February 22, 2026 – First Sunday in Lent
Exodus 13.17-22
Mark 2.18-20
Polycurious
First Sunday in Lent
The stars were aligned this week in the constellation of World Religions and Spirituality. For the world’s Muslims, Ramadan began this week on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on when the new moon was sighted where you are. Ramadan is the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, and is a time for fasting, prayer, meditation and building community for the faithful. The month of Ramadan was chosen for the observance because it is believed to be the time when the Quran was revealed to the prophet Mohammed. Healthy Muslim adults are expected to fast from dawn to sunset through the month as a sign of reverence and devotion.
This week also saw the Lunar New Year, or Chinese New Year, which began on Tuesday. This year is the year of the Horse, specifically the Year of the Fire Horse, which only occurs every sixty years. The celebration lasts anywhere from 6 to 17 days. Because it is based on the lunar calendar, the date of the new year changes from year to year. Celebrated mostly in Asian and East Asian nations, it is also known as the Spring festival, and it is in part celebrated by praying for a successful spring planting in the hope of providing a fruitful autumn harvest. If you saw this week’s Facebook post, then you saw a rendering of the Chinese Fire Horse.
Finally, for the Christian world, Lent began this week on Ash Wednesday. We really don’t need to rehearse what the season of Lent is about, except to note it is a time for spiritual reflection, for prayer and penitence in preparation for the celebration of Easter six weeks from now. Lent is a period of forty days, and as we have noted before, Sundays are not considered a part of Lent, since each Sunday throughout the year is regarded as a “little Easter.” This is why that little preposition on the front cover of the bulletin is so important, the word “in” as in the first Sunday in Lent rather than the first Sunday of Lent. Since Sundays are not a part of Lent, the church considers Sundays in, but not of Lent. Consider this your bit of ecclesiastical trivia for the day.
Ramadan, Lunar New Year and Lent, three celebrations of three very different spiritual traditions. Interestingly, they are also three moveable celebrations, none of them is held on the same date every year, which is why it is so felicitous they all began within a day of one another this week. Three different traditions, three different paths to God.
Yesterday’s piece in our UCC Lent Devotionals by Phiwa Langeni takes as its text our Old Testament lesson from Exodus chapter 13 this morning. Phiwa zeroes in on verse 18: “God led the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea.” I understand I’m taking a chance here speaking of roundabouts to a population that often drives route 154 to Haddam on a regular basis, where we encounter not one, but two of roundabouts, but I suppose God has a reason for it. Langeni reflects on what it might mean to take a different, less familiar route, to God, as the Hebrews did on their journey to the Promised Land. But even though the route was not a direct one – they avoided the war-mongering Philistines – they did so in the confidence God was leading them. “The Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, lo lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day not the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.” And not only was theirs a roundabout route, it was a generational route: tradition has it that it took forty years to reach the Promised Land.
My friend and colleague The Rev. Molly Baskette is retiring in two weeks after thirty three years in pastoral ministry. Molly and I worked together near at start of her ministry in Beverly, and she went from there to the UCC church in Somerville Massachusetts, just north of Cambridge, and then to the First Church UCC in Berkely, California for the past ten years. Molly has been part of the UCC’s Still-Speaking Writers Group since its inception, the group of folks who contribute to our Advent and Lent devotionals, among other publications. In fact she wrote Thursday’s piece in our Lent devotionals, Outgrowing Christ(ianity) and it does have an elegiac tone to it, especially her opening words, “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve outgrown Christianity. Not the teachings of Christ, but the trappings and traps of Christendom.” In a certain sense we can understand what she is talking about, particularly in an age when so many people who don’t know anything about the church or only know a little, look at Christian Nationalism and think that is what the church is all about – you know, things like cutting health care and food supplement programs and arresting immigrants and targeting people of color, all those things Jesus told us to do. Molly uses the metaphor of Jesus as the bridegroom that we read from Mark this morning to suggest it might be time for a trial separation. If you read it you saw how she has some fun with the image, but as always hers is a thoughtful and spot-on reflection. And to be honest, if the church of JD Vance is considered the primary route to God then I’d want a divorce as well. For Molly, the answer lies in Christian mysticism. And this is a significant path to God; it has stood the test of time, and the mystical tradition has deep roots in Christianity, arguably to John the Baptist himself. Such spiritual luminaries as St Theresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and St Clare of Assisi each found their own pathway to God in the mystical tradition, and by doing so demonstrated that even within the church of Jesus Christ there can be multiple pathways to God.
The Hebrews of the Exodus, following the God-designed roundabout, found an alternate route to the Promised Land. Molly also suggests some alternate routes to enlightenment, using the image of Jesus as the bridegroom as a jumping off point. She wrote, “Jesus cast himself into the role of bridegroom to the Church. Does this mean I want a divorce? And who would I even be divorcing: Jesus or the Church? Maybe I’m in a poly relationship with both of them, playing the weary peacemaker.” I think this is Molly’s way of offering a healthy remedy to the way the church has long understood itself. Perhaps if the institutional church understood that it offers one of many, ways, but not the exclusive way, to being in a healthy relationship with God, we would be free of the charge that we must all believe the same thing. Isn’t this what gets us lumped in to the assumption that an aberration like Christian Nationalism, like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition before it, back to the fundamentalism of the early 20th century, is the only path to God? Or are there multiple ways of knowing God, each with its own particular way of being in relationship with the divine? If God could send Israel through the roundabout way, why couldn’t God beckon us with whatever it is that will bring us closer? Could route 154 in Haddam be a metaphor for finding enlightenment? I wouldn’t go that far, but it does suggest there are other ways of looking at it.
I think the confluence of celebrations in the constellation of World Religions and Spirituality this week has something important to say to us. The month-long fasting of Ramadan is a seriously strenuous religious practice. I’m not at all certain I could do this, and my hat is off to the millions who make it an annual practice as automatically and habitually as we put up a Christmas tree every year. And while we don’t see as many ashed foreheads out and about as we once did on Ash Wednesdays past, it remains a signal of a personal devotion remembering we are an imperfect people who put both our trust and our faith in somebody who died so we could live. As for the Lunar New Year, indeed with all the religious holidays and feasts that are governed by the phase of the moon, well, let’s remember that the holiest day of the Christian calendar is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. you can’t get much more lunar – and for that matter much more solar – than this!
Yes, there is one God of us all, and yes, there is more than one path to know and love God, and yes, there is a polyphony of voices that sing of who God is to them, and ours is one of those voices that can sing of who God is to us. As we saw this week, they come in a variety of accents and languages and songs of praise. And so we lift ours in concert with our sisters and brothers wherever they are, and by whatever name they call our one glorious listening and loving God.