Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17 or Matthew 17:1-9

Psalm 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

When I think of hills, I think of the ones in Missouri. The ones that looked like heads of broccoli to me as a child when the trees were full and green in the summer. The sides of them are blasted open to make way for the highway, putting layers upon layers of rock on display in huge outcrops.

I can close my eyes and, even from Connecticut, be back there, nestled between the rises. A place where I feel kept. Here, I feel like I fit in the order of things.

In Psalm 121, the psalmist doesn’t look above the hills for help but to the hills. We gaze upwards with the psalmist when we are knee-deep in the mire of violence and unrest, seeking the help that will pull us out. And looking to the hills, we remember: our help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Who made these hills. Who made the ground under our feet. Who made the broccoli trees and the stratigraphies of earth history. And who became a part of it all.

At the top of the hill, it’s easy to forget that the few inches of soil directly underfoot don’t tell the land’s full story. From the bottom, we see the limestone and the shale stacked on one another all the way up, with wayward volcanic intrusions pushing their way through the orderly sequence. We see how the layers have been tilted and compressed over millions of years like a toddler had come through and squished the hills like PlayDoh.

The top of the hill is not the youngest rock but the rock that has most recently been revealed by processes of weathering, saying hello once again to the open air. When our feet find this ground, something seems to say you’ve been here before.

We have been here before.

Lent is a time-warping season.

As designed, the United States has been in a state of crisis. Federal agents are disappearing people off the streets, quietly killing people imprisoned in detention centers and killing others in broad daylight in front of their neighbors.

We have been here before.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) has sent patrols back into the streets of Minneapolis, where AIM first began in 1968. New members of Philadelphia’s chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense have been out in Minnesota, too, and are sending patrols into their own city to protect their community from ICE. Others have created rapid response networks and neighborhood defense teams of their own, responding to the hyperlocal needs of their communities in new ways while taking cues from previous eras of resistance to state violence.

We are living through moments that feel like they’ve been tilted, compressed, and suspended in time. Overwhelmingly new and familiar, all at once. And at each inflection point, it all collapses down to the size of our phone screen. A red dot of a laser on our chest. A stabbing pain in the hippocampus when we realize we know this story and must choose which character to play this time.

“Look to the hills,” the psalmist tells us.

What is our role as Christians when our world collapses? Luckily, we are familiar with collapse. And we are experts in time travel.

In Lent, we walk solemnly toward Jesus’s execution. We know it is coming because we make this journey every year and because it is always coming. Jesus tells the disciples he will be handed over to be killed multiple times across the gospels, and he carries out his entire ministry with the knowledge that it is leading him to the cross. As people who follow the way of Jesus, our faith cannot exist without risk.

This walk toward Jesus’s death begins with the harsh reminder that we are mortal. We are dust and to dust we shall return. One day, the matter that makes us up will be something else and the time we spent on earth will be reflected in some hillside outcrop. Risk becomes scarier to face in the shadow of this reminder.

But the reason we walk with Jesus towards the cross instead of running away is because we know what’s on the other side of the crucifixion. Because we’ve been here before, we know that Jesus rises and defeats sin and death. The Gospel of John tells us that as long as we believe in him, we may have eternal life.

The Christian journey is a funny one to undertake. We await the agony of Jesus’s death at the same time we cling to the sure hope of the resurrection. It’s like standing on an exposure of folded rock, one foot in one time period and the other foot in another.

God calls us to straddle multiple realities, to plant our feet firmly in both grief and hope. We are experts in time travel and skilled navigators of collapse. This is why our voices, bodies, and collective power are needed in times of turmoil: we learn from Jesus how to move through a broken world, knowing a new one exists as soon as we dare to imagine it.

But we cannot tend to injustice if we refuse to look at it squarely.

When we look to the hills, we pass our eyes over layers of structural sin and works of evil that have reproduced themselves over hundreds, even thousands of years. We find moments of breakthrough and peace. We see struggle and resilience, oppression and violence, death and life. Down in the valley as we look up, we tread on sediment that will become new rock. History is still unfolding and it unfolds in the presence of everything that has already been, the bad and the good. Most importantly, in the presence of Jesus Christ: the crucified and the resurrected.

The earth is an archive of all God has done and what we have done to each other. Land holds onto memory, and much of our work for justice and peace takes place on stolen land whose soil is still blood-soaked. It is no wonder that where the Church has attempted to exist in ignorance of the land it sits upon, it has failed to meet moments of crisis.

May this Lent be a time of learning the histories that act upon us where we live, a time to reckon and repent and recommit. Map out how your own story is part of a larger one where you live, and invite your neighbors to share your stories with one another. It is easier to know what the next step is when you see where you’ve come from.

May we listen to that feeling that says you’ve been here before and seek the wisdom of those who have gone before us whose struggles are ongoing in our own lives.

As we walk through dark valleys on the way to the cross, may we look to the hills and know that our marching footsteps are not sustained by our own sheer willpower but by the grace of God who is our help.

The dust is enough, the psalmist tells us. Look to the hills to find the land God found suitable for his only son. This is the world that God loved so much that he entered it like a fault breaks through rock layers, disrupting time and space.

Here, we are kept.

As we protest, as we pray, as we learn, as we struggle, God keeps us.

In these moments that feel like they are tilted, compressed, and suspended in time, God keeps us.

God keeps us in the coming light of the resurrection—the “already won” that gives us reason to keep moving through the “not yet.”

Logan Crews (she/her) is a writer, dancer, and Episcopalian from St. Louis, Missouri. She is a third-year Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School (who once upon a time studied geology) and serves on the student leadership team of the US chapter of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF-US).