“Lent is a season often imagined as a journey, echoing the forty-day journey of Noah and his family in the flood, the forty-year journey of the Israelites in the wilderness, and the forty-day journey of Jesus in the desert.” (Sundays and Seasons, Year A 2008)

These emblematic journeys of Noah, the Israelites and Jesus were hardly ones that accommodated excess baggage. It was necessary to strip down to the essentials.

Prayer. Fasting. Almsgiving. The three disciplines of Lent help us get to the essentials. Praying constantly. Fasting from enmity and violence, from falsehood and excess. Giving away what we find we don’t need and maybe even some of what we do.

Lent is for the healing our souls, for traveling lightly, for living faithfully and courageously with little protection.

And it’s for traveling together, companions on the way. Join your fellow pilgrims on Sundays and Wednesdays during Lent for worship and study. Our Lenten Wednesdays (5:30 Bible Study on “The Seven Last Words of Christ”, 6 p.m. common meal, 7-7:30 Vespers on the theme of “What Language Shall I Borrow?”) are a good center for your work/school week in addition to regular Sunday worship.

Plan ahead now to incorporate the services of Holy Week (March 16-23) into your life and that of your family.

This year, make the Season of Salvation a road well traveled.

Pastor Susan

Reflections as We Journey Towards Lent

We have just returned from New York City where Susan and I participated in Trinity Institute’s conference on Religion and Violence. (For more information, go to TrinityWallStreet.org.) No one can be unaware of the connection between religion and violence. We all have to ask whether there is something integral to our faiths that either promotes or tolerates certain forms of violence, through distortion or manipulation. How could following Jesus, the beloved of God, the man of peace, have, as a consequence, violence? But we know from scripture and history that violence did indeed follow Jesus, whether it was in the slicing-off of the ear of a Roman soldier who came to arrest Jesus in Gethsemane, or believing that God wanted Christians to slaughter Muslims, Jews, and even Eastern Christians in the Crusades in order to “take back” Jerusalem.

We Christians have much to reflect upon, along with our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, and, apropos of this coming Lent, to repent of, pray about, and think through. As Tariq Ramadan, the conference’s Muslim speaker, mentioned facetiously in an interview, if we really want to sever the link between religion and violence, “we’ll first need to get rid of people”. This way of severing religion from violence must NOT be the only way for it to happen!

So as we prepare ourselves to enter Lent 2008, to follow Jesus, even to that garden where he prays deep into the night and is yet betrayed by one of his own, we have hard and painful questions to ask ourselves about our own intimate connection to violence. We proclaim a transforming story of redemption that does contain the violence of the cross – and yet God works redemption out of it. How do we tell that story? Have we heard it or told it in ways that support violence? What does it call forth from us? Let us again seek to follow Jesus in these forty days, aware of our own responsibility, as Christians, for violence. Let us follow Jesus into the dry wilderness, and then into that first garden of betrayal, followed into the second garden where his body was laid and buried, so that we may, at the last, enter into the garden of God’s redemptive love.

Pastor Michael

Print This

Email This