyone who gets in their way.  What happens to those who get in your way when you are in conflict?  When someone else’s co-existence threatens yours?

The Apostle Paul said, “Love is patient.  Love is kind.  Love is not envious, or boastful, or arrogant, or rude.  It does not insist on its own way.  It is not irritable or resentful.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  It is only because I have been up to my chin in the raw sewage personal failure that I even have the nerve to ask the question, “How do you handle conflict?”

From my failures, this is what I have come to learn about conflict.  We can run from it or we can engage it with grace.  We can lean into it, live forward through it and come out on the other side as something we would never otherwise have been.  Jesus, in the garden, facing the conflict that the cross was going to be, first said, “God, please, not me.”  Then, he leaned forward into what made life possible for you and me. 

It was in Jesus’ surrender to the ultimate conflict any human being could ever possibly face that we found life.  His half-brother James later wrote, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.  Let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing” (James 1:2-4). 

I hate conflict.  But, the greatest gifts I have ever experienced have come to me through some form of conflict.  Isn’t this rain we are celebrating today so good because it has been so long since we had any?  The same forces, however, that can create tornadoes that destroy have also been at work bringing rain that refreshes and renews.  Nature has been in conflict, and we have been the beneficiaries of that conflict. 

Last Sunday, I got an email from a friend who lives in another city.  Her parents live hundreds of miles from here.  Her mother had gone into the hospital and they had asked if I would do their funeral when their time came, though there is no sense that they are going to pass away immediately.

I was a little surprised, honestly.  I knew her parents when I was in high school, when I was her classmate.  But, I’ve seen them very little in the last thirty years.  They really only know about me because they knew me when I was growing up in Brownfield and I am still their daughter’s friend and I am the pastor of a church.  That’s about it.  So, how desperate would you be if the person you were asking to do your funeral someday was someone you had not seen in thirty years, and you only knew them because they were a classmate of one of your children?

It made me wonder, so I called my friend.  I said, “I’ll be thrilled to do it.  I am a little curious, though.  Do they not have a church?”  She said, “No, they haven’t been to church in twenty-three years.”  These were people like you, people I had known growing up in church all my life.  Twenty-three years ago, their youngest son, who worked for the telephone company, climbed to the top of a telephone pole one day to do some work.  It snapped at the base and fell over on him, killing him instantly.  The last time this couple was in church was for the funeral of their son.  Apparently, it was for the funeral of more than just their son.

I am not judging them.  I grieve for them.  What they hoped for in life, and perhaps what they believed they deserved, came into conflict with what life actually ended up delivering.  They chose to handle their conflict by isolating themselves from the God who could have been the source of their healing.  It seems, in their last years, they are beginning to just open the door a little bit to God by reaching out to a preacher-boy they knew thirty years ago.

How are you handling the conflicts in your life?  With resentment, bitterness, payback?  Or, are you using those conflicts as opportunities to search for meaning?

The third and last question.  How honest can you be?  “Love,” the scripture says, “rejoices in the truth.”  Love seeks truth, lives for it, thrives on it, starves in its absence.

I was feeling pretty good this past week about something I had done.  I shared it with Nancy , and she complimented me, saying that I had handled it very well by giving someone a helpful piece of advice.  As I always do when people compliment me, I tend to deflect it.  I said, “Well, I appreciate your words, but I know I’m not perfect.”  Nancy very quickly said, “No, you’re not perfect, but you do give good advice.”  Nothing like honesty!

There is a direct correlation between honest and intimacy, and our lives will never be more intimate, even with God, than we are honest.  So, may I be honest with you?  When I read the life of Jesus, I see that we are spared nothing.  This is the story of a real, live human being who suffered some of the greatest abuse any human being could ever experience and was murdered for his good doings.  We are the ones who have romanticized the gospel.  We are the ones who have turned even the most graphic scenes of violence in the gospel story into stained glass beauty.

I am absolutely certain that was never the heavenly Father’s original intention.  His original intention with the gospel was to tell us the truth.  Not just about himself, but about how life might turn out for us.  And, what it might cost us if we want to be people of faith in light of life’s hostilities.  Especially if those hostilities have to do with getting reconnected with someone with whom we have been in conflict.  Like God, or someone we are married to, or someone we go to church with, or whatever.  That is what the gospel story is really about and what Lent calls on us to reflect.  Yet, if I may be honest with you, one of my greatest temptations as a pastor is to be dishonest.  Not in the sense of stealing from you.  But, dishonest in the sense of withholding from you.

If you have been a member of this church for any length of time at all, you know that your pastor was divorced and remarried before I became your pastor.  When I first came, I would talk about that some, and understandably, some would say to me, “Don’t talk about that.”  The most interesting thing was that every time I did, more people than not said to me, “Thank you for being so honest.”  To this day, the most requested sermon I have ever preached, ever, is “Beyond The Closure Myth,” the sermon I preached nine years ago, before I became your pastor, on what it is like to go through a divorce as a minister and find my way back again.  I cannot tell you about the importance of being freed of your demons unless I am willing to confess my own, and you let me.

If a pastor being human is too uncomfortable for you, God bless you, because you are going to have a real hard time with the gospel and the very real, human Jesus whose life story it is.  If the church is not the place where the redeeming gospel of Christ can be brought to bear about real conflicts we live with every day, then pray tell, where will we have that conversation?

My friend George Mason told his Wilshire congregation last Sunday about something Steve Jobs told the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University .  Jobs was the founder of Apple Computer.  You may know a little bit about his story, that he founded the company and then was fired from it.  He went through all of that mess, and many good things came out of that.  But, one difficult thing after another also happened to him, including pancreatic cancer.  It was a very rare form of pancreatic cancer, because it happened to be the kind that was curable through surgery.  This is what Jobs told the graduates. 

“This is the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades.  Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.  No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.  It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.  Right now,” Jobs said to those young graduates, “right now, the new is you.  But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true.  Your time is limited.”  And, this is where what Jobs said zeroed in on me, and the Holy Spirit took it and laser-pinpointed one of my greatest weaknesses.  “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.”  What else was Jesus doing in the wilderness, if he was not being obedient to that?

Love rejoices in being truthful, and that includes being truthful with and to ourselves.  The greatest temptation Jesus ever faced was the temptation to become the Messiah everyone else thought he should be instead of the Savior God sent him to be.  What is your greatest temptation?  I have told you mine.  Can we talk honestly with each other?

How important is it for you to be in control?  How do you handle conflict?  How honest can you be?  How you answer those questions will determine how you get along.  Or, not.

What if the desert you’re living in, in your marriage, or your life on any level, whatever, was just the dry ground on which the raindrops of God’s blessings are about to fall, because you finally decided to look at and honestly answer those three questions?  What if?