‘Life Will Happen to You’
A Lenten Reflection
By the Rev. Matt Metevelis
Emmylou Harris wrote a letter to Pete Seeger as she began her career as a young folk singer. She reached out because she felt that she could not perform the music she loved with “authenticity.” She said she didn’t come from the kind of rough rural poverty that molded the great artists on the scene at that time. Health and happiness kept her from being a “legitimate” musician.
Seeger responded. “Don’t worry about suffering … life will happen to you.” He commended the books of Woody Guthrie and encouraged her to keep playing.
Too many Christians treat Lent as a quest for legitimacy. Real Christians are the ones who suffer.
Lent inspires 40-day challenges to promote spiritual health, a kind of dry January with soup suppers. It becomes something else to fail at once those new year resolutions go stale.
Lent, the common thinking goes, is a time when we remember the sufferings of Jesus. We put the music at a more somber tempo. We don’t say Alleluia. The whole thing just turns into mood lighting to get us ready for Easter.
Jesus tells us another story about Lent. Lent is not a time to draw close to Christ in our self-chosen pains and healthy habits. Christ takes the initiative instead and draws near to us in our very real suffering.
The Lenten journey is not about our quest to find some suffering to make us more like Christ. It is Christ’s journey to us.
Christ retreats into the wilderness that we inhabit to do battle with the enemy on our behalf. Through every lie he denies and every word he asserts he claims us in the very real
battlegrounds of our lives. In Matthew’s account, we see that our trials and temptations become the bloody soil where Christ plants his cross.
The long narratives from John’s Gospel in the subsequent weeks are stories where Jesus takes the word of God and proclaims it into the lives of real people. Jesus will meet a seeker, an outcast, a beggar, and a dead man. Most of these people do not have a “journey” to make. Nicodemus makes his by stumbling around at night. Armed with words, Jesus will cause them to drop their buckets, open their eyes, and walk out of a grave.
Nicodemus makes his Lenten journey at night seeking to understand what the fuss is about. “Nobody can do what you do apart from God.” But Jesus fires back that his seeking is not enough, and that he has to be reborn to truly know what’s happening. And that birth does not come from an earthly pilgrimage. Instead it will be by a free range Spirit sent to gather people and give them life in Christ’s name. Nicodemus, the teacher of Israel, is told to forget his seeking for the sake of the Spirit seeking him.
A woman at the well makes her Lenten journey for entirely different reasons. To avoid gossip and shame, she goes to the well in the heat of the day. At a well she meets a cultural enemy who promises her water that will never run dry. By the joyful power of her chance encounter she is transformed from a woman who hid in shame to someone who cannot wait to tell her story.
Jesus sends a beggar on a Lenten journey into a pool where he regains his sight. Jesus tells his disciples that this beggar will be the one in whom God’s works will be revealed.
The work of giving a man sight on the Sabbath will also reveal the blindness of the religious leaders. They will cast the former blind man out and Christ will meet him once again to hear his joyful confession.
An ELCA pastor, Matt
Metevelis lives with his family
in Henderson, Nevada.
Since 2009 he has served as
a chaplain at Nathan Adelson
Hospice in Las Vegas. Until its
closure in 2023, he also served
as a pastor at Reformation
Lutheran Church.
In the final Sunday of Lent, Lazarus is dead. There is no journey. Jesus buries himself in the grief of Martha and Mary so much that he resurrects Lazarus early, performing the miracle of miracles before his “hour.” Lazarus lurches from death to life with the grave clothes still sticking on him because Jesus spoke words of resurrection and life—and later became them.
Every week in this season is a story. Each of these stories is a tale of the reality and promises of Christ that intersect with the pains, shames, and struggles of real lives. These are people who don’t have to go looking for suffering. Life has happened to them.
The Crossings community exists because we confess that these things are still happening. Seekers are still found by Jesus. Outcasts are welcomed in and given a purpose. Beggars
are given sight and agency. People dead in sins rise up in forgiveness. Christ is always on a collision course with us in everyday life.
Pete Seeger was right. Life will happen. But in our Lenten stories we hear the promise that Christ will happen too. I give thanks for him and for all of you.
2026 Crossings Conference: Our Identity and the Promise of the Gospel
By Dr. Carol Braun
Members of the Crossings community came together in January for our annual conference under the title “In Christ for Good: The Gospel and Christian Behavior.”
The Rev. Ella Moehlmann, lead conference organizer, opened by explaining that our community is on guard against works-righteousness thinking: “The emphasis on doing good, being good: we see that in the Church all around us, and it hits us like God’s law—condemning, accusing.”
Yet, Ella noted, the question remains: “How does the gospel cross with our daily lives, in which we behave one way or another? What does hearing the gospel have to do with good works?”
That theme of Christian behavior united a rich array of talks, panels, and preaching.
Participants at the January 2026 conference—
especially the Rev. Lori Cornell, vice president of
Crossings—enjoy a speaker’s comment.
The Rev. Alex LaChapelle and the Rev. Dr. Marcus Felde gave an introduction to the Crossings method of analyzing scripture, focusing on Zaccheus as an example of a man saved from himself through his encounter with Jesus.
In “Preaching Law and Gospel and the Consequences of Grace,” the Rev. Dr. Glenn Monson argued that law-gospel preaching can produce faith working through love rather than under duress. He invoked Bonhoeffer’s concept of “a hidden righteousness”—hidden even from the righteous—a motif that recurred throughout the conference.
The Rev. Dr. Fred Niedner addressed “Living Out Our Faith and Hope as the Crucified and Risen Body of Christ.” From a preacher’s perspective, he followed the first three steps of the Crossings matrix down into the depths of faithless despair, where “I need to hear the gospel, the promise that even here, hanging by a thread, God hangs onto me long after I’ve lost my grip, and God sends you to hold me, listen to me, forgive me, weep with me, love me.”
Katherine Steinly and Levi Powers, parish pastors
in two New Jersey cities, pose with Adam Morton, a featured speaker at the Crossings conference.
The Rev. Dr. Adam Morton spoke on “Wrestling Jacob and a Series of Tubes: How the Passive Life Gets Things Done.” He likened humans to tubes, empty until God fills us with life and faith. And he drew on Jacob’s wrestling match to argue that, given a gospel promise so strong it can withstand an attack from God himself, “the one uniquely Christian behavior is to fight with God and win.”
In “How God Uses the Gospel (In and Through Us),” the Rev. Dr. Kit Kleinhans took up questions of Christian community and loving our neighbors by attention to their actual needs. She encouraged us, when we find it hard to recognize good fruits in Christian behavior, to remember our baptisms, come together, console each other, and do the things that Christ has promised to be with us when we do.
The Rev. Robin Lütjohann provoked thoughts on the relationship between social justice and our “thin tradition” of law-gospel theology in his talk on “Justice and Justification.” He argued that the Crossings community should feel free to talk about politics and to think of justice work as a good and necessary vocation, because our identity rests not there but in the promise of the gospel.
Participants in the Crossings preaching mentoring program described their experiences. Conference-goers used the Crossings method to analyze the next Sunday’s gospel reading. And the speakers gathered for one last panel.
In daily worship, we heard inspiring preaching by preaching program learners and, at the Tuesday evening Eucharist, by the Rev. Candice Wassell, who credits Crossings with “raising” her in the faith.
The Rev. Candice Wassell
preaches at the Tuesday
night Eucharist during
the Crossings conference
at the Pallottine Retreat
Center near St. Louis
By the end several conclusions emerged: that in our radical impotence Christ dies for us, opens us to be filled with the gospel, and life surges out of us into the world; that attention to the civil use of the law frees us from conflating justice with the gospel; and that the working out of how to apply God’s law entails wrestling and disagreement in which we can engage cheerfully given our identity in Christ.
The Rev. Scott Benolkin, pastor of Bethel Lutheran Church in University City, Missouri, has attended many Crossings conferences and appreciated this year’s discussions of vocation. And the Rev. Dr. Charley Lopez, a 1975 graduate of Seminex and long-time follower of Crossings, enjoyed attending the conference for the first time. Charley appreciated that all the presenters “focused on the underpinnings of the law and gospel,” which “is what Crossings does best.”
Two Gifts Sustain and Expand Our Mission
The Neeb Family Foundation, founded by the late Rev. Dr. Larry Neeb, has for many years made grants to Crossings, including for the Preaching Mentoring Program. The foundation’s current grant will double the number of mentors and learners. For more information about the foundation, visit neebff.org.
Kathy and Mark Helge have been involved in Crossings since its founding. In 2013, they made a substantial gift to the Bertram-Schroeder Legacy Fund. They’ve also given challenge grants to match gifts from others to support the Crossings Conference. Now, they have made another significant gift to the Legacy Fund.
We give thanks for these gifts, along with the financial contributions so many of you continue to make. Because of this generosity, Crossings will be able to expand and sustain its outreach in the years to come. All of us rejoice that more people in more places will hear the promise of the Gospel.
Join Us Online for…
- Table Talk, the monthly online discussion forum
- The Crossings Book Club every other week
- Lectionary text studies posted every Sunday
- Thursday Theology with essays, sermons, and other thought-provoking writing
To learn more and sign up, visit crossings.org/join-us
Crossings Newsletter Staff:
Writer/Editor: Matt Metevelis
Board President: Jerome Burce
Executive Secretary: Cathy Lessmann
Executive Director: Sherman Lee
Project and Development Manager: Bethany Dreher
Contributions to Crossings are tax-deductible. Crossings welcomes donor-advised fund gifts and charitable IRA distributions.
1 comment
I read Matt Metevelis’ “Life will Happen…” when the Crossings Connection arrived. What a thrill to see the Lenten gospels laid out to “connect” where real life happens…but I guess that’s the purpose behind the Crossings Connection! Thanks, Matt!