We are delighted that Bobby Gross, author of Living the Christian Year and who has contributed previous series during Lent and Advent, has agreed to write a new series of Lenten reflections on the theme of humility.
Circumstantial vulnerability? Well, that’s a rather banal truism. We all know that “stuff” happens. Except, many of us generally don’t think bad stuff will happen to us, at least not anytime soon.
Which is arguably good. I don’t think we should go around with excessive fear or gnawing anxiety about all the bad things that might intersect our lives. But in fact, increasing numbers of people, especially young adults, actually are navigating life with an exaggerated sense of threat and precarity.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU has written about the perceived fragility of students in The Coddling of the American Mind, and he has a new book forthcoming this month, The Anxious Generation, exploring the roots of what he describes as an “epidemic of mental illness.”[i] I have no interest in contributing to these concerning trends, but I do find it helpful during Lent to consciously rehearse our vulnerability to unpredictable circumstances.
This can prove uncomfortable as we may find ourselves caught in the tension between faith and fear, between living non-anxiously because we have a protective God and perhaps feeling apprehensive because this same God does not exempt us from hard things.
We know that suffering can (and will) come to God’s people, sometimes as a cost of following Jesus (persecution, rejection) but more often as a consequence of merely living in a fallen world. Just remember Job. Or the apostle Paul.
In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul catalogued all the things that had befallen him over his years of ministry: imprisonments, floggings and beatings and one stoning; three shipwrecks; danger from rivers, from bandits, danger in the city, in the wilderness, on the sea; false friends; toil and hardship; sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, lack of clothing for the cold; not to mention the mental distress of caring for all the churches under his oversight.
Jesus himself endured hardship: a kind of on-the-road homelessness, hostile crowds, harassment by authorities, unhelpful “concern” from his family, the horrible death of his forerunner John the Baptizer, betrayal by one in his inner circle, and eventually unjust arrest, torture, and execution.
And I can name friends or family members who’ve been hit by divorce, job loss, accidents, fire, scams, racial discrimination, financial setbacks, and unexpected deaths of loved ones. We all can. And truth be told, we could each compile a list troubles that have come our way, some relatively minor, others devastating.
Tish Harrison Warren has written an honest and wise book about how to live and pray as those who are vulnerable in a broken world that can break us: Prayer in the Night. She exposits a tender prayer included in the short Anglican service of Compline, which many Christians pray before going to sleep at night:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
She has chapters for each phrase, describing the collection as “a taxonomy of vulnerability.” I appreciate her honesty and theological insight. Early in the book, she shares an experience from her college days. It took place a few months after a three-year-old boy in her church had drowned:
Our church was still staggered in grief as I sat listening to my pastor preach about trusting God. “You cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to you,” he said. I was dumbstruck….In some wordless place deep within, I had hoped that God would keep bad things from happening to me—that it was somehow his job to do so, that he owed me that much. The plain truth…stood before me, obvious and terrible.[ii]
She goes on to affirm that “Of course, God does keep many bad things from happening to us,” although we don’t always know or notice. “But God does not keep all bad things from happening to us. He cannot be trusted to do that because he never made that promise….Our creator lets us remain vulnerable.” God did not even spare himself from bad things, she notes, thinking of Jesus.
Jesus knew this. We detect his wisdom in the pattern of prayer he laid out for his followers, familiar to us as the “Lord’s Prayer.” The first half helps us express our worship of God: gratitude for his fatherly love, reverence for his beautiful holiness, allegiance to his good leadership of our lives. The second half helps us express our dependence on God: in body (give us daily bread), soul (forgive us our sins), and circumstance (lead us…deliver us…). Both sections of the prayer flow from a posture of profound humility.
It’s the themes of the second set of petitions that we’ve been exploring in the Lenten blogs so far: creaturely mortality, moral culpability, and now circumstantial vulnerability. Jesus validates these truths of our human condition by teaching us to ask God daily for provision, mercy, and guidance/protection. We need God to keep us out of trouble and temptation and when we find ourselves in it to save us from it.
Matthew includes this prayer in his compilation of Jesus’ teachings called the Sermon on the Mount. A few verses later, he records what Jesus had to say about anxiety. We are not to worry about our lives (we cannot lengthen them) or what we will eat or wear (look how God feeds the birds and clothes the fields with flowers) or what will happen tomorrow (today’s trouble is enough for today). Instead, we are to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness/justice,” trusting that God will care for us.[iii] In humility, Jesus faced his most dire circumstances in this way: Not my will, Father, but yours.
In his epistle, James echoes this same humility:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.[iv]
Lent calls for us to cultivate humility about the degree of control we have over our lives, over what we will do or what will happen to us. Yes, we have our dreams and make our plans and go about our day-to-day activities, but always mindful of circumstantial uncertainty. We resist anxiety and paralyzing fear. Instead, we practice humble and hopeful dependence on the Father who loves us and the Jesus who leads us. We cast our cares on the One who cares for us.[v]
Lord, spare us from trouble that would test our faith; indeed, save us from evil and the Evil One.
Tish Warren reminds us:
Mysteriously, God does not take away our vulnerability. He enters into it…. We find he is here with us, in the present tense. He participates in our suffering, even as—mysteriously—in our suffering we participate in the fulness of Christ’s life.[vi]
God with us and God for us, whatever happens. By such Lenten humility, we anticipate the dark mystery of Good Friday and the glorious light of Easter Sunday.
[i] Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin, 2019); The Anxious Generation (Penguin, 2023).
[ii] Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (IVP, 2021), p. 22.
[iii] See Matthew 6
[iv] James 4:13-16
[v] See 1 Peter 5:5b-11
[vi] Prayer in the Night, p. 29-30
Previous articles in this series:
Ash Wednesday and the Gift of Lent
Lenten Humility: Remembering our Creaturely Mortality
Lenten Humility: Admitting our Moral Culpability
Bobby Gross is the author of Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (InterVarsity Press). Bobby has spent his career in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He currently serves as Senior Field Director for the Graduate & Faculty Ministries division. For 13 years he served as VP and National Director for Graduate & Faculty Ministries. Originally from Columbus, GA, Bobby and his wife Charlene have lived in Miami (FL), New York City, and now Atlanta. He graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a B.A. in American Studies and English Literature and did additional studies in theology at Regent College in Vancouver. Bobby served on the national board of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) for six years. An admitted bibliophile, Bobby also writes poetry and collects contemporary art on religious themes.