Many people follow the tradition of fasting in Lent, “giving something up” as a symbol of repentance and as an exercise in spiritual discipline, designed ultimately to test and strengthen the will. Others choose instead to “take something on,” choosing a way to serve the community or a new spiritual practice, with the same ends in mind. This year, for example, our Sunday School students will be leading the whole church in a season of gathering donations of clothing and food, inspired by the “40 Bags in 40 Days” decluttering challenge. (More on that to come!)

For myself, this year, I’m thinking of Lent as a chance to “peel something away.” I don’t plan to fast from my cup of morning coffee or my (less frequent) evening bowls of salt-and-vinegar chips. I’ll probably try to abstain from alcohol, as I have the last few years during Lent. But mostly, this year, I’m planning to peel away a few of the deeply-engrained habits that just aren’t giving me life.

In other words: I’m breaking up with my phone.

Not the actual “telephone call” feature of the phone, to be clear, but all the rest: continually opening up one social-media app or another, expecting to see something interesting or outrageous; starting off the morning with a digital doom-scroll to see the latest news; distracting myself from settling down with a book by constantly checking email. To all the myriad distractions that promise relaxation but instead just leave me on edge, to all the temptations to fuel my own outrage, to the constant connection that never quite connects, I humbly bid adieu.

This isn’t a “fast,” per se; fasting means giving up something that’s good, to take it up again in the future. It certainly isn’t “taking something on.” It feels exciting. It feels like a relief. I’m sure that it will be incredibly hard. I know that I will fail, over and over again.

This is “repentance,” at its best: a turning away from a path of destruction toward another that leads to life. In Hebrew, repentance is teshuvah, “returning,” and that’s my goal this Lent: I want to return to the way I related to the world before I had a smartphone. I want to be present with people when I am present with people, not to be looking down at a screen. I want to read a book before I go to bed, not bathe my eyes in blue light. I want to peel something away this Lent, not as a temporary fast, but in the hope that my path is changed.

What about you? What’s the test of your willpower this Lent? What’s the gift that you might give the world? What is it that you need to give up, or take on, or peel away, to come one step closer to the promise of abundant life?

Last week, a clergy friend of mine texted me a meme: an image of some dried-up old palm branches, brittle pale yellow and green, with the caption: “Ash Wednesday is just around the corner—Do you know where your palms are?” Then on Tuesday morning, I walked down Main Street just in time to see a tragicomic sight: three City workers with a woodchipping truck, getting ready to grind the Thompson Square Christmas Tree into mulch.

Two different ways of cleaning up old plant life; two different meanings, too, I think.

For some reason, I’ll admit, I’d never thought before about what happens to old Christmas trees after they’re picked up (by the Boy Scouts, or the City, or whatever the local custom may be). Are they thrown onto the yard waste heap at the town dump? Burned to usher in the New Year? I had no idea. Seeing a dump truck pulling a woodchipper parked on the curb put it right in front of my eyes. The magic of Christmas is over. The woodchipper is here. The tree will be destroyed, and then the truck will drive away.

The palms are something different. They sit around all year, gathering dust, slowly drying out, tucked into sacristies and rectors’ offices all around the world. And then one day—maybe on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, maybe on Shrove Tuesday night—the palms are burned. Most of the adults won’t notice, but the kids will think it’s fun. Somebody will hover, worried about the flames, and the palms will burn into rough, imperfect chunks. Later, I’ll have to sift and sort and grind them a bit so they can be used. And they are used: the burned palms become the ashes for Ash Wednesday. These are the best ashes for Ash Wednesday, I think: not the smooth, odorless ones you can buy from a store, to be shipped to your church in a small, plastic envelope; but your own ashes, gritty to the touch and smelling like smoke and pancakes.

We don’t woodchip the palms, in other words, and send them away. We reuse them. And the palms with which we praise the Messiah as he enters into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday become the ashes with which we mark our repentance and mortality the next year.

Two ways of taking out the trash. Two ways of recycling old things. But it strikes me that the ashes are much more like what we get to do with our lives. All of us experience many things, some good, some bad. And while we might wish to feed the worst parts of our lives into the woodchipper and send them off, never to be heard from again, we really can’t. We usually don’t have that choice. We can’t “just” get over things; try as we might, we can’t “just” move on.

But we can try to make new meaning from them. If they’re going to be sticking around, we can try to transform them into something else. We can take the dried-up palms stashed on the deep sacristy shelves of our lives, and burn them up, grind them, transform them and reuse them. We can take the hardest parts of our own lives, and try to see what new thing can become of them. They’ll never really go away. But that doesn’t mean that they can never change.

So, as January continues on and the beginning of Lent draws near: Do you know where your palms are? Or, maybe as a first step: Do you know what your palms are? Do you know what things you might need to burn this year, so they can become something new?

And Gabriel came to Mary and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. (Luke 1:28–29)

The Annunciation tends to pass us by. You might think that this day—when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the Messiah, the Son of God—would be a big one in the Church year. But the holiday itself falls on March 25 (you can do the math), right around Easter, and it often gets rescheduled if it falls during Holy Week or Easter Week. (This year, the announcement will be delayed slightly to April 8…) We tell the story again on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, but of course this year, that falls on the morning of Christmas Eve, and once again, few will hear it. And of course, when I say “we” here I mean “we Protestants,” who’ve always been a bit skeptical about the role of the Mother of God, relative to our Roman Catholic friends.

But an obscure Annunciation is somehow appropriate for the day.

An angel of the Lord—scratch that, not just any angel, but the Archangel Gabriel!—appears to a young woman with an extraordinary message, and a greeting: “Greetings, favored one!” (in some traditional translations, “Hail, full of grace!”) “The Lord is with you!” And Mary is not frightened, or impressed, or flattered, but perplexed. The angel goes on at length, describing the amazing thing that is happening: “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus! He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David! He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end!” And Mary is not shocked, or terrified, or lost in rapturous praise. She simply asks the obvious question: “How can this be?” And the angel gives an answer I’ve always loved for its wild inadequacy: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

Thanks, Gabriel. That clears things up.

The angel of the Lord appears to announce the most important event in human history, one which is completely fundamental to Christian theology, and this is as clear as he can be? This is as public an announcement as God wants to make? One angel, to one person, with a few short, confusing sentences?

But sometimes that’s all that we get. The world moves underneath us, and no one else notices. God reaches out to touch us, and no one else sees it. God speaks into our lives, and the message is confusing, and we are perplexed.

And we’re left with a choice. We can ignore that message from God, or shrug it off as something else. We can try to make perplexity precise, transforming ambiguity into fundamentalism in pursuit of something we can wrap our heads around. Or we can simply accept that we’re going along for the ride, and echo Mary’s words: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Last night, a hardy group from St. John’s bundled up against the wind and cold and set up a table on Main Street as part of Visit Charlestown’s Holiday Night Out. Whether by accident or by Providence, we were stationed next to the entrance of The Cooperative Bank, where Santa Claus was available for photos, so a steady stream of neighbors young and old walked past us on their way to see the Big Guy. We blasted Christmas music, handed out cookies and candy-cane gift bags, and collected a few bids for our Red Sox ticket Silent Auction.

But by far the most heads were turned by Simon’s voice announcing, as they walked past, “Free Raffle! Free Raffle!”

It’s astounding how quickly someone’s path can change when you say those simple words. We were just raffling off a gift basket, nothing crazy. But it was free. All you had to do was risk frozen fingers to write your name on a slip of paper and put it in the box for a chance to win.

And so we witnessed dozens of bundled-up yuppies on their way home from work or out for dinner turn aside with a look of delight. Scores of seniors chatted with us as they scoped out the goods. More than one elementary schooler checked with her mom to confirm that the family email address was, in fact, correct.

And why not? It was a free raffle, a chance to win a nice little gift, no strings attached.

But as the box of entries filled with free raffle tickets, so did the “Donations Welcome” jar at the other end of the table. A young guy who never would’ve stopped to buy a church raffle ticket slipped a twenty across the table in exchange for his free cookie and chance at a prize. Kids searched their pockets for leftover dollar bills. And best yet, when someone said she had no cash but could she Venmo us, we said no, it’s free; just fill a ticket out and put it in.

As Pia observed, halfway through, this is like grace. And she was right, and in fact I can’t think of a better way to put it.

In God’s economy, everything is free of charge. You are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are (from time to time) inspired, and you do not have to do a thing. God’s grace is a free raffle for a wonderful gift, and if you show up without cash, you get a ticket anyway. God’s love is completely gratuitous, in every sense of the word.

And yet this freedom doesn’t lead to freeloading. Not a single person, when confronted with the news of a free raffle, came up with a scheme to game the system, to take advantage of our generosity. They responded with their own. As the ticket box filled up, the tip jar filled up too, and if that doesn’t sum up Christian life, I don’t know what does. When we are loved, it leads us to love. When we are forgiven, it leads us to forgive. When in the midst of darkness we see a glimpse of light, we do not hide it away for ourselves, but show it to the world.

I walked home last night wondering what else we could give away for free, and what gifts we’d receive in return. I wondered how much money the Harvest Fair would raise if the Turkey Dinner were free (suggested donation: $20). I wondered what the church’s budget would look like if instead of charging tickets for church, we opened our doors and accepted donations. (Psych! We already do this! But churches used to actually rent pews.) I wondered what it would look like in my life to remember that everything I have is a gift from somewhere else, and to give myself as a gift in return.

I wonder what it would look like in yours.

This Sunday marks the beginning of another Advent, the season of quiet reflection and eager anticipation that falls before Christmas, in which we still our souls and quiet our minds to prepare to greet the coming of Jesus with joy.

At least in theory.

This year, as every year, Advent seems to come too soon, tripping over the heels of Thanksgiving and plunging us suddenly into a new season. For many of us, the stillness of Advent will really be a frenzy of parties and concerts and holiday preparation. For others, the cold and darkness of these December days will make it hard to feel like we want to rejoice, or the grief of loved ones lost will tinges every special day with sadness. I, for one, continue to be in denial about the arrival of colder winter weather, which I’m still pretending won’t come this year.

But God shows up, in any case, whether we feel like it or not.

But that’s the most Adventy part of the whole thing. God shows up, whether we are ready or not. Whether we’re awake or asleep, lamps full of oil or empty, long before we expect it and after unimaginable delays, God shows up in our lives and in our worlds. In the darkest days of the year, in the darkest eras of our lives, in a tucked-away manger in a small town outside the holy city, God shows up, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

So your Advent this year might not be too quiet. Or it might be too quiet. It might be cold, and dark, or it might be warm and cozy. But whatever it is: Keep one eye open for the coming of Christ. Expect some unexpected grace. Prepare to be unprepared for joy to appear in a place you never would have imagined.