March 27, 2022 - The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Lectionary Readings

O God, we thank you for being a God who seeks and finds the lost ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            Throughout Lent the Sunday readings there is a common theme – we are dead and God brings us into new and abundant life in Jesus Christ. Today, that theme is about as clear as it gets. In many ways, we experience death – sometimes it’s the death of a dream or idea, sometimes the end of a relationship, sometimes physical or mental decline, and sometimes it is the physical death of a loved one or friend. A lot of these life-draining realities are the result of human sin – war, partisanship, greed, jealousy. Whatever the cause, the result is that we are often left wandering in the valley of the shadow of death. But there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; God seeks out and finds the lost and brings us back into the grace of his love.

March 20, 2022 - The Third Sunday in Lent

Lectionary Readings

O Lord, show us mercy and nourish us with your grace that we might bear the fruits of love ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            Why. It’s a question we hear asked dozens of times a day; hundreds if you have small children at home. We humans are meaning-making machines – we like to join data points, come up with theories, test hypotheses, and connect ideas all in pursuit of having an overarching narrative that can explain our otherwise seemingly bewildering and unexplainable experiences. Whether it is responding to a drought, the reality of death, the war in Ukraine, or our child’s behavior – for tens of thousands of years, we have been searching for answers to assuage our feelings of randomness and helplessness. Perhaps the reason why the question continues to be asked so frequently is that as simple as the question is – just three letters – we still don’t have a satisfying answer.

March 6, 2022 - The First Sunday in Lent

Lectionary Readings

O Lord, we do not live by bread alone, but by the grace of your Word made flesh ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            We mark the season of Lent not because we like doing traditional things, not because we are melancholy, not because we are particularly reverent. From the earliest days of the Church, followers of Jesus have recognized that Easter is most fully celebrated and appreciated when it has been prepared for. Forty is a significant number for Jews and Christians – it’s the number of days that the rain fell when Noah was in the ark, the number of years the Hebrews journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land, the number of days that Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted. Forty is a number of completeness, signaling that the proper amount of time has passed. And so forty days before Easter, we begin preparing for it with Lent – a season of examination and honesty, when we name the inevitability of Death, the pervasiveness of Sin, and our utter reliance on God to sustain us.

March 2, 2022 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings; Psalm 51

Gracious God, even in death we are yours ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            “Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.” It is good and holy to think about death. Not in the philosophical way of  “We are all going to die” or the sentimental “circle of life,” but rather in the gut-wrenching “Your last scan isn’t good – you’ve got about 2 months left” sort of way. Yes, faith gives us courage and hope in the face of death, but death is still something that hangs over us. As St. Paul writes, “The last enemy is death.” Indeed, death is an enemy as it severs bonds of love and causes us to do so many unhealthy things in reaction to it.