Have you ever awakened from a scary dream —  and felt fear seep into your wakefulness? Are you afraid of the dark?

Lent, the first Sunday in Lent. Lent is the season when we in the Church slow down and acknowledge the darker side of the world, the darker side of ourselves. Many of us began the season with a smudge of soot on the forehead, and the reminder that we are dust and to dust we will return. That's not meant to depress or frighten us. It simply reminds us of who we are. It reminds us to slow down a little and look at the darker side of things.

There is a dark side to the world. We can romanticize it away, or refuse to acknowledge it, but the darkness is there. We don't have final answers to the questions of evil and suffering. But we do acknowledge the problem. As I speak these words, maggots and beetles and bacteria are dying, flowers bloom and quickly die, a wolf somewhere is killing a deer, blood continues to pour, wars erupt, loved ones die, infants cry, and death and sadness are woven into the fabric of things. Nature's red in tooth and claw the poet Browning correctly said. Bad things happen, and we human beings experience sadness and grief.

There is a dark side to ourselves. We can refuse to look, and refuse to acknowledge it, but our dark side continues. We are selfish or greedy, we fail at love, we aren't there for others when they desperately need us, we refuse to deal with our problems, we isolate ourselves from God, we isolate ourselves from our neighbors. Sometimes Homo sapiens do horrible things, and this reality is woven into the fabric of our lives. Sometimes we ourselves do bad things, causing sadness and grief.

Lent is the season when we in the Church slow down and acknowledge the darker side of the world, the darker side of ourselves. Sometimes this information seems too much to bear — like the gut clenching fear of a scary dream. Are you afraid of the darkness? Sometimes I am. But Lent gives us a safety net. We can look at the darker side without being swallowed by it. We can acknowledge darkness but still embrace meaning and hope and love.

The theologian Karl Barth suggests that we should be careful with the old Lutheran paradigm of law and gospel. The old paradigm speaks the law first: Thou Shalt, or Thou Shalt Not. Only after experiencing the pressure of the law do we move to gospel: You are forgiven, you are loved. From Law to Gospel, Judgment to Grace. That's the old familiar Lutheran paradigm. But Karl Barth disagrees with the order. He says that we can't approach the law except from within the Gospel. We can't even consider our sin and brokenness until we already know we are loved and forgiven. We must hear the Yes first, says Barth, and only then can we approach the No and examine ourselves. It's like when we're having a conflict with someone we love. It's always more effective to start by saying something warm and connecting before moving to the hard words that must be said. I love you, but there's something I need to say... Start with the Yes; then go to the No.

I think Barth is right. And though I won't abandon the Law-Gospel approach, I've learned to try always to begin with grace and hope.

This is Lent. We journey into the darkness, but we're safely buoyed up by grace. We go into the darkness, but only with the security of a safety net.

That's what I think our texts point to this morning — the safety net we need for Lent. What is this safety net? Undoubtedly there's more, but our texts today point simply to storytelling: telling our personal stories, telling our Scriptural stories, and telling our community story through worship and praise.

We find stability and safety by telling our personal stories. Once a year the ancient Israelis celebrated the festival of weeks. And each year they would liturgically repeat their own story, beginning with Jacob.

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

By reciting their own personal story, the Israelites remembered who they were. In remembering their identity, they were able to negotiate darkness — such darkness as Exile, judgment, war, and the other difficulties they needed to face. So we tell our stories to one another and to ourselves. By telling our stories we stabilize ourselves for the darkness of Lent. We remember who we are.

We find stability and safety by telling biblical stories. In our Gospel text Jesus does another kind of story telling: he quotes the bible. Here's that famous temptation story, where Jesus faces his own Lenten journey in the wilderness. When tempted by the devil, Jesus simply quotes scripture. That's how he protects himself from the darkness — by telling the biblical story — by quoting the bible. Of course we notice that the devil also quotes scripture. But Jesus counters him with a simple "It is written" and then repeating the biblical story again. Someone once said that all good theology is story saturated imagination. Story saturated imagination. There's something to it. We read the biblical stories, we listen to them, and we internalize them. When we are saturated with these stories, we imagine a new world. That's what good theology is — story saturated imagination. I like that. And when we're saturated with biblical stories, we are protected from darkness within and without. So the stories of scripture work as a safety net as we journey into Lent.

We find stability and safety by telling our community story — through worship and praise. Worship is a safety net. When we worship we find protection. Public engaged ritual grounds us and connects us. The liturgy gives us psychic insulation against the darkness around us and within us. Remember the confession from Deuteronomy I read moments ago? I didn't go into it earlier, but it's an amazing and famous text. First of all, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor, and so on" is probably the oldest text in the bible — the most ancient layer of oral tradition. Secondly, it's Israel's oldest liturgy — the first public liturgy they ever used. Indeed, Gerhard von Rad's magnificent thesis is that this ancient liturgical formula is the seed out of which all the rest of scripture grew. His argument is famous among theologians and biblical scholars. When we worship together, as the ancient Israelites did in reciting their creed, when we tell our community story through hymn and chant and songs of praise — here too we find a safety net for Lent. Here in our Creeds and our Our Fathers, in our Great Thanksgiving and Sanctus praise, here we find psychic insulation — a safety net as we journey into Lent.

The world's a tough place. There's a lot of darkness — both outside of us and within us. We'll never be mature or whole until we've faced it down — done our shadow work. And it can be frightening — similar to waking up from a scary dream. But we aren't alone, abandoned without resources. Old wisdom teaches us the way. The journey through lent is essential: there's no Easter without Good Friday. And you and I will never be mature or whole till we face the darkness down. But we are safe. The darkness will not swallow us. The light blooms in the darkness and springtime flowers reach for sun. Good Friday resolves into Easter like a minor 7^th resolves into a tonic. And we are given tools for the way. We have a safety net. So, as we begin our Lenten journey, let's remember our stories: our personal stories — the ones we remember and tell; our biblical stories — the ones we read and hear; and our liturgical stories — the ones we chant and pray. And remember: you are buoyed up by grace. Safe Lenten journeys to you all.  — Amen.