The trips over there draw us more deeply into our responsibility here. This to me is the journey of Lent, to listen more deeply to the world, not so much to learn how it sins, but to learn how participate in its sin. The biggest temptation we have is to focus out there, on those people who are destroying American culture as we know it. But the journey of Lent calls us home into our own hearts to see how we might be doing exactly what we believe everyone else is doing. We can only be the prophets of the most high, as we stand in the wilderness of our own struggles.
Judgment is easy.
Self-reflection and repentance are much harder. Yet is is in the wilderness, in Jesus' honest struggle to figure out how he will be in the world, that he is surrounded by the Holy Spirit. So the real journey of Lent becomes finding those places where the Spirit surrounds us and gives us courage to ask the right questions and to see the right issues. Spirit, born of water and word. Spirit, born of bread and wine.