During the summers when I was a Hendrix College student, I left the bucolic confines of the Hendrix campus and returned to Northeast Arkansas to work for the Arkansas Highway Department on a bridge crew. It would be difficult to imagine a starker contrast between the two environments. The red brick, tree-lined path between the philosophy building and library was replaced with tarry blacktop leading to decaying rural bridges over ditches and creeks. What’s more, each week the bridge crew worked four, ten-hour days, from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. in the oppressive summer heat standing on asphalt above water with the sun both beating down and reflecting up. The minutes of those days ticked by at a maddeningly slow crawl. Those long summers felt like exile from the life I loved and was supposed to be living.
During those summers I operated a jackhammer and an acetylene torch, but the worst job was flagging. Flagging on remote county roads was incredibly lonely, because the flagger was fifty yards away from the rest of the crew. And, it was dangerous, because the rare car that appeared often careened down the road unaware of or unconcerned with the promising young college student frantically waving his red flag. Flagging was also dangerous because the others on the crew sometimes forgot about the flagger and failed to provide him minor graces in the sweltering heat such as, oh, water.
In my overheated delirium, I would sometimes daydream and occasionally hallucinate, and it was on one such morning while flagging in rural Craighead County north of Jonesboro that a small Chrysler K-Car emerged from the haze and approached our worksite. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing inside the car. Was it penguins? Surely that couldn’t be. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and peered in again. And, sure enough, stuffed into that small, powder blue sedan so tight that they could have been circus clowns was a whole bunch of full-habit-wearing nuns. I’m not sure I’d seen that many nuns collectively in my entire life at that point, and I’d surely not seen so many together, literally sitting on one another’s laps. The driver smiled at me angelically, and I waved them on. For the rest of the morning, I wondered at what I’d seen.
Lent surely is a long season. It’s six weeks in duration, including Holy Week, but the sense of it is longer still. If we’ve given up something meaningful, Lent is so long that we feel the lack. If we’ve taken on a discipline, Lent is so long that it begins to chafe. If we’ve done neither of these things, Lent is so long that we truly begin to feel guilty at our lack of observance. And if we are theologically attuned, Lent is so long—and this is, of course, the point—that we experience with Jesus the long march to the cross. The season becomes more and more ominous as the weeks progress. The mood gets ever-darker. The sensation of impending doom crescendos. At this point in the season, on the fifth Sunday of Lent, Lent can be as oppressive as the Arkansas summer heat while standing upon blacktop.
This is the sense that our readings initially convey today. In the Old Testament reading, the prophet Jeremiah writes during the Babylonian Exile, at a time when many of the Jewish people have been forcibly removed from the their land while others have been relegated to third-class citizenship. This state of affairs has been going on so long that Jeremiah’s neighbors are despondent. They’ve forgotten what blessing looks like.
In John’s Gospel, today’s focus is individually on Jesus. By now in the Gospel, Jesus has a clear sense of where his ministry is headed: straight to a Roman crossbeam of wood, a painful and humiliating end for him and the dashing of all hope for his followers. Jesus has attempted to explain what is coming to his closest friends, but no one wants to hear it. No one wants to believe it. And so, no one empathizes or truly walks with Jesus in these moments of fear and dread. Jesus experiences his own personal exile. He is truly all alone. In a moment of heartrending vulnerability, today Jesus admits, “Now my soul is troubled.”
For both Jeremiah and Jesus, exile could, and perhaps by rights ought to, lead to despair. In the midst of the withering heat, or on the march to the cross, or on the fifth Sunday of an interminably long Lent, or in whatever we are facing in life that feels like an endless exile, how do we fend off despair? How do we persevere? How do we thrive?
The great American Baptist preacher Tony Campolo has a sermon entitled, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.” Friday in that sermon is Good Friday, the Friday when hope is dashed, when Jesus is killed; the metaphoric Friday in which so much of our own lives seems to be lived. For so many, so often, life is a prolonged Good Friday of pain, or illness, or disappointment, or exile from the things we love and that give life. Tony Campolo acknowledges Friday in all its reality, in which—like standing on asphalt over water—the heat and glare of life exhaust and confuse and render us practically delirious. This is what Jeremiah feels in the midst of a broken people. This is what Jesus feels, all alone in his knowledge of what is coming, as his soul is troubled.
But in each and every line of Tony Campolo’s sermon, even as he acknowledges the unavoidable, irrepressible reality of Friday, Campolo adds, “but Sunday’s coming!” And the Sunday after Good Friday is always Easter Sunday.
This is the promise to which Jesus holds fast. After lamenting his troubled soul, in his next breath, Jesus speaks of glory.
This is what the prophet proclaims. From exile, Jeremiah speaks God’s voice and says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people…They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
This is not Pollyanna optimism. Jesus knows that the pain of the cross will dwarf the pain of his present loneliness. Jeremiah’s exile continues, and he has no way to know when God will restore God’s people. These are realities that must be faced. But for those who find their lives in the Living God, these realities are not the deepest reality nor the most enduring. Beyond any exile, beyond any pain, beyond any challenge, God’s reconciling, restoring, joy-giving love awaits.
At lunchtime on that 1992 summer day in Craighead County, our Highway Department bridge crew loaded into our truck and sought a shaded area in which we could rest and escape the sun for a few minutes. We drove to a small, nearby county park. All of us were surly and uncomfortable, complaining and bickering about the relentless heat and endless day, but as we pulled into the park our mouths were suddenly stopped and our eyes widened. What I’d seen earlier while flagging had not been a hallucination. In the middle of the park was a playground, and on the swings, the merry-go-round, the slides, and even the monkey bars were all those nuns![i] In full habit in the summer heat, more nuns that I could count were frolicking around, grinning and playing like schoolchildren. Can you picture it? Whatever you are imagining, it was more than that. I’ve never seen anything else like it, either before or since. It was surreal. Those nuns were dressed in black that extended to their ankles. They had to have been at least as hot and uncomfortable as we were. And yet, in the midst of that endless and sweltering summer, they laughed with abandon. They found joy.
At nineteen, I thought those ten-hour days of grueling manual labor in the Arkansas heat were the worst life could get. (My, how life has, time and time again, proven me wrong!) But even then, God revealed hope to me, and God did so through the laughter of a playground filled with nuns. As they awaited the resurrection, in their heavy black habits they played and frolicked and acted like blessed children. They knew that in a world so often like Good Friday, Sunday is coming. It is! Wherever you are in this season of Lent, wherever you are in the Lent of your own life, however endless your Good Friday has seemed, Sunday is coming. Easter is coming. Hold fast, friends. Wipe the sweat from your eyes. Look for the signs coming down the road. Easter is coming, and by the grace of the God of love, we will know joy.
[i] I later learned that the nuns were sisters of Holy Angels Convent, a house of Olivetan Benedictine Sisters located north of Jonesboro. The convent still exists, presently with twenty-one sisters.
God in the Midst of the City 