This morning we are beckoned to our Lenten journey by these words:

"Come, come, whoever you are,
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come."

("Come Come Whoever You Are,"
Sufi poet Meylan Jelaluddin Rumi, circa 1200 CE)

The season of Lent calls us back, asks us to take a good hard look at our lives and choose who we will follow. It asks us to make a deliberate decision to enter into a season of darkness so that we might emerge on the other side to celebrate the joy of Easter.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about the seasons of our lives in the following way: "Human life consists in satisfied seasons of well-being; seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering and death; and in turns of surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair. Where there has been only darkness, there is light." (Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms. pp 10-9-21)

Brueggemann speaks of this as a movement from orientation to disorientation to new orientation. This movement can be seen over and over again in our faith history. Adam and Eve took it – living in paradise, being forced out by their disobedience into the unknown, reorienting as they raised a family and found their way in a new life. Abraham and Sarah took it – from a place of being settled and comfortable in their ancestral land, traveling to the unknown with strange promises, to a time of knowing God's promises for them fulfilled in a new land. Moses took the journey, Ruth took it, as well as countless others in our faith history.

We ourselves find life like that. We find ourselves settled and comfortable only to have all of that tumbled upside down. The tumbled, upside down time feels as if it has always been like that and will always be so. Times of disorientation cause us to lose our sense of direction and forget which way is up. Did you ever go through the touch tunnel at Liberty Science Center? You went through that tunnel in complete darkness and had to feel your way through the turns. When going through you tend to lose any sense of orientation and can't figure out whether you are coming or going. Yesterday I saw that this building can do the same thing if you aren't used to it. Many times I turned people around who were heading towards the front of the building thinking they were going out the back. Disorientation takes us out of our well-ordered lives and takes us, gasping for breath into the unknown. Disorientation is the land of grieving, the journey of ill-ness, job loss … disorientation is pregnancy, new parenthood, new job, new homes … disorientation is the times when all the familiar signs of life are gone and you have to figure it out all over again.

We aren't all that graceful about disorientation. Most of the time, given our druthers we would not choose to unsettle all that we know to find new ways of being. Think of a time of disorientation as being a time when you have to re-think everything and find new places for the old and familiar – like moving your old things to a new house. Or … singing very familiar words to a new tune. Try fitting the words of the very familiar Easter song, Christ the Lord is Risen Today, to a different tune.

Disorientation is Lent … in a different way. Lent is a chosen disorientation, a path we follow in the example of Jesus Christ. The moment of baptism is a moment of profound orientation for Jesus – "this is my Son with whom I am well pleased." There is no time for Jesus to bask in that moment – he finds himself almost immediately in the "scrubby" wilderness that is the Judean country-side. An area much like this building to visitors, or the touch tunnel at Liberty Science Center – a place where it is difficult to tell which way is up. In the wilderness time he is tested – he gets to wrestle with the demons. He is given a choice to have it all … he can choose the familiarity of what he already knows and then some. Each time he confronted with that choice in this wilderness testing he says no and turns to what God is calling him towards.

Today we stand poised to completely enter into the journey that is Lent. First a time to go into the wilderness and wrestle with our demons … finding what is still unrepentant and unconverted in us. But again, Lent is also chosen disorientation. This Lenten season we will be exploring what it means to be transformed by God's love story for us. To be transformed means we are willing to enter into a time of disorientation where we learn to sing familiar words in unfamiliar ways. The choice is tough – it is one thing to be thrust into the land of disorientation by circumstances beyond our control. Lent asks us to make this choice consciously and deliberately. To lift our lives up for examination and transformation. It asks that we choose to go to the difficult places willingly in the example of Jesus Christ. Our second hymn says it well.

"You must go and stand your trial; you have to stand it by yourself. Nobody else can stand it for you, you have to stand it by yourself."

Jesus walked the lonesome valley for us that we might be transformed. Dare to walk this journey of disorientation and be transformed so that you might come through on the other side of a new orientation: Easter joy.