Meeting God in the Wilderness

Beloved in Christ,

As we begin another Lent together, many have noted how strange it is to begin this season when we feel like last year’s Lent never really ended. We have spent the past year fasting from our cherished ways of living and connecting with other people, and have lived in a virtual wilderness, longing to sing the songs of what used to feel like home. 

A year ago, I was nervous about how a long wilderness would impact our church, which was already reeling in many ways. I and many others wondered what and how we would emerge from a prolonged period of exile. 

The thing about wilderness and exile in the Bible and throughout our history, though, is that while it is a place of deep pain and immeasurable loss, it is also, always, the source of new and renewed life. It’s a space of both depravation and nourishment. At the outset of the Babylonian exile, the people of Israel had everything they knew and loved ripped away from them, were physically sent off to live in a strange land, and had to learn to connect with God in strange and unfamiliar ways. It felt as if God had simply abandoned the whole project of God’s people. And yet, it’s precisely that period that gave us most of the Old Testament in its current form, with its remarkable depiction of a God who loves and pursues us with a love that will not let us go, with its soaring prophecies of hope for the coming of God’s peace and justice that defy the encroaching darkness. In the face of loss and heartbreak, the people met in new ways the depth of God’s love and faithfulness. 

I am in a very different place today than I was one year ago as I look out on the future of God’s church. I still don’t know what all of this will look like. We may be smaller, we may have less money, but because I have soaked in what God has done in scripture, because I have know what God is capable of in my own broken self and life, and because I see week by week by week in visitations the incredible ways the people of our diocese are finding new life, I am absolutely overflowing with hope for what I know will be a Spirit-filled future. As we settle into another five weeks of an already prolonged Lent, don’t forget for a second, beloved, that the end of Lent’s story is God’s decisive declaration that there is no one so far gone that they cannot be found, there is nothing so broken that it cannot be mended, and there is nothing so dead that it cannot be restored to God’s glorious, unending life. 

Keep the faith,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop
Episcopal Church in Minnesota