Lent is coming to an end this week. And although I am grateful to celebrate the resurrection on Sunday, I will miss it. Lent feels more natural to me than other pars of the church year. I think its because I am at home with a theological anthropology that is Augustinian or maybe a bit Calvinist. I believe people suck. We are not good. We are in a mess that we have made. We are responsible for the unholy crap that occurs everyday. So lent allows me to feel the depth of my moral depravity, to wallow in my personal muck, and to be truthful about my weaknesses.
Yesterday we observed Palm/Passion Sunday. We used Eoc-friendly Palms from Lutheran World relief---meaning that theydid not contribute to deforestation, while we did contribute to the sustainable economy of a Mexican Palm tree farmer. That was a good thing. It always amazes me that the gospel narrative for Sunday holds together this schizophrenic nature of people; one minute the crowds are following Jesus the Messiah King into Jerusalem shoutin "Hosanna". A week later they are accusing him of treason and shouting "crucify". Fickle, aren't we Jesus? Thing is, I doubt any of us would be in that crowd, so passionate and bold. Not us, not the privileged. We couldn't follow Jesus on the grounds that he would turn our safe and happy worlds upside-down. We maybe required to give up our lives in order to declare allegiance to him. Better to back Rome and the powers- that-be. been I think we would have abandoned Jesus well before the Passover march on Temple jerusalem. And by the time the crucifixion occurs, we would have been back to work. Its amazing that his followers interpreted the cross as the divine salvation event considering how many crucifixions they would have witnessed already. I propose that the truth about Jesus' life and death would have escaped us as it did Roman history and the annals of antiquity for the most part. Were it not for those who beleived in his resurrection, we would not have a single story about Jesus life and death.
Lent offers forty days of spiritual formation and continuing education for those of us whose lives are caught up in the story of Jesus. Prayer, fasting, giving, and studying become hallmarks of the season. I fast from coffee for the season because coffee is a sign of my dependence on earthly things, rather than on the things of GOD. (Not saying that coffee is not a gift from GOD, because it is. Its just that I take it for granted and I depend on it as daily bread.) I also try to reada good book or two. This lent has been challenging though. I have been doing the work of an evangelist and the inefficiency of that kind of ministry takes its toll on my time. I continue to visit people in prison and have made hopeful connections with three men there. I'm also involved in a prison ministry task force, the church in society committee of our synod and our advocacy council. We have been making innovative plans to infiltrate our annual synodical assembly this June. I will be wearing a prison-issue orange jump suit with stats on incarceration in PA and the U.S. I hope we raise awareness that inspires mission to the prison population.
We explored "The Jesus Creed" by Scot McKnight this Lent. I recommend it for anyone who has read "The Purpose Driven life" by Rik Warren, because I think the former is a smarter alternative to the self-help guidebook that Warren wrote. "The Jesus Creed" asks about spiritual formation in the time of Jesus. His suggestion is that Jesus was spiritually formed by the Shemaand by the Levitical command to the love the neighbor. These two commandments from the Torah shaped Jesus' messianic/rabbinical ministry. What I'm learning again is that my assumptions about Jesus ought never to become rigid and unchangeable. McKnight offers another way in which we might look at Jesus, come to know him, follow him, and love him.
In the Easter season I will blog. We will be exploring what it means to care for creation and its renewal.
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