One Lenten liturgy borrows the language of Joel 2 verbatim as the congregation sings, "Return to the Lord your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love."
This is beautiful language, but it is also hard language to believe. Now, this language is hard to believe because so many of our experiences lack grace and mercy. We live in a culture quick to anger. and where love is entirely fragile and quite fleeting. We find Joel's words hard to believe because our experience tells us that upon our return, we should expect more of the same. Lent is a slow journey toward a different experience. The culture of God's kingdom challenges our pettiness and jealousy with the revelation of the once hidden God. In Jesus, the unbelievable attributes of God become conceivable because Jesus introduces us to new experiences. Rather than quick anger, Jesus meets our sin with compassion. Instead of an impotent love, Jesus introduces us to a love that gives sight to the blind, makes the lame to walk, opens the ears of the deaf, and even raises the dead. Though sin mars our view of God, Jesus returns our attention to the kind of world that God had in mind at the dawn of creation. One of wholeness and compassion, of togetherness and peace. Our return, then, is to a foreign country that happens to be our homeland. In Lent, we relearn the lengths to which God is willing to go in order to redeem the world, and to return us all to communion with God. The disciplines of Lent help to reintroduce us to this culture, to this kingdom, in which God desires us all to live. A culture where we all, in the image of God, might be gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Whatever your Lenten disciplines are, I pray that they are helping you, your church, your community, and our world to look more like this, for as we return to God, we become more like God.
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For many, Lent is a time of preparation, which includes both denial and transformation. Looking less like the sinner and looking more like the saint.
But for me, preparation seems almost exclusively tied up in the call process. Hearing from bishops and churches, being assigned to a region and then given the freedom to interview, and wondering what it is that God has in store for Michelle and I all requires an attentiveness of preparation. Yet, yesterday a good friend stopped me in my tracks with a great question: "What does waiting look like for you?" I was dumbfounded. This shocked me because it helped to congeal in my mind the difference between waiting and preparation. Waiting can look like anything. Waiting doesn't require anything of you. While you wait, you can do pretty much whatever you want (like that guy in the dentist's lounge who doesn't turn the sound off while he's playing Candy Crush). Preparation, however, is an attentive waiting. Preparation is a wait pregnant with purpose. Rather than waste time on silly apps or however it is that we fill our time with anything but purpose, what if waited we meaning? What if we prepared? Rather than biding my time until God calls me to a congregation, why don't I continue to pursue a healthier lifestyle? Perhaps I should continue to read up not only on my thesis or my science-fiction guilty pleasures, but on how to help congregations transition to 21st century ministry. Practice preaching. Get acquainted with my synod. Pray for the people to whom God will call me. Foster healthy relationships with my fellow students here so that we might have better friendships as colleagues in ministry. Perhaps I should love justice and mercy more than the idea of a paycheck and housing stability. This e-journal blog is part of that process for me. I want to communicate to my congregation, whoever and wherever that might be, not only a vision for our life together, but the honest reality that I struggle, and that I want to be better. I need accountability. I need good people to ask great questions about waiting, because as Christians, we wait for the Lord. This is not only about Lent, but about our everyday life. We are anticipating the return of the Creator to creation, to fully establish God's Kingdom here on earth. Until then, we should not wait without purpose. We should prepare. And to prepare for the King, we should work to make this world look more like Christ's kingdom. "May your kingdom come. May your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Help us to prepare, As part part of my Lenten discipline, I plan to start blogging. This will be more like journal entries or devotional material, at least until Easter. My hope is that this process will help me to become more honest and more thankful, as it provides a public venue for genuine discourse and opportunities to offer thanks.
So, here at this beginning of Lent, let me be honest. I struggle with thankfulness. I appreciate, at least conceptually, the work that others do on my behalf and the sacrifices that others make for me, but I often struggle to be thankful in the way that I think I ought. This comes from, at least in part, an incipient sense of entitlement. We have all been culturally conditioned, and my experiences have shaped me to believe that I deserve what I have, regardless of how it came to me. How can I be thankful if I deserved it in the first place? And then I hear, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Said over me. Said over my friends, some older, some younger. Said to the two toddlers who sat near me today at church. Dust deserves nothing. That is the Ash Wednesday proclamation. Our entitlement - my entitlement - is bunk. I want to be more thankful, and to get there, I must first realize that I am surviving solely on grace. God's grace in creation and redemption. The grace of others who offer love and support, often at the expense of themselves. The grace of the air that fills my nostrils, the food that fills my belly, the light that enlivens my eyes. It is all grace to this desperately needy pile of dust. Days like today help me be thankful because my ego takes a hit, and instead I find joy only in the mercy of others. I am thankful that so many people water this dust, that so many others bring nutrients, and that still others tend and care for me that I might, in time, bear a plant that will bear fruit. Not because I deserve it, but because somebody cares about this dust. So, why relent? Because God won't relent, even if we are only dust, because for some reason, God breathes life into the dirt that we are. |
AuthorSimultaneously a sinner and a saint. Archives
September 2020
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