The Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 6, 2025

Isaiah 43:16-21

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?” might be one of the most processual statements in the whole library of scripture. 

For the process-relational preacher and congregation, these words of God might actually feel old hat. Of course God is about to do a new thing! We’re kind of banking on that with this whole metaphysics of dynamic relationality!

But do you perceive it?

How is your Lenten discipline this year?

With only a handful of days left in Lent, do you perceive God on the edge of creativity and novelty, about to do a new thing?

Or are you tired and distracted?

Are you just ready to get through Holy Week and Easter? Are you concerned that choir rehearsals just don’t have the choir where they should be for the Easter anthem, and the breakfast after the Easter sunrise service still doesn’t have anyone signed up to bring the hot cross buns? It’s been so long since you’ve made them that you’re not sure you can manage this being the “one more thing.”

While God is on the edge of creativity and novelty, are you on a different edge after weathering barrages of executive orders, economic uncertainties, regrets, mounting needs, and international instabilities over recent months? years?

Preacher, do you perceive God at the ready, excited to partner with the jackals and ostriches, the waters and peoples?

Preacher, do your people perceive God at the ready, excited to choose them and quench their thirst, to reintroduce them to their wild animal kindred in wonder, love, and praise?

As rich as theological reflection on novelty, change, creativity, and possibility are within our ecosystem of philosophies of organism, I’m not convinced that we need to focus on these theological opportunities in this season. “Do you not perceive it?” seems to be the pastoral and homiletic gem in the theological treasure chest before us.

At this moment in Lent, a full month into the season of self-examination and penitence, how have our practices prepared us to answer the question, “Do you not perceive it?” How might we tune our hearts to the more gracious good news that the jackals, ostriches, and waters are ready to be our siblings in holy relationships with God?

If you and/or your people feel particularly perceptive, what is your discernment process for recognizing your vocation(s) within God’s new thing?

If you and/or your people are feeling rather lost or still uncomfortable in this wandering examen, what might you do to take a moment for some vital rest and vision?

As Lent continues, welcome this question within your disciplines. Our theologies of change and novelty, creativity and possibility only stand to be enriched by our intentional discernment and our honed perception.

~~~

Psalm 126

What do you do when you perceive God thrumming on the edge of creativity, a new possibility becoming actual?

Come home with shouts of joy, carrying your sheaves! Laugh! Name the great things that God has done! Identify God’s creativity in your life!

Testify.

I don’t know how comfortable you or your congregation might be with an Old Time Religion word like “testify,” but the psalmist gives us a glimpse of exactly that: testimony. Bearing witness–quite literally, becoming a martyr–is one of our great and humbling responsibilities as the people of God. Instead of thinking about testimony as a proselytization of the unchurched, though, the joyful sheave-carriers are coming home!

How might your testimony evangelize the church? How might you and your people need to hear how God is at work in your lives and in the world this Lent?

To bear the witness of Christ’s good news for the life of the world, we must evangelize ourself, Church! Just as we cannot journey Holy Lent without each other, we cannot keep it to ourselves when we perceive God about to do a new thing!

~~~

Philippians 3:4b-14

Have you gotten to a point in Lent where you’re feeling the urgency of it all?

Some years, my Lenten observance becomes beautifully routine, a canalization of meaningful habituality that brings life-giving waters to thirsty roots in the depths of my life. Some years, Lenten observance seems overloaded with externalities to such a point that we’re nearing a frenzy at this fifth week: responsibilities in worship preparation, coursework (or grading) increasing in complexity, family making Easter travel plans, Springtime planting (and allergies) in full swing, tax season nearing its deadlines, and your list may go on.

The urgency of Lent is not the urgency of these externalities. The urgency of Lent heightens our focus on the cross of Christ and the crucifixions throughout our world today. The urgency of Lent is a matter of life and death in which we are graced with the baptism and the discipline to bear with the sufferings of Christ and the world as we become Christlike together.

Christ’s cross, then, is not the site of a substitute execution that staves off a penalty against you or me despite what bloodlust-filled theologians in the last few centuries might want you to think. Such a theology denies your baptism into the Body of the Crucified Messiah, ignores the crucifixions that persist throughout the world today, and vacates all hope that we can participate in divine lures that beckon our creativity to materialize various possibilities for flourishing life and justice, for the life of the world.

As we are disciplining ourselves and being disciplined to perceive God at the edge of creativity, novelty, and possibility, Karen Baker-Fletcher reminds us that we must wrestle with our belonging to one another in solidarity “to incarnate God in the here and now” (Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit, 124). Discipling through Lent, we are called to recognize how we are knit together in the dynamic and emerging cosmos as kindred creatures who shape and are shaped by each other, God, and all our relations. 

In this letter to the Philippians, we are reminded that our discipleship highlights a gracious sharing in the death of Christ such that we are practiced, we are tuned to bear the sufferings of the crucified throughout our world today so that they might know that they are loved and never discarded as broken victims of history. In bearing with others in their suffering, process theologies of change and creativity, novelty and possibility can enliven the crucial task of perceiving ways out of no ways without having to appeal to some pie-in-the-sky opioid that merely dulls the pain. 

Take your cue from Theodore Walker, Jr., and Vincent Harding: “Because of changing circumstances, the precise ‘definition of struggle for freedom’ is ‘fluid’” (Mothership Connections, 46-47). The fluidity of oppression means that oppression cannot be understood as strictly necessary. Oppression is contingent. Other worlds in which oppression is overcome and/or nonexistent are possible! As we disciple and are discipled this Lent, we can pursue justice and flourishing as urgent and living hopes through the cross, with the crucified, and as the resurrection because of the sheer fact that liberation from oppression is a possibility at all! 

Perceiving God on the cusp of creative novelty, process Christian theology can affirm a hope that “is not only in the future. Hope is in the present,” stirring up in us desires to live into worlds that are other than the present schemes (Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit, 120). Our hope is thickened on the faithful journey with God, who calls us “to arise from whatever oppressive, repressive, depressive slumber seduces us to inaction and to act with God, who is on the side of justice” (Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit, 121-122).

Whatever lies ahead is not yet known because it is not…

…yet.

Pressing on, straining forward with Paul this Lent is not about reaching some predestined fixedness that’s just up ahead in the temporal distance. Just as we must perceive God on the verge of creative novelty, prehending the world and discerning possibilities for our zesty adventure in love, beauty, peace, and truth, so must we discern our vocations for such a time as this and then act. With God, one another, and all of creation, we must transform our hopes for solidarity in justice, through the cross and resurrection, into our present actual world. 

Do you perceive God about to do a new thing? Great. Act on it and do so with urgency. The life of the world, especially hung on and weeping at the Golgathas across the land, needs us.

~~~

John 12:1-8

I confess that I struggle with this Gospel lesson. Well, I don’t struggle with this Gospel lesson. I struggle with poor interpretations of it. I think I heard too many classmates dismiss theological convictions about God’s preferential option for the poor with a misreading of 12:8, marginalizing  Martha’s hospitality and Lazarus’s liveliness on their way to lick the boots of neoliberal capital rather than wipe the feet of Jesus after Mary has poured and wiped her precious anointing oil.

You may have encountered such a lazy misreading in your own ministry. It goes something like “Well, Jesus said that we’ll always have the poor with us, so trying to end the conditions that cause their poverty would be futile at best. They’ll always be here.”

Simply, this encounter is not about poverty. John’s gospel even gives us a clue to that effect within the story, noting that Judas Iscariot criticized the cost of Mary’s gift “not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it” (12:6). Furthermore, if this was an encounter about poverty, I would expect it to appear in Luke’s gospel. In fact, the writer of Luke-Acts is the only one of the gospellers who does not include this story! 

This is particularly important this lectionary year as we spend so much time in Luke, having heard from the Sermon on the Plain just a few weeks ago! Remember Jesus’s words about the poor there?! “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. . . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your consolation.” Luke-Acts wouldn’t leave out an opportunity for Jesus to talk about poverty, class, and economics (especially at a meal!!!), so the absence of this anointing from Luke’s gospel might heighten our attention elsewhere in John’s retelling of the encounter.

Set within our Lenten disciplines, this reading ought to draw the preacher’s attention to the others at the dinner. Surely this is not the first time that the disciples are meeting Martha, Lazarus, and Mary. We might recognize them in our own parishes today.

This Lent and throughout the journey of faith, who are the hosts in your community, spreading tables and preparing meals? Who are the attendants, reclining with others and gracing relationships with life abundant? Who are the adorers, calling others into wonder, love, and humble praise in the face of the unknown-yet-impending future?

In the Whiteheadian process tradition, these questions might even evoke the artforms of the religious. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead states, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness” (RM, 47). The cosmos is dynamic and interrelated, so none of us are ever alone. In our “own solitariness,” therefore, we confront the relationships that influence our own emergence through each moment of reality. Process womanist theologian Monica Coleman reminds us, “Relationships compose the world. They are the world” (Making a Way Out of No Way, 75). Religion, then, is what we do to become ourselves in the encounters with the mind-boggling complexity of our relatedness.

Hospitality, presence, and adoration can be artforms of the religious (another Whiteheadian phrase) that hone the disciple’s perception of the world as a whole, of each creature as kin, and of God on the cusp of creative novelty.

Discerning the artforms of the religious in your community might just be the new thing that God is about to do. Maybe, this Lent, God is inviting you, preacher and congregation alike and together, to disciple one another in faithful practices like hospitality, attending, and adoring so that your relationships brilliantly bloom in the Easter season and beyond.

As we prepare to follow a donkey colt, drive out money-changers, eat, keep vigil, sleep, assault, arrest, deny, choose Barabbas, lash, nail, impale, weep, witness, flee, fear, listen, proclaim, see in broken bread, demand to touch wounds, and be invited to breakfast, maybe we need to become intimately aware of our present relationships, our hopes, our gifts, and our callings to prepare for the journey ahead. Maybe we need to discern a way forward, together, answering God’s calls to bear witness in the world, to the Christ, and with the suffering.

Maybe we need to savor this dinner and the fragrance of the perfume as it fills the house.

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Tom is an ordained United Methodist Elder and process theologian. He earned his PhD from Boston University School of Theology, where he developed a process theology of Holy Communion in a sacramental ecotheology. Currently, he serves as the Acquiring Editor at Orbis Books, an affiliate faculty member in Wesleyan and Methodist theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, the Lecturer in United Methodist History and Doctrine at Yale Divinity School, and on the steering committee of the Open and Relational Theologies Unit of the AAR.