   As a pastor I put everything I have into helping people see that they are beloved of the Holy One. The first truth I proclaim is that God is Love. The second truth is that God makes us in the image of God and calls us very good, that we are bodies made of stardust filled with the breath of God. Our most intimate relationship - ourselves with the very Ground of Being and Source of All That Is - manifests and produces love. This theology is the hill I will die on as a preacher, a teacher, as one who holds sacred space for another.
   I talk about this Reality more than the sin we do in the world. This isn’t because the damage we do matters little. You see, I don’t see how we can tell the truth of our lives and the world around us, how we can sit with the pain within the reality humankind has fashioned, unless we first know ourselves beloved.
  So with our belovedness as a given, today we remember that we are mortal, that we will only live so long. That we come from the dust of stars and to that dust we will return. We lament the pain of the limits of this world and of ourselves. We grieve what we cannot fix or make whole or set free. We are brave enough to tell the truth and to feel the truth.
  You see, Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem, and while we know that Easter will happen, we are not at Easter yet. Limitations, failure, suffering, betrayal, loss, and death will all happen first. Lent calls us to be present to this journey. To stay with the hard and the pain and the this isn’t what I thought would happen and the can’t you think of something else and the end of a dream of what might have been.
   If we are not willing to feel the pain, our joy will be radically incomplete. Muted. Insufficient.
   So, beloveds, I ask you to enter into the journey of Lent.
