The season of Lent begins 40 days (not counting Sundays) before Easter, and follows the trajectory of Jesus’s wilderness temptation, through the Last Supper, footwashing, garden prayers, betrayal, trial, scourging, condemnation, crucifixion, and descent into sin’s cursed darkness. Lent does not end until the Great Vigil on Saturday night, with the declaration of Christ’s victory over the grave.

“My servant,” says Isaiah, “will justify many by taking their guilt on himself” (Isa. 53:10 NJB).

“My servant.”

Lent outlines the contours of the Suffering Servant’s servitude. Maundy Thursday – named, as it is, for the giving of the “new commandment” that we love one another as Christ has loved us – pivots on the occasion of the footwashing (John 13). Maundy Thursday’s washing and being washed creates in me a fresh hunger for participation in this new regime in which basin and towel are emblems of rule.

In the church, it is “deacons” – literally, something like “table waiters” – who are most explicitly called to model this servant lifestyle.

Apprenticeship in “the Way” of Service

Of late, I’ve been apprenticing as “subdeacon” at the Cathedral of St. Luke. Because I don’t come by “the way of the liturgy” naturally, there’s little I take for granted. And so “the way” is filled with delightful surprises – each one an important lesson for a pride-prone theologian.

Note the “sub-” in subdeacon.

Under the Word, in the Spirit

The subdeacon holds the Gospel-book while the deacon reads it so the preacher can preach it before the celebrant celebrates it in bread and wine. My calling as a seminary professor is to teach the Word and Sacraments to aspiring ministers. It’s a bit of a reversal for me to take a wordless role in worship, while somebody else reads and preaches and celebrates. What’s left to do? Everything! – like, silently pray that the good news will have its effect on us. Oh, blessed reversal.

The way it normally works at the Cathedral is that the subdeacon carries the Gospel-book out into the congregation from the altar, turns around to face the altar, and opens the Gospel so the deacon can read it to the congregation. The thurifer (the person who bears the incense) accompanies them, and gives the thurible (the incense vessel) to the deacon, who “censes” the Gospel and returns the thurible to the thurifer. Then the subdeacon holds the Gospel while the deacon, facing the congregation with his or her back to the altar, reads.

The first time I held the Gospel for the deacon I noticed that the thurifer, who had just returned to the altar, now continued to swing the still-smoking thurible, signifying the continued prayer that the Gospel being read would be illumined in our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit. I couldn’t not mix my unvoiced prayers with the rising incense. It was an overwhelming experience of both physically and symbolically “standing under” the reading of the Word, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I recalled Paul telling Timothy to attend not just to the exhortation and teaching of the Word, but “to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim. 4:13 ESV). I recalled him celebrating the fact that the gospel had come to the Thessalonians “not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit with full conviction” (1 Thess. 1:5 ESV). I recalled Justin Martyr’s description of early Christians’ worship in Rome: “… the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits” (1st Apology 67.3). Paul must have had something like this dynamic in mind: the children of God gathered in the presence of their Heavenly Father, saying (metaphorically), “Read it again, Daddy!”

For me, assisting someone else to read is something of a parable of my labors as a theologian: come under the Word in the Spirit, and enable others to read and proclaim it well.

A Prayer-filled Eucharist

The subdeacon’s second main task is to point the text of the prayer the celebrant offers in the course of celebrating the Eucharist. It’s profoundly good for me wordlessly – and, again, prayerfully – to support a reality I have the privilege to ponder and teach.

What strikes me the most about “the way of the liturgy” is the prayerfulness of the Eucharist – in this respect more than any other, it is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. It is remaking me. Customarily at the Cathedral, the Altar/Table is incensed – again, depicting the rising of our prayers and the intermingling of our spirits with God’s Spirit.

Now, there’s a centuries long argument between Western and Eastern liturgical churches over whether the thing that really counts in the Eucharist is “the words of institution” (West) or the “calling on the Holy Spirit” (East). But even the Western churches who practice “the way of the liturgy” pray the words of institution: “When the hour had come for him to be glorified by you, his Heavenly Father, having loved them to the end; at supper with them he took bread, and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, and said…” (Book of Common Prayer, Eucharistic Prayer D, p. 374). In this practice, there is a tacit recognition that the most important actor in the whole affair is the Lord. Our main task is to be present to his presence.

A profound mystery takes place at the Table of the Lord, and the angle of vision that subdeaconing provides has taken me further into it. The King of the Angels has stooped to serve, and a prayed Eucharist acknowledges the wonder of the mystery in which we participate. As John Calvin wrote, in explanation of how it is that the Lord can be in body in heaven and in Spirit among us at Table: “I rather feel than understand it” (Institutes 4.17.32)

In his Dust of Death, Os Guinness once observed that the truly unique thing about the Christian faith is that at its center stands one who went so low that none of us can ever say we have gone lower. In the Lent of his own preparation to stand silent before his accusers, in the Lent of his bowing before his Father’s Word, in the Lent of his own prayerful dependence upon the Holy Spirit, in the Lent of his descent into “holy darkness,” Jesus marks the way of “table waiting” – even of being “sub-“ to the table waiters – to be the way to the richest of feasts.

My computer’s slow demise during this Lenten season has afforded the opportunity for some unanticipated reading. I’m working my way through Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend. Hard to explain why, but the Faust story has long fascinated me. My favorite telling is The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe:

See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! –
One drop would save my soul – half a drop! ah, my Christ!

But I love the story even when Disney does it, as in The Little Mermaid. Twice since college I’ve failed to get all the way through Mann’s Dr. Faustus. This time I’m going to make it. It’s such a great story.

Thomas Mann had a special understanding, I think, of the challenge of faith for people whose societies have tried to banish the God-question. In Dr. Faustus, Mann spins a familiar yarn: “For what are you willing to sell your soul?” He does so, however, in a most arresting way. The lead character’s goal is a transcendent, game-changing way of composing music (for what it’s worth, his model is Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone serial music). Mann sets the story against the backdrop of the demonic sway Nazism gained over the Germany he loved and had to leave. How could such evil take hold of one of Europe’s most refined cultures and “developed” societies?

Knowing that the demonic is eventually to take over Adrian Leverkühn’s character, I shudder at the realization that his last intellectual stop along the way before choosing a career in music is theology, my own profession. Adrian’s narrator friend realizes there’s a problem. Adrian’s teachers realize there’s a problem.

Adrian is brilliant, and knows it. He turns to theology, but not to be mastered by its Lord. Adrian wishes – so intuit those who know him – to use theology as a weapon to force philosophy, the so-called “queen of the sciences,” into submission to his will.

Theology as will to power.

Bad idea.

What Adrian is after is “theology enthroned” – and himself along with it. To the contrary, precisely because theology is “the apex of all thinking,” muses Adrian’s friend, it must

be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon it. …

But I did not believe in my friend’s humility. I believed in his pride.

Goose pimples. For a theologian, pride of intellect is an occupational hazard – a plaguing and persistent occupational hazard. Though there are all kind of idols, none is more sinister, none more primal, than pride. It was through pride, as C. S. Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, that the devil became the devil. “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n,” pronounces Milton’s Lucifer.

One of the glories of Lent is the opportunity to ponder – even to enter into – Jesus’s vicarious faith. The Architect of the universe has to go out into the wilderness to trust and obey and depend. Presented with the second of the great Faustian propositions in the human story, Jesus, “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38), humbly demurs. Instead of succumbing to Lucifer’s lies, Jesus, “the Second Man” (1 Cor. 15:47), believes in his Father’s provision, obeys his Father’s plan, and trusts his Father’s timing. As the writer to the Hebrews says of him: “And again (Jesus said), ‘I will put my trust in Him’” (Heb. 2:13). Of the many wonderful things Jesus did for me, here is one of the most splendid: he believed, he obeyed, he trusted for me.

Praise be, he believes God where Adam – who lost out at the first Faustian proffer – had not. Praise be, He obeys God where I do not. Praise be, the Son of God stands firm in the wilderness and unseats pride with a simple, “It is written.”

The Lenten Season begins with the lectionary reading of Matthew 4:1-11, Jesus’s being sent into the wilderness for forty days. Resisting – indeed, decisively overcoming – Satan prepares the Anointed One for his journey to the cross and resurrection. Riffing on Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, Dean of the Cathedral of St. Luke (Orlando, FL), Tony Clark applies the text with words to the effect: “The waiting place can be a very good place to be.”

Not the Dean’s fault, but I pretty much only half hear the message.

Then the rest of March unfolds: my beloved MacBook Pro in a slow death spiral; my plucky 90 year old mother in and out of the hospital twice (while she simultaneously deals with the death of a best friend of 50 years); a lingering fender-bender incident that has insurance companies, well, being insurance companies; a sudden Central FL squall that takes out our power for 3 days. The sum of which virtually brings my sabbatical writing to a halt.

Finally, I realize: “Oh, I’ve been put in the waiting place … and I don’t like it one bit.”

Though I don’t hear it at the beginning of Lent, I’m hearing Dean Clark’s message now. Whining about not meeting word-count goals isn’t waiting. Listening for words of deeper wisdom is waiting. Giving thanks for daily bread – that’s waiting. Taking in the sufferings of neighbors next door and across the planet – that’s waiting. Discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary – the frustratingly, non-glamorously ordinary – that’s waiting. And it is a good place to be.

Of help has been some unplanned reading, affording the opportunity to contemplate the difference between Thomas Mann’s Faust character, Adrian Leverkühn, on the one hand, and Peggy Noonan’s “spiritual father,” John Paul the Great, on the other. The former flirts with theology in order to gain power – and becomes a son of the devil. The latter embraces the world’s wounds – and embodies life as a son of God. More about each in coming days …

Meanwhile, we’re in this forty day waiting place. Jesus’s own forty days encapsulate a life of learning a Son’s obedience. According to the writer to the Hebrews, this obedience qualifies him to be the righteous priest-king the Scriptures had promised (Heb. 5:8-10). Because he waited in the wilderness he became bread for the world. Because he waited in the wilderness he indeed brought the angelic realm into his service. Because he waited in the wilderness he inherited all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

Jesus redeems the waiting place for all of us. Jesus’s uncommon wilderness-waiting makes of his followers’ waiting, as James Stalker puts it, “a common instrument of providential discipline for those to whom exceptional work has been appointed.” May we all know Jesus in our waiting places – both for the exceptional work appointed for each of us, as well as for the unique “fellowship of his suffering” to be found only in the frustratingly lonely and seemingly godforsaken wilderness.