Christian Pathway

In the news and you can’t avoid it, are men mainly white, getting angry and behaving like spoilt children. Showing every sign of having had their tantrums affirmed as strength by doting mothers and never being sent to bed without their tea.
The world isn’t quite as affirming as Mother, so we can see them shouting frustration at each other, and that aggression is spun as strength. Some think this shoutiness is strength.

The world seems to want strength right now, as shown by our leaders. The world then seems to like simple answers and quick solutions to complicated problems. Some of them drape themselves in Christianity.

I think they could learn much about strength by the next few weeks of Lent. The journey we begin today shows what real strength is, vulnerability.

When the Trumps and Putins, and all the other shouty male leaders have long gone and left whatever mess behind them. Jesus’s example of vulnerability to the point giving everything will be the one to turn to.

We join him in Lent, repeatedly showing how the creator of everything displays vulnerability as strength. It begins today with the enemy saying to make this stone into bread. Go get control over all the world as a ruler; throw yourself off the roof.

Jesus decides to go hungry and doesn’t ask his Father in Heaven to join with party tricks signs of strength.
Through Lent and through to Easter, we will see our lord again and again choosing to be vulnerable. Choosing to wash feet, riding into Jerusalem on a humble donkey, and choosing the death of the lowest of the low.

Lent shows us that vulnerability is the ultimate act of our faith. Why we, as a nation that thinks of itself as Christian, never seem to understand this is beyond me

For a Christian country, we never seem to get the dichotomy of this sorted. Famous author Brene Brown talks about this strength of vulnerability. She says, “Vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage.”

It goes both ways; Jesus shows and heals vulnerability in so many turns of the story of lent.

Yet our leaders and us typically ignore this lesson.

We cover up our vulnerability because, as Brenee says, vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you, but it’s the last thing I want you to see in me.
In you, it’s courage. In me, it’s inadequacy. In you, it’s strength and lovability. In me, it’s shame.”

We see Jesus’s death as shameful to this day? Because we see weakness as bad and vulnerability as weakness? Because the world teaches us that being strong is good. Being strong provides easy answers. So when we feel weak, we shut down our feelings, buckle up, and crack on.

The problem when we think like this we shut down so many feelings, and the problem with that is you can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.

Then, we, as unhappy as we are, interact with others in ways that are less caring than we might be as we act out our pain.

We walk through our lives pretending to be happy, or at least ok, pretending to be something we are not. At worse we are fibbing at best we aren’t being authentic.
“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we actually are. Choosing authenticity means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to be vulnerable.”
All of these things are at the heart of what we are going to see played out as we move through Lent, Jesus choosing to be weak, choosing to love, to be authentic.

Really, half the men we see shouting and causing mayhem are just little boys having a tantrum because mummy won’t affirm their tantrum in tescos, and so the toys come out the pram.

The actual reverse of power

Anyone who stays with the journey of lent will see what absolute power does in the next 40 days.

Jesus tips our ideas of the world upside down and shows that love means being vulnerable because we all are. We can’t love ourselves if we don’t love our weaknesses, because he loves all of you and that is what he came for, isn’t it? Grace for our weakness?

If you take one thing away from Jesus’s journey through lent, I would really like you to ask yourself this. Why do we see shouty men as strong when the man we worship chooses to be vulnerable.

Even to death.
For you.