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Mhm So well, friends, we are well on our way in this third week of the 40 day linton journey to Easter lint is one of those seasons fraught with ambiguity. It's a difficult mixture of darkness

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and light, or rather light veiled in darkness. We are not alone in our confusion, the Lenten season of jesus life, the time leading up to his betrayal and death was also incomprehensible for Peter,

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while jesus was warning the disciples about his coming death , which would disturbingly become the pattern for christian disciples who would henceforth deny themselves even their very lives to follow him. While jesus was sketching out this plan

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on a napkin over lunch, maybe spilling a little wine just for dramatic effect. Peter, on the other hand, was thumbing through the latest demographic, architectural and media plans for this new mega church would

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be the scent which would be the center of his new kingdom. Of course, as the scripture attests , some kind of argument ensued with jesus waving, waving the soggy napkin and peter pointing to charts and

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graphs, until finally jesus said, Get behind me , satan, Peter didn't get it, and the disciples could not comprehend the significance of death or the complex good of the Lenten season, and we are

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not much better. It is for us it is relatively easy to comprehend the unmitigated good of easter and advent and Pentecost. Those seasons are celebrated as the coming of God as son and spirit. In advent

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easter and Pentecost, God burst onto the scene into history from his virgin mothers womb from the grave, or as a rushing wind with miracles abounding with singing angels displaced stones and tongues of flame. Yet Lent

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has a somewhat different aesthetic tone, a darker tone . Although we say we celebrate lent in reality we mostly endure it. Few of us say, on easter morning, you know, I wasn't quite ready

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for lent to end. Yeah, the images that accompany lent are of wilderness, travail, demonic temptation , fasting and ashes on our foreheads. To remind us of our mortality as if we needed reminding all

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of which is to prepare us appropriately to celebrate easter lint sort of reminds me of the joke. My father was fond of telling about the man who kept hitting himself in the head with a hammer because it

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felt so good when he stopped. Yet I am not satisfied. That leads. Only purpose is to prepare us for easter that lent in itself has no internal good. As my christian education class knows christian

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practices such as hospitality sabbath, keeping forgiveness or giving testimony. All move us towards a world which God intended and work in accordance with God's providence. However , in in this sense, the practices are good

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. They move towards some good but significantly christian practices have internal goods, for example, the act of providing hospitality demands that we find compassion for another, that we order and simplify our resources in order to

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have time, food or a bed to give the other, and that we learn words and gestures to express welcome these demands enlarge our hearts, creating us new attitudes, new virtues, new skills and new

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knowledge. In other words, they create the world that they envision. I wonder if we might say something similar about lent, that it not only prepares us for easter but holds some good of its own

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, but what is the good of lent? What knowledge or goods or virtues do we attain? Uh Indeed, may we only attain from inside the Lenten journey by walking it steadfastly. And honestly, today

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I want to suggest that length opens for us a particular kind of good, a good that I want to call the sacrament of loss in and through the loss of lent. We make glimpse, God's goodness

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in order to illuminate this sacrament. This morning, I want to beg your indulgence and tell a story that is self referential, which you should probably never do from the pulpit. Back in 2007 when Melissa

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, my wife was working half time in Atlanta as the vice president for the Fund for Theological Education and I of course, was here at Austin Seminary. I was a bit a bit lonely and so I

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searched online and found a border collie rescue league in Yuval d texas. As it turns out someone had found an abandoned border collie wandering in the wilderness outside of you baldy. Uh he had heartworms and ticks

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and all sorts of parasites. He was torn by thorns and brambles and they told me all of this by email and it took nearly three months to nurse him back to health. Finally, on the appointed

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day around this time of year, I made the three hour drive from Austin to You've Aldi and found myself in a fenced in compound. After a few instructions by the vet, I opened the passenger side

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of my truck and this white dog with black speckles and a black patch over his eye, jumped into the seat beside me. And on the three hour drive back to Austin, I decided to call him

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a wink, partly due to the black patch over his eye that made it look like he was winking , but also due to my love of the theologian , walter wink. So, on my way back

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to Austin week sat in the passenger seat with his eyes straight ahead, rarely making eye contact with me as if he was afraid of becoming overly familiar too quickly. But on this trip up by 35 each

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time we passed a great big, loud, big rig tractor trailer, he would move an inch closer to me on the bench seat so that by the time we got to Austin he was right beside me

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, leaning on my shoulder. I'm tempted to try to describe the many things that my dog did to win my heart. Over the seven years he lived with me, how he learned his commands in mere

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minutes. He never needed a leash because he followed so closely on my heels. How he never grounded another creature, how, when he lived, uh , went at the, when we were at the

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park, he approached all people, especially Children, and offered them a blessing by lifting his paul And how politely he requested a snack sharply at 9:00 each evening. It's amazing. It's amazing how over the

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years our lives our senses are neurons, are spirits become so attuned to these creatures living alongside us, so that we cannot think of our lives without them . But this morning I will resist elaborating a complete

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list of his special qualities because I fear that you will be tempted to call to mind your own dog , but which cannot be as special as wink. Once went on a walk with wink at Adams Park

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, one of the several homeless men we greeted each day approached wink, and he and wink seemed to communicate in some kind of unknown language of lines and grants for a few minutes. And afterwards the homeless

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man, who had previously appeared not to even notice that I was present, looked to me and said , he is a holy dog, which I have always taken as the gospel truth, and I have

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experienced his holiness through his constant dispensing of grace and goodness, waking me in the morning, greeting me at the end of the day, declaring his love for me in the evening, and of course,

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this beautiful visage of black and white speckled throw pillow of a creature moving silently and gracefully around our house . But about three weeks ago now the vet Perform surgery to remove two masses on winks from Winks Abdomen

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, which we thought were malignant, but which turned out to be part of a complex of symptoms that involved in an immune mediated anemia in which his body attacked his own red blood cells, causing lethargy and

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weakness and a few other lethal symptoms. The vet put him through several aggressive rounds of treatment steroids, gamma globulin, along with a transfusion and friday. Before last we thought he was improving some. So

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the vet said we could take him home for the weekend. But on sunday morning he became so weak that he could not move from his bed. So we nursed him all day long and finally in the

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evening rushed him to the veterinary hospital. So I was holding him on my lap in the back seat while Melissa drove the car down mo pack south to the southward to the clinic and we were both sobbing

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our eyes out and I was petting him on the head and about a block from the hospital. Um He struggled to his feet with herculean effort and laid his head onto my chest as if to comfort me

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. He lived about another day before the vet called Late monday night to tell me that he had died . He simply didn't have enough strength to survive long enough for the treatment to work. And right about

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now some of you are thinking, is he really preaching a sermon about his dog? But I promise you this is not just about my dog, but I do want to linger for a moment on his

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death and how it struck me. I am only a little ashamed to admit that winks death broke my heart. I'm old enough to have experienced the loss of many friends, relatives and even apparent. But

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if I'm honest, I must admit that the loss of this dog affected me more than any of them . I am a little ashamed because I know that there are great many, uh, serious problems in

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the world from which people die each day. War , urban violence, state sponsored racism, poverty, disease. And this is what breaks my heart. My dog. I also grew up in a pragmatic

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, working class Southern culture in which dogs earned their keep by hunting and protecting the property. And I lived in Alaska where mushers relied on dogs for their livelihood and they rarely admit their love for their dogs

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any more than they would admit their love for their snow machine or their rifle in Alaska. When a dog gets sick or lame. The old timers, the sour does say This is horrible. They say

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there's a 25 cent solution for that 25 cents being the price of a rifle cartridge. Now, let's put all of that aside for just a moment, the fact that there is great suffering in the world

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and that at least culturally dogs are valued different from humans. But I am compelled this morning to say something about the sacraments of caring and loss. In the days following the death of wink, I felt

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the world shift on its axis a bit, life was somewhat less sweet. The house was a bit more empty. I was more alone. My inner life was not enchanted by its entanglements with this creature

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. I did not receive his grace at the end of each day, I felt somewhat less relevant to the life of the world. No one needed me for walks and for feedings. I was not nourished

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by his beauty, the touch of his for the lick of his tongue or his general general spirit walks with him no longer took me out into my neighborhood where Children, elderly people, homeless people and other

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dogs there smells, they're welcoming banter and their departing benedictions. We're endlessly fascinating to him and hence to me. The world felt a bit flatter in the days following his death. As some of you know

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, I unashamedly wept through meetings, classes, and conversations with friends. Uh, this week, however , I report a report that the pain is not so immediate, and some of my friends tell me

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that I will no longer soon no longer hurt like this, and maybe I should get another dog. And I suspect that all of this is true. But I want to preach this sermon before. I

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forget what I learned about loss. Have you ever been asleep and dreaming a really good dream? Only to find that when you awake, you can no longer recall what was so important about the dream.

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I know that in these days ahead that I will no longer weep for wink, my neurons will adjust , and I will not expect him to greet me at the door and or to hear his footsteps in

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the night. Uh, I may forget how special he was. But now before I wake from this dream, from this, in between, time between the ordinary nous of loving him and the coming ordinary

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nous of life without him. I confess that I believe my days with wink and my care for him constituted a kind of sacrament, a window to God , a means of grace in which my heart was

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enlarged. Love was extended to me and my love for the world was increased thomas. Aquinas stated that all things that God created imitate God in their own way, which I take to mean that an in

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and through wink, I glimpsed something of God's own love and grace and beauty. I suspect that wink has allowed me a glimpse through a dark lens into the true nature of things that every day and everything

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is mysteriously filled with beauty and grace. If we could only perceive it christian formation. Spiritual development is in part coming to see with our spiritual eyes are spiritual senses that all things are created good or as

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genesis says. K votes are weighted with glory and only when we perceive the goodness of all things are we compelled to treat them justly and protect them from being treated unjustly. So there's much more to say

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about all of this, but here's the point for today. Not only is my care for wink a sacrament, but I've come to see that his loss losing him has also been a sacrament. A few

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things have become especially clear to me in his death , including the historic affirmation that death is the enemy I abhor er in a new way the forces of disease that took away the sweetness and goodness of my

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dog and my father and all those whose beds I have sat beside or and over whose graves I have prayed yet even in death, God provides a view to the good, as I said earlier upon winks

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, Death. There was a time before my memory of him receded into unconsciousness, that I was keenly and achingly aware of his goodness. I'm still in touch with this memory and can easily affirm this grace

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even um even that it is somehow a view to God's own perfect goodness in God's own perfect grace. But the absolute goodness, the goodness of this creature and the tragedy of loss was intensely present to me

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in those first days after his death. Those days immediately following his death were for me a kind of aching wakefulness to God's utter beauty and the utter beauty of God's creatures, which I'm only now partly losing

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partly from self protection. As I slowly drift into a kind of forgetfulness. So this sacrament of loss I want to suggest is rather like the Lenten season which we willingly undergo each year, a season of

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letting go. In order to remember, we talk about lent in many different ways as a time of prayer penance, repentance, alms, giving atonement, self denial. But among these things, lent is

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a time of loss, a time of giving up our hallelujahs and are feasting. And in this loss we give ourselves over to a kind of aching remembrance of the utter goodness of creation, which God is

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redeeming. The remembrance of all the grace, the grace of all things which God loves. The gospel of jesus christ does not only point ahead to the resurrection and the redemption of all things. It also

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points backwards to those glimpses of goodness we have known in and through creation we have known the goodness you and I a food, warmth of shelter, the kindness of friends, the satisfaction of good work,

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and we have known the beauty of dogs and all creatures, the the resurrection points to the restoration of these things to their rightful place in our lives, in which God will be one day. All in

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all, lent is a time of loss of fasting , of self abnegation, not because the material world is evil, but perhaps because we live too much in a state of forgetfulness in which creation has been

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flattened by an insipid consumerism. The losses of lent reminds those with eyes to see, and ears to hear of the utter goodness of God's creation, which will one day be fully redeemed by the work of

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jesus christ. But for now, for this season I invite you and each bite. You do not take in each drink you do not swallow, and each habit from which you refrain in each hallelujah,

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you do not sing to remember life's goodness for which our hearts ache apart from the goodness of creation. The resurrection makes no sense. I want to close today with a quote from Jorgen, molten juan and

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this is from his book, The Spirit of Life . When I love God, I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes. He embraces the feelings to sense the

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sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my sense and the creation of your love and all the things

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that encounter me. You are waiting for me. For a long time. I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, protecting myself with an armor of un approachability. But

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you were outside outside myself and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart, into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses and my

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own self and others. The experience of God deepens the experiences of life. It does not reduce them for it awakens the unconditional yes to life. The more I love God, the more gladly I exist

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, the more immediately and holy, I exist, the more I sense the living God, the inexhaustible well of life in life's eternity, in the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit