Lent 2025 resources offer nourishment, challenge, and encouragement to dig deep  

Amid a news cycle filled with stories that can cause overwhelm and disorientation, the season of Lent will begin next week on March 5.

Sharon Fennema, Join the Movement curator and storyteller, described how many of the movement-makers she has connected with in recent months have described “feeling inundated and pulled in a million directions by all the injustices being perpetrated at every level of government and society right now.”

It’s within this context that ministries of the United Church of Christ offer Lent resources filled with spiritual sustenance to meet the moment.

“This moment calls for profound, courageous, and prophetic truth telling,” said the Rev. Cheryl Lindsay, who prepares Sermon Seeds and Worship Ways resources as UCC minister for worship and theology.

Lent is also a time that provides extra space for lament — something that can serve the moment well, she added.

Movement Wisdom for Wild Days

Movement Wisdom for Wild Days, a 40-day Lent journey of grounding, guidance, and discernment is now available from Join the Movement.

The downloadable document offers a calendar of daily wisdom from movement ancestors, with a weekly discernment practice that invites reflection and embodied practices. It offers the invitation “to find grounding and guidance by reaching back, as Jesus did, to the wisdom and experience of our freedom-making ancestors.”

Fennema described how Jesus’ journey in the wilderness offers the reminder that he also looked back to his ancestors for guidance when he was preparing for his ministry amidst trials and temptations. The Lent calendar aims to provide nourishment and inspiration akin to what Jesus found during his 40 days in the wilderness.

“I think a lot of people of good will are experiencing disorientation and overwhelm as we struggle to find our footing and discern how we can contribute to a way forward in love and justice,” she said. “The season of Lent, with its invitation to refocus, reorient, and pay attention to our spiritual life and practices, offers us a wonderful opportunity to intentionally consider what path our journey should take for the days ahead.”

Fennema hopes the Lent calendar will offer the message that “we are not alone, this struggle for freedom is not new, and we have resources and wisdom to guide us.”

“We’ve been here before,” said the Rev. Velda Love, UCC minister for racial justice and Join the Movement lead. “Many of our ancestors have given us sacred memories to remain focused during what seems like insurmountable threats from empires. We are stronger together and will build up movements towards liberation and a just world for all!”

Sound the Alarm: Toward Good Friday

This year’s Ash Wednesday lectionary scripture from the book of Joel offers instructions to “sound the alarm on my holy mountain.”

The scripture sets the tone for a season that invites people to individual and collective repentance, it says within the 2025 Lenten and Holy Week Sermon Seeds and Worship Ways Roadmap.

“For the church, we need to confront the collective and personal complicity with the rise of White Christian Nationalism and our continuing embedded acceptance and even promotion of white supremacy — even, and for the UCC especially, in progressive spaces,” Lindsay said. “‘Sound the alarm’ emphasizes the urgency and gravity of this call.”

The theme’s title of also moving toward Good Friday “encourages collectively and intentionally wrestling with the pain, suffering, and sacrifice empire has forced upon Jesus and those who follow The Way,” she said. “I sense that folx, both beyond and within the church, struggle with hopelessness and despair made more pronounced by weariness for the struggle for hope and progress itself. Lament has been and is helpful as a spiritual practice that ultimately leads us to hope as we confront our uncertainties, anger, and grief. Lent provides space for lament more than any other liturgical season.”

Lindsay has crafted a Ritual of Breath and Ashes for Ash Wednesday, which she notes was created with inspiration from a group of National Ministries colleagues.

The Rev. Ruth Garwood, a transitional pastor in the Heartland Conference and certified facilitator of Sacred Conversations to End Racism, joins Lindsay as the writer of the Sunday liturgical elements for Worship Ways in this season.

Into the Deep

This year’s Lent devotional, available from Pilgrim Press, takes on the theme of this summer’s General Synod 35 — Into the Deep — in its daily entries crafted by the Stillspeaking Writers’ Group.

“The writers wanted to support the United Church of Christ in reflecting on God’s breadth and depth in advance of Synod,” said Rachael Hackenberg, publisher and team leader for Pilgrim Press.

The Rev. Mary Luti addresses the theme in the introduction to Into the Deep: “God’s trajectory is downward. God inhabits the depth of life, love, loss, ecstasy and pain. God loves the deep. God works in the deep. It’s where the reckoning is, the wonder, the courage, the life-sustaining bliss.”

“In these days when many people are feeling the stress of rapid political change, we can find a spiritual anchor by clinging to God’s loving depths,” Hackenberg said.

The individual reflections invite readers into a range of “deeps” — from the depth of silence to the deep bedrock of faith, from the fishing depths where the disciples cast their nets to the humble depths of Mary anointing Jesus’s feet.

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