Lenten Reflections: Coming Soon

Check this site beginning Wednesday, February 22 for a reflection on a daily scripture reading from the Gospel of Mark for Lent, 2012.

Holy Saturday, April 3

Scripture for the Day:

Come, let us bow down in worship,

let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;

for he is our God

and we are the people of his pasture,

the flock under his care.

Today, if you hear his voice,

do not harden your hearts - Psalm 95:6-8

Reflection – Ed Happ

The Yearning

I long for

the God who

dabbles in chaos,

puts His finger

into my hard heart,

a thorn to

stir my doubt;

pokes through

my hands

when I dare

to take up

the pen of a wagging tongue—

the God

who speaks to me

in the slow time—

the outages

in a flurried life—

when even

a blowing

wisp of a

spring spore

can sing.

30 Apr 00

Holy Saturday is a day that does not make sense. We are stuck between the times, in a limbo much like a man late in life getting laid off before he realizes the dream, before it has taken him by surprise. Yesterday all the plans and hopes died with the finality of a nail in a coffin. How do we go on from here? What will I tell my friends, my children, my family? I am a fool without a cause, without a purpose, without a job. Our hopes are scattered to the wind like the disciples in hiding. This did not go as planned; this did not end well. I’ve been shaken up with no foundation on which to place my feet and stand. I bolt the door, curl up in my bed and wait; doubt and despair stirring left and right, I dream of an elusive knock on the window.

Good Friday, April 2

Scripture for the Day:

Who has believed what we have heard?

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant,

and like a root out of dry ground;

he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;

and as one from whom others hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God,

and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:1-5

Reflection

Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

(1987, North Point Press, San Francisco)

To sit and look at light-filled leaves
May let us see, or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes
To what unsighted hope believes:
The blessed conviviality
That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise.
Time when the Maker’s radiant sight

Made radiant every thing He saw,
And every thing He saw was filled
With perfect joy and life and light.
His perfect pleasure was sole law;
No pleasure had become self-willed.

For all His creatures were His pleasures
And their whole pleasure was to be
What He made them; they sought no gain
Or growth beyond their proper measures,
Nor longed for change or novelty.
The only new thing could be pain.

Maundy Thursday, April 1

Scripture for the Day:

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord – and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, `Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” – John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Reflection – Kate Heichler

Why is this night different from all other nights? I don’t know if that question was part of the Passover observance in Jesus’ how different this night would be from all other nights that ever had been or ever would be.

Maundy Thursday is for me the most sacred night of all the sacred nights. It is a threshold from regular chronos time into God’s kairos time, a night when the membrane separating heaven and earth becomes wafer-thin. We gather and celebrate and commemorate a meal at which everything became subverted, no expectation met unchanged. Jesus takes the familiar prayers of blessing and distorts them with shocking words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. He takes a ritual of hospitality with which a host would normally greet guests and enacts it after the food, lowering himself to wash his disciples’ feet, an act of intimacy and humility that challenges our self-sufficiency as much as it did theirs. And after supper he goes into the night to accept the most intimate of humiliations, not fighting, but subverting human pretensions of control with love and truth.

And so we eat and wash and bless and pray, and walk together into the three-day dream sequence we relive every year, in which God and humanity meet on a cross of brutality,

in which heaven and earth come crashing together and the whole mortal order of things is overturned, once and for all. Death swallowed up by life. Here it begins, our sacred mystery. Stay awake. Watch and pray.

To ponder and pray:

¨ Will you accept the gift and discomfort of allowing someone else to wash your feet tonight? Someone who stands in for Jesus?

¨ If not, in your prayer today tell Jesus why you won’t allow him that privilege. How does He answer you?

If yes, invite Him to open your heart to God’s transforming life in the encounter.

Wednesday in Holy Week, March 31

Scripture for the Day:

At supper with his friends, Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. One of his disciples-- the one whom Jesus loved - was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” – John 13:21-35

Tuesday in Holy Week, March 30

Scripture for the Day: Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” – John 12:20-26

from Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir, 1998

What hard travail God does in death!

He strives in sleep, in our despair,

And all flesh shudders underneath

The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;

All night the cold wind heaves and pries;

Creation strains sinew and bone

Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bend, pent in seed, grows straight

And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising

The merely dead, graves fill with light

Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

Monday in Holy Week, March 29

Scripture for the Day: While Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” - Mark 14:3-9

Reflection – Kate Heichler

We have, for the past five weeks, been modeling something of this woman’s act of extravagant worship – we have been offering our time, the most precious commodity most of us possess.

Few things are more costly than giving a whole day to something or someone. In the spiritual practice of Sabbath-keeping, we offer God a whole day per week, empty, for God to fill.

The practical, earthbound voices in and around us might say, “Wouldn’t God rather we worked for those hours? Got something done? Made money so we could give more away? Produced something? Done volunteer work? Why was this time wasted in this way?”

But a voice in our spirit cries, ‘Yes! Break open the alabaster jar of precious minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years… break it open and offer it all in worship to our Lord; pour it over his head and watch our precious time drip down his face.

For who gave us the time, but He, the Maker of all time, and the One in whom all time will end?