Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Jesus intentionally goes into Samaritan territory. He hangs out by a well to talk with this woman. None of this is stuff he is supposed to do. And the threat isn’t only to himself. He is putting the woman at risk, too. This is as important to the story as the woman’s confusion and excitement at what he says. And we can plainly see why. Because the story isn’t about ascribing sin to the woman, but the vehicle of redemption in Jesus.
I love the dialogue between the woman at the well and Jesus. It is one of my favorite stories. But the second half is almost better. It has the disciples arriving with the protective bluster of students wanting to impress their teacher. They see the transgression and don’t know what to do about it. They fall back on care for him in this godforsaken place. He’s got to be hungry! Get him to eat!
Then, in a kind of echo of Job’s trip to Nineveh, we see the people being transformed by prophetic word and God’s invitation. Are the disciples like Job here: disappointed? that they don’t get to condemn the bad guys? That their moral superiority doesn’t get to win the day?
Or shall we also witness the transformative power of God. That it isn’t built on vengeance or violence, but on love. Trust. Sitting with the other person and sharing the good water with them.
The animosity between the hebrews and samaritans was earned. They hated each other and acted like it. They hurt each other.
There are two analogies many Americans gravitate to in an attempt to discuss this. One is the infamous Hatfields and McCoys: two family rivals that bedevil the mind like Shakespeare’s famous feuding families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Another is the late unpleasantness in Ireland. All of it, full of violence, hatred, and righteous ideology.
Besides the obvious, what all of these examples reveal is a tendency toward time blindness. A sense that things have always been this way, that it goes back to the beginning, and will never not be.
Unless, of course, they compromise. Realize their mistakes.
Except that none of this is true. The people have the same great great grandfather. It’s his well. We are all family. Our demand to be right has little to do with making things right.
Nicodemus and Redeeming Grace Lent 2A | John 3:1-17
How does he get there? In the big city, at night, visiting the traveling rabbi with a small host of disciples. One who just showed up to the Temple earlier that week and made a great scene; whose signs of wonder at the Passover festival attracted so many. What compelled him? Not to join the throngs during the day, but to still seek him out?
I don’t know, it doesn’t say. But we can imagine, can’t we?
There’s one version of this that runs through my mind. I start with a parking lot — it wouldn’t be a street corner, too public — a parking lot, with spaced lighting. More, outside a bar around midnight than parking garage meeting with Deep Throat with secrets about Watergate. The kind of place that people like them aren’t supposed to be. And the sort of place that people who know this isn’t where they’re supposed to be also aren’t supposed to be. Like Southern Baptists meeting each other in the liquor store. Nobody’s looking at them. Not there, then.
And in my version, there are trench coats, I suppose, and they make sure not to be under the streetlights. Even if nobody’s looking, there’s still something to not being seen, right? In drawing up this image of a secret meeting, I find it embellishes the parts of the story I most want to imagine are central — the secrecy, the nighttime — because it helps me make the conclusions I want to draw — that Nicodemus doesn’t want to be seen. And I take this as essential and true, final. And yet . . . it doesn’t say this.
The Night Meeting Scenario
Other parts of the story go unaddressed in the secret night meeting scenario. Like, do the crowds leave him alone after dinner? As if they look at each other and go, same time tomorrow? And wander off? Don’t people camp outside celebrity hotels? How is Jesus alone here? And when I reread the text I realize it doesn’t ever say he is.
What my vision of this story has always relied on wasn’t just the facts of the story, but a theme that is consistent within Jesus’s teachings and the gospel narrative. That Jesus is the light in the darkness. That’s a metaphor, right? And the use of light and dark as imagery becomes a motif, a theme, that evokes common ideas about everything: from the people to theology. It evokes good and evil, truth and deception, knowing and ignorance. And so when I read a story about a man coming to Jesus at night, the themes all engage and we read them as much as we read the text itself.
This is how we read stories of all kinds. The pattern-matching machine that is our brain interprets the sequence of events and draws in literal and metaphorical data and fills in the gaps. We assume things. Like, meeting in secret means Nicodemus is afraid of being seen. And as intuitive leaps go, I think this is probably a 75-80% confidence one. The kind of choice I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to make. Even though Jesus hasn’t made any enemies yet. He has courted controversy, but we shouldn’t assume that, because Nicodemus is a Pharisee, that the animosity from the Pharisees is a thing in the story yet. It isn’t. There’s a better explanation.
The Matter of Ego
The text makes two telling references to Nicodemus’s station. The first is the evangelist’s introduction of him as a religious leader. This sets us up to know that he has a station that requires both leadership skill and subject knowledge. He needs to know things about God to be able to lead people in the way of God. The other is from Jesus himself, at the end of their dialogue when he says “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”
If we set aside their conversation for a moment, we can see a deeper reason for secrecy: ego in leadership. It isn’t that Nicodemus might be seen going to this particular rabbi, but that he’d be found receiving counsel from any rabbi.
This is the kind of hubris engendered by a culture of self-reliant hierarchies which can be found all over the world. They come in different forms and will articulate the reasoning differently, but they will, in the end, say that teachers can’t have teachers because it undermines their authority. The way a therapist isn’t allowed to have a therapist or a priest shouldn’t have a priest. It exposes weakness and the expectation is perfection. The best we can get.
Of course, the best advice I ever got from my friends who studied psychology: never go to a therapist who doesn’t have a therapist. These are the ones who know they don’t know everything.
Knowledge and the Leader
This nighttime encounter is all the more curious because of this strange dialogue about the nature of authority and being born from above. And much like my own effort to dig into the scene so I can stage it for myself and open up what is happening in it, Jesus wants to defy a kind of literalism that wants to ignore the metaphor, the theme. That wishes to set that very part aside, as if life can be separated from meaning, like marriage can be separated from a sense of love.
Let’s recognize just how instinctive such a move is, especially in our 21st century US context. How much we want to not only pull the things apart to look at them, but to do so with the intention of ignoring some of them. Because we don’t value the theme as much as the action. We think one is real and the other is something ineffable. And it is this move that is all the more dangerous. Because it renders the essential as extraneous and outside the calculus. This is how we tolerate poverty in our community and genocide in our world. Because it is all so complicated. And our moral convictions are just something we can set aside for realpolitik. It is how human rights become expendible and torture becomes enhanced interrogations.
Nicodemus himself says that he knows where Jesus comes from because it is otherwise impossible. He knows God is at work here. But then his mind goes literal about the physical birth process — what he would have learned in his 9th grade biology class if this were happening now. He resists, like countless modernists and skeptics today, the holistic character of faith which holds everything together and refuses to separate them.
Jesus is born from above. And so is Nicodemus. That is dope. The best news we can hear today.
The Third Version of the Story
There’s a third version of the story. And it is one that doesn’t start in the encounter, but before it. About what compels Nicodemus. That doesn’t use the time and location to judge Nicodemus but to enlighten what it is that he is experiencing: a moment of revelation.
Imagine that he is in the Temple, the massive, echoing walls, the throng of people, and the whispers that reach him, about this man and what he is doing. And he sees things he can’t explain (outside of the obvious — but we all know to be skeptical) and he’s watching these events unfold and he’s not so much excited as compelled by them. They hold his attention. And he goes home at the end of the day. He makes dinner, sits down by candle light, perhaps at study because he can’t go to bed yet, or maybe he’s in bed tossing and turning and his mind won’t let him stop.
What is he thinking? But about the rabbi from the north. He doesn’t have a question for him exactly yet. Just a feeling. Like he needs to be close to him. He’ll come up with something when he gets there. He throws on his coat, slips his feet into his sandals and is out the door before he can even assess what it is he’s doing. And he searches and searches for where the rabbi is, where he and his people are staying, and somehow he tracks them down, it doesn’t really matter how, because at this moment he’d do anything to make this happen.
That’s what Nicodemus is doing there in the middle of the night. He’s the woman with the lost coin. He’s searching for the Kin-dom. And to the rational, it doesn’t make sense and to the faithful, this is normal platitude, but to the person who lives with it all together, it is a kind of madness that only makes sense when we see the whole picture.
God of Grace
This encounter with Nicodemus so often plays second fiddle to the ballyhooed verse about God’s love for the world. But it couldn’t be more instructive of it. Of God’s love and sacrifice — not for condemnation or for appeasement to human cruelty — but for redemption.
Redemption that comes at weird times, man. Like the middle of the night. Or when we’ve bottomed out. Or when we are chilling with the coolest person we’ve ever met who is so not like us.
It’s like acknowledging our whole selves. Including (especially!) the stuff that doesn’t make sense. Or we’re prone to ignore. The other stuff, rational or fluffy. Maybe it doesn’t make intuitive sense or we’re taught to not include in our precious evaluations. Stuff like a person’s humanness when they’ve done something wrong. The kind of thing that is key to mercy. Or the part of faith that requires us to question authority, even the authority of God! Or what it means to be a neighbor. What it means to love our neighbor.
The story isn’t punishment, it’s redemption. And that isn’t cheap grace, either — with a kind of proactive forgiveness of all things. We hold all of it knowing that God is a God of love and redemption and in the end, we will all be brought into his loving embrace.
This is generous, love, hope. That we are good enough. That nothing can get between us and God. All of us. Including the apostle, Nicodemus. So there’s hope yet for us, friends.
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.
Nicodemus is a religious leader. He has wisdom — historical, theological, biblical — and training. He is part of a network of spiritual gurus who help guide the faithful on their spiritual journeys. He is one of the most respected figures in Judea. But he is alone in coming to Jesus. Afraid to be seen. Why?
In one sense, it is quite obvious — it could be politically problematic for him. That we get this instinctively is quite revealing. Because we are almost too understanding of this. Which is also revealing about us. That we allow it to be so normal. To hide our questions, our curiosities, our relationships. Or that we expect our leaders to be duplicitous and dishonest, to hide negotiations and intentions. Or their real selves.
But people are beginning to flock to Jesus. It isn’t yet politically dangerous to be associated with him. Perhaps the more glaring thing to note is that this fear is self-imposed. That he fears the effect on his reputation. Like a therapist having a therapist. This, as any therapist will tell you, is the hubris of perceived perfection. That there is nothing more important for the healer than to receive healing, for the wise than to learn, for the life bringer than to be alive. Perhaps his fear is all on him.
On Ash Wednesday, we read a gospel about giving and praying in secret to a God who communicates in secret. At the same time, we have very public encounters in our Sunday gospel readings.
A few weeks ago, we read from the Sermon on the Mount that we are the light of the world. And therefore, we shouldn’t hide the light! This Sunday, we will read a story of a Pharisee named Nicodemus who visits Jesus in secret.
These stories complicate our sense of what Jesus is trying to say. And it complicates the common tendency many might have of creating rules for how one might always behave. How one might give and pray and communicate with other people.
This story complicates such rules we discern from scripture, which also includes the ones given by Paul to go to others in secret. To work in private to deal with things that we think shouldn’t be public.
These other readings we’re getting complicate things for us because they question the seeming ubiquitous sense of secrecy, of doing things behind closed doors. As if this is the best policy. They seem to argue the opposite and offer a compelling argument about public witness.
This is not to say we should make everything public but because we hide things in secret, in the darkness.
One of the most common ways we try to manipulate others is by telling someone in secret, “you know, people are saying _____” and usually it is just them. Or there is one person. In reality, “person is saying.”
When we do this, we’re trying to be helpful and instructive. We’re trying to alert someone else that there is something happening, a potential groundswell they may not know about. Sometimes. Often it is passive aggressive and manipulative because they know what they are doing. They want their way and want others to think they have numbers on their side.
Sometimes what we keep secret from others can include our true selves. Our struggles. Struggles that we may not know are common, or experienced by anyone else.
Much of what is kept secret distorts the truth, often to persuade others, or even ourselves. Hiding behind the veil of anonymity, we can be anything. Just not who we really are.
Jesus and the rejection of supremacy Lent 1A | Matthew 4:1-11
Jesus entered the public stage at his baptism. When John the Baptizer was proclaiming the Good News of repentance at the Jordan River and dunkinging people into the flowing water, proclaiming the transformative power of God to restore them, renew them, transform their lives. And Jesus joined the masses as the one who came to lead them. Among them at the grassroots, experiencing the same transformation. And as he came out of the water, the voice of God proclaimed him beloved.
From there, he was whisked into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to spend forty days in quarantine, separate from people, his home. It was common then, there, to take a retreat like this. Not a bougie retreat with spas and yoga, but time alone in the desert, watching bugs crawl out of the cracks in the earth at night, when the sun’s heat is gone, and life starts to return to the space humans declare is desolate and empty.
Jesus was driven there to observe and wait, to hunger and thirst for righteousness. The sermon that will come after this, beginning with the beatitudes of blessing no doubt grows from here. Like John’s ministry, in the wilderness, wild and dangerous. Here, too, the danger is not so much overblown as misunderstood. And the perceived safety of the cities is, too.
After his quarantine,
As Jesus is preparing to return to his place, from wilderness, the river, to begin everything, to follow the crazy commands of God, of the one he dared call Father, the one who made Joseph his Dad by a miraculous bloodline, by love and devotion, the Adversary appears to block his path. He is an obstruction. A stumbling block. Better to hang a millstone around his neck and throw him into the sea than do what he does to Jesus. Not only tempt, but to attempt to destroy.
Jesus, for his part, is incredulous. He takes the appearance for what it is. Not from God. Not of God. Against. Obstruction. A giant rock in the way.
The narrative, I think, would depend on a certain base level of temptation to enhance the tension. The reader needs to think this is a life or death situation. That Jesus is really struggling. Stories rely on tension and people need to believe that the stakes are high here.
Theologically, though, we need a perfect Jesus who isn’t tempted at all. Who is super smart and outwits the wiles of the devil. We need smart and faithful and Godly Jesus here. So, for theological reasons, we want there to be no tension here at all. Just inevitable Jesusy victory.
What if both of these are a miscalculation? In part because we assume the tension comes from the tempting itself and not the substance of the story — what the devil assumes a fully human Jesus could not resist. And, if we also believe Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, there would have to be some tension in his spirit here? That Jesus would need to work at least a little to resist. And that we, as readers, need to wrestle with our own version of this specific temptation?
Three things, the adversary offers Jesus.
Three specific things that he promises Jesus would exercise power over. Power over existence (sate his hunger); God (force God to save him); and humanity (control the world). Temptation to exercise power over others, to control for oneself. Supremacy.
The Adversary tries to tempt Jesus to use power he is confident Jesus already possesses. Power to transform the world and do what he wants. Not that the devil could give it to him in exchange for his soul, like Faust. But we all know that is the bargain. That, to take supreme control is to surrender our soul to evil. There are no benevolent emperors flowing the streets with freedom and justice by disempowering the people and marching armies in those very streets.
He invites Jesus to exercise this power to control the world by quoting scripture, by putting a religious gloss on it, telling him God must want him to do this. Here’s a verse in the Bible to defend my argument!
We can recognize these moves, can’t we? Because we see the very same ones in our world. Promises of safety through domination, protecting our power and wealth by force, declaring God is on our side in all of it. These aren’t the signs of evil, but the means of justifying it. Bad intentions filtered through good desires. Safety is good, but tyranny is evil. And this is always the exchange. The promise. They mess up the railroads and promise to make them run on time. Then the people don’t even get that. And the point is not the trains, but the believing. To make us think that this is the trade: authoritarianism for effectiveness. But Benito Mussolini didn’t make it happen. It was always the worst of both worlds.
The Easier Way
The temptation that power offers is control. Domination. Supremacy. But really, it is about making things easier. An easier way to consensus, to opportunity, to peace. And meanwhile we always think we can use it for good. We can so easily convince ourselves that we are the exception!
Yet what we see Jesus do is reject the premise by rejecting the offer. The offer to exercise the power itself. In Tolkien terms, to use the ring, even to save himself. Something Frodo couldn’t resist. To reject the power of God and to end the evil of the world by dominating it, controlling it, declaring peace has just come to the world because I’ve made the fighting stop. But there is no peace when there is no wholeness, restoration, health, freedom, and justice in the world.
Jesus sees through the Adversary’s attempts because none of this is consistent with the Dream of God. None of this reflects the love and generosity of God. It is, in short, the wrong way.
What we will see in Jesus’s journey, which began at the river and was forged in the wilderness, goes from here to the north, to collect some students, some disciples. Jesus will offer them, not the world, security, safety, or an easy path to wealth and righteousness, but the way. A way of moving, of being, that has to be experienced for itself, that they have to experience first and then share with others. A way that they could only describe using that very word: The Way. That’s what they called it. The Way.
And every failure and moment of stumbling would teach them that The Way is a journey. One that is so rarely easy, but is quite easy to experience when you’re on it. That it is both challenging and easy. Obvious and opaque. But when you are doing it right, you just know it. You can see it. In the fruits. What grows.
The Way
This is The Way that we are following, Friends. A way of being that is experienced by living it. By loving and sharing and giving. We find it by facing our challenges alongside others and when we witness the incredible Spirit of God in the lives of those around us. It is a joyous and worthy way to be in the world.
The question I ought to ask each of us consider then is this: what tempts you? I don’t mean chocolate or coffee or whatever you might choose to give up for Lent. I mean deeply. Look for it. Dig within, interrogating your past choices, when you are sensitive to criticism or reacted harshly. What gets to you? Dig for and think about what is behind it. It is often the same things: control, safety, security, power. And under that it is about being loved and respected and wanting to be treated like we matter. And these insecurities (hear that word in-secure, it is always about power), these insecurities drive us toward safety and security, toward embrace and adoration. To even be worshipped like a god.
Find what tempts you and know that this doesn’t lead us along The Way, God does. And this season of Lent is designed for self-discovery. To examine these parts of us that the Adversary uses to tempt us, to trick us to abandon The Way, to trip each other up, to masquerade, even with scripture. But when we see the trick and know what it’s about, we don’t have to fall for it. We can let it go.
We can be free. Free of those expectations and temptations. Free to be of service to one another, to love one another. Fiercely and with the love of God. For this is our calling and command, our way and our light, our work and our devotion. That God’s Kin-dom, the blessed community is joyous, present, open to all of us.
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Jesus leaves his baptism for a forty-day quarantine in the desert. This is the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, before the disciples and the crowds, before the healings and the miracles. All he has is what he entered the time away with: his life, faith, and the promise. Words of God’s faithfulness, of love and hope.
And here, at the end, when he can almost taste the food and the feel the blankets of his bed, the voices of loved ones calling to him, the adversary appears, to tempt him. To tempt him to stray. From his path. From belief. Tempt him with power. Security. Certainty. That he could be the master of his own fate. That he doesn’t need God to protect him. He could have it all. Everything. Just take it.
This is the devil’s bargain. It isn’t satanic worship or doubt and disbelief. It is the self unmoored from dependent and reciprocal relationship. The exercise of power to dominate and oppress. To control the world around you. The things we call human greatness. Claiming them for ourselves. These are the things the devil tempts Jesus with because they are precisely not the things of Christ, of God. They aren’t Christian.
Today is different. The beginning of a new season. In the church and, hopefully, if we embrace its character, a new season in our lives.
Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. And in a few minutes, we will be invited to participate in the rhythms of the season. Rhythms that are intentionally different from the rhythms of the rest of the year. We give about six weeks out of 52 in the year as different. We offer them like a sacrifice, a gift, which are, in fact synonyms in a life of faith. Of giving away, of generosity, of self. Small offerings for the sake of others.
The most common way we think of this sacrifice is in the practice of abstinence. Christians all over the world will take as a discipline the refusal to consume red meat or sugary sweets or caffeine or some other indulgence that has become for us too common, too easy, perhaps even too necessary for making it through the day. It is a ritualistic sacrifice, a gift. To God and self. To make ourselves a shade healthier, no doubt. But also to free us. From obligation. For communication — to commune with God. Without obstruction. With intention.
Some History
Historically, Ash Wednesday was also the start of the catechumenate season, when newcomers would give their time to learn, opening themselves to become members of The Way. And notorious sinners, people whose sin was public and had hurt the community, would repent, opening themselves to become members of The Way again. And the community, witnessing these two groups, would reflect, opening themselves to welcome both into The Way.
Ash Wednesday reminds us that our normal isn’t good enough. Our culture, our impulses, what we’ve been taught . . . we need to keep learning. Keep studying.
Ash Wednesday is also a vibe. We pray these downer prayers and these psalms and some of us really like it. The rest of the year with all the people wanting happy stuff — ugh. It gets so old. How refreshing it is to contemplate our wretchedness! Did you know that 70% of the psalms are laments? But only 25% of the ones we use on Sundays are? The church knows which way our bread is buttered! But on this day, people come to church looking for this. Because we need the reminder, don’t we? To be different. That we can do this life differently from now on.
In Secret
This gospel passage invites us into thinking about our world differently, doesn’t it? It is a radical idea, in a culture of networking, of naming things, of being publicly known, seeking popularity, to give in secret, to be known by God for our goodness, not the world. Not our neighbors.
And it offers a radical departure, too for those who seek to connect the notion of blessing to morality to evidence of goodness. To make God’s connection to us secret, not the visible fruits of abundance, of wealth and power as public proof.
It makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? Personal, internal. A contrast to the perpetually public. It is a call, then, to do the work. Do the work within. Strive. And through God, become. Become generous, compassionate, loving. Give to others because it is good, not so that you look good.
The same, too, can be said for God. That God needs to give in secret because the goodness of God needs to be held to the same standard for it to work, doesn’t it? For God’s goodness to be good, it needs to be good for the sake of the good. Not for the fame. So that the world can see the good, but, instead, to experience the good.
Ashes
A recent piece in The Living Church explores some of the history of the practice of Ash Wednesday and how it has evolved. How we read this gospel about secret prayer and come forward to receive ashes on our foreheads, have someone, usually a priest, smearing the ashes there in the sign of the cross, connecting it to baptism and confirmation, to chrism, to blessing. Bringing death and life into their proper tension.
And I note that baptism, too, is a sign of death as much as it is a sign of life. It is about our dustiness and our new becoming from the dust again. Life and death are always present with us, Friends!
The article reminds us that the Prayer Book doesn’t prescribe how we receive the ashes. It simply says that they are “imposed”. In ancient liturgies, the ashes were sprinkled. Like we do with the cremated remains of loved ones. They would sprinkle on the tonsured heads of the devoted, skin bared, prepared to receive, to fall off in time, in the movement in the world, the standing and sitting and kneeling of worship, the walking out of doors, the shaking of hands, the singing in the car, the greeting of neighbors at Kroger, and all of the blessed things we are prone to do. Ashes fall off and we are left with the memory, the command, internalized and present.
To Wipe or Not To Wipe
While I agree completely with this article from The Living Church, I also completely disagree with it! What? Well, it is because the tradition reveals that it isn’t about the secret prayer or the public witness, as if it must be one or the other, but that these two live in constant tension. We are in public and so we find a way to give in private. Because that is good. But we are also called to be witnesses to the love of God. We are called to communicate in private and public: both.
I often invite us into this conundrum because this day is the best example of how we are called to both and we can’t always do both at the same time. So we have to choose. Choose to do our best with humility.
So I say: To wipe or not to wipe. That is the question. Do we receive the ashes, imposed on us, perhaps cruciform, perhaps an ambiguous smudge, and let them fall away? Do we wipe them away on the way out? Do we make sure to have them in public, to be seen? Or remove them? Are we like politicians with flag pins, where it becomes a required part of the wardrobe, chastising one another for not having dirt on our faces? Or do we chastise each other for not wiping? Or for the crosses rather than the sprinkles on the bald heads? What is right?
The real question, the better question: is there a right? No. There is no “right way” with a paradox.
Shalom
This gospel passage is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, just a few verses after Jesus said that we are the light of the world and that our light should not be hidden. That the sun rises on the good and bad alike. That we are to not resist the evildoer. And in the space between, in the middle of this gospel reading, Jesus teaches them to pray. What they are to pray when they are praying in secret. To pray the words and familiar phrases we know as the Lord’s Prayer. A prayer that isn’t personal and selfish. Calling for personal blessing, power, or wealth. But public reconciliation. Justice. Health. Equity. Peace. Shalom.
The paradox of Ash Wednesday is that the personal and public are inseparable. That we are what we pray for. We are light and hope in Jesus. But it can’t be about ourselves, only. And it can’t be for ourselves, only. It is about us and each other. Our common lives and common life.
We’re called to remember all of this today. So that we take this season with intention and devotion. That we look at ourselves and our world. That we study and make new habits that help us remember to listen for Jesus this whole season. So that we remember what we’ve learned during this season, to practice sacrifice and giving and welcoming and becoming so that when we do get to the feast of the resurrection, we can be reborn. We can be forever new. Alive. True.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
