The Sacred Steps: Lent

Ash Wednesday: March 5, 2025

Among Christians that observe this forty-day journey with Jesus, many use this time to connect to the suffering of Jesus, specifically his Jerusalem experience, by giving-up (doing without) something of significance to their daily life.  Other followers choose to add something to their living, as a way to understand how Jesus lived and perhaps serve those with whom Jesus associated during his journey.  Many communities of faith offer special studies or host mid-week meals during Lent, to build community and, though perhaps not explicitly state, to create accountability loops for those who have chosen a discipline to follow during Lent.  Lent could be a time of intentional hospitality or invitation for your community to participate in a study, conversation, or weekly meal as an introduction to the practice of Christianity.  If followed, a spiritual discipline can provide a person (believer, practitioner, or skeptic) with a foundation for personal growth.  Like Lent, a spiritual discipline is about the journey, not the destination. It is a time to challenge a “belief” in, or a “belief” about, Jesus as a savior, by personally practicing the way of Jesus, which can lead to the Truth about God and give meaning to life, even a life of faith.  John Dominic Crossan’s book, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus, would be good for your individual study or for a small group to read together and discuss during Lent.

A favorite suggestion I offer to persons seeking a spiritual discipline during Lent, for the first time or as a seasoned follower, is to write your own gospel.  Thomas Jefferson completed his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth in 1820.  This is a way to begin journaling, by spending thirty minutes each day writing your account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  Like the writer of John, take the synoptic Gospels and some of the non-canonical writings as source material for your gospel.  Weigh those accounts with your experiences.  What would your gospel account include?  What would be the focus of your telling of the story of Jesus?  What does your gospel say about the person of Jesus and the character of God?  Would you be willing to share your gospel account with the youth group or your Sunday school class?  Can you imagine someone reading your gospel as scripture?

One option for the children’s sermons during Lent would be for you to choose the parables of Jesus you think are important for the children to know, and then use one each week as the topic for your time on the sacred steps.  What five parables would you choose?  That question would be good to ask in an adult Sunday school class and to explore during Lent.  You might ask several groups in your congregation to identify their top five parables and see what parables are popular.  Your process of choosing and studying these five parables could be your spiritual discipline, as well as the core of the gospel account that you would write.  How will you journey with Jesus to Jerusalem this Lenten season?

Personal Thoughts / Planning for Lent

Spend some time journaling about your thoughts or goals for this Lenten season.  
For whom will you be praying?
Will you take on a discipline during Lent?
Whom do you hope or want to be praying for you?
Does he or she know you seek their intercessory prayers?

, 03/04/2025. Category: SSCSJ. Tagged: .

Wisdom from Wendell Berry

A Poem of Hope

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
in the trees in the silence of the fisherman
and the heron, and the trees that keep the land
they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.

This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
and how to be here with them. By this knowledge
make the sense you need to make. By it stand
in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.

Speak to your fellow humans as your place
has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
before they had heard a radio. Speak
publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
from the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
by which it speaks for itself and no other.

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

, 02/12/2025. Category: Culture. Tagged: .
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