Steadfastness: A Lenten Reflection
A Lenten Reflection by the Rev. Dr. Donald A Wells | February 2026
While I don’t remember all of the details of Jon Stewart being interviewed by Stephen Colbert on the Tonight Show, it was a few years back, one part of that interview has stuck in my mind. That exchange seems an appropriate beginning for a Lenten Reflection. The issue of religion and family came up and Colbert noted that Stewart was Jewish and his wife was Roman Catholic and wondered if that were a problem in raising their son. Stewart replied to the effect, “Not at all! We are of one mind. We are raising him to be guilty." The audience laughed heartedly. It was a well-worn stereotype.
But we in the Protestant tradition should not laugh quite so hard. We certainly have our share of guilt and we bring it all out especially in the Lenten Season. A good deal of our liturgical materials and many of our hymns foster feelings of great guilt: ‘our sins crucified Jesus’; ‘only his shed blood can make us whole’, and on. What a burden to inflict on people!
I fear that this doctrine of ‘original sin’ will ever be with us, although various segments of the Christian Movement understand sin and evil differently, including the Celtic Christian tradition, many Paulists, the Franciscans, along with many, but not all, on the more progressive side of theological discourse, including those in our United Church of Christ. Indeed, there is a need to name our sinfulness especially around our complicity in both personal and institutional racism; our prejudices toward people of other religions, cultures and ethnic backgrounds; the tragic effects of patriarchy, both past and present; and the horrific situation we now find ourselves in today in our nation. I do not have my head in the sand regarding these and other issues that we need to seriously address.
But I suggest there is a different take on all of this. It says that we have been loved and blessed by God from our very creation. God saw that the creation was good and that includes us. The bad choices we make need to be acknowledged, but we have never been separated from God as some would have us believe. The task of the Church, then, is to encourage us to live more fully into our creation as children of God; to help us on the journey. Christ’s death to placate an angry God is not what is needed and is simply bad theology. There are other theories of the atonement that we can address at another time. Suffice it to say for now is that we are already God’s beloved children and don’t need the extra long faces and the inner ‘sackcloth and ashes’ attitude we often adopt in Lent; an attitude that drains our emotional energies and diverts us from meaningful discipleship.
The late biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, in his ‘Forward’ to an issue in the Journal for Preachers (Vol. XLIII, No. 2, Lent 2020), helps us in this regard. He writes:
One might think, from popular culture and some church practices, that Lent is a season in which we may variously feel sad, guilty, or depraved. But of course Lent is none of that. Lent is a season when we face the matter of being more seriously and more fully disciples of Jesus.
He takes his cue from the Gospel of Luke (9:51) where Jesus is seen as setting ‘his face to go to Jerusalem’ and then notes that the older KJV uses a stronger word: ‘steadfastly’. ‘He steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem’. The beginning of that journey is really where we should mark the start of our own Lenten journey. Brueggemann suggests that had Jesus remained in Galilee preaching and teaching he would have been a nice but an unimportant rabbi. But the decision to go to Jerusalem was the game changer. Brueggemann again:
His decision to go to Jerusalem means that he would assert and act out the contradiction that his good news posed for the political-religious establishment. Discipleship is a life of following him on the path of contradiction and contestation.
Now we have a far better focus for Lent. We need to travel with Jesus into the Jerusalem’s of our world. Examples abound: both citizens and immigrants taken off the street by ICE; people of other faith traditions and cultures mocked; military ‘might makes right’ prevails; divisive and hurtful language now common place; and ‘white supremacy’ is the unspoken theme of the day for many.
In this Lenten season let our hymns, prayers, conversations, voices, protests and votes come to the fore with new resolve as we live out our lives as disciples. Let us encourage one another, calling forth the deep goodness that is within each of us from creation, moving us away from the deadening and disempowering focus on guilt, so that we might follow him ‘steadfastly’ toward Jerusalem.