Lent Leads to Life

 

For six weeks, we pray our longings and losses until we reach the Holiest Week of the Christian year.  From Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday (Maundy means commandment and honors Christ’s call to love; you can remember that because the word looks like mandate), to Good or God’s Friday, to Silent Saturday, to Easter Sunday.  In many ways, this culmination of Lent is a model/message for every week of faith.  We start with the joy of Palm Sunday, waving palm branches high and shouting, “Hosanna!”  But this isn’t a pep rally for Jesus during the parade or some kind of victory march.  Hosanna means help us.  Help me, God, because I cannot help or save myself.  Lent brings me close to my own vulnerability, woundedness, and boneheadedness or stubbornness (I am an Iowan after all!).  Lent lays bare that I am part of systems that benefit me and that I can’t seem to untangle/untwist myself from these systems.  So, shouting and singing, “Hosanna” is a cathartic release.  Hosanna is confessional to say, “Thank God, I am not the savior of this world,” even though many humans and pastors can forget this.  As the “hosannas” hush, we move to the Passover/Communion table.  In an ordinary loaf of bread and cup of wine, we encounter God’s grace.  Grace, Dallas Willard said, is opposed to earning, not effort.  That is, I don’t deserve grace.  Grace is fully, freely given.  And when God’s unconditional grace gets into my life, my life changes.  Because we are what we eat, we need to feast on God’s grace and love.  Bread and cup symbolize this.  Jesus says every time you eat bread and drink from a cup ~ in other words ~ every meal is communion.  Sit with this beautiful truth today.  Jesus embodied God’s presence in ways that captivated hearts in real ways, each day, then and now.  This threatened both the political and religious hierarchy.  Jesus was killed not because God couldn’t balance the Divine Excel spreadsheet.  God has been against sacrificial killings since Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac.  But still, we believe in quid pro quo faith.  We still believe that we need to be “good” and earn badges for our heavenly sash to impress St. Peter at the gate.  We still believe that it is our beliefs that save us, rather than God’s love.  Caught up in a consumeristic culture that clings to the cliché, “There are no free lunches,” we have never really accepted a table open to all and a cross of God’s love poured out to show us the hurt and harm humans do.  Good or God’s Friday says that if we do not practice love, we will just keep on killing each other.  That is as true as the news you read today.  Jesus, God’s love incarnate, didn’t have to die, but rather, holy love knows that grief will always be part of the recipe with humans.  This brings us to Saturday, where we sit silently in the mystery of all that we’ve encountered from Ash Wednesday, Lent, Maundy Thursday, and God’s Friday.  It is too much.  Perhaps this is why we keep telling the story again and again each year, because this week is like a mirror reflecting our lives.  When we stare in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13), we start to see how God’s grace will never be contained and can’t be killed.  So, we come on Easter to shout and sing, “Alleluia,” to the One who was, is, and will be forever our strength and source of life.  Easter re-orients the stories we tell.  Hold the promises and possibility of Holy Week today, letting it sink in and sing ~ meeting you in your life.  Which day described above feels like a fit for what you are carrying to this Morning Meditation?  Or how does each day meet a particular part of your life?  May our meditations lean in and listen for God, who is with us every week and day.  Amen.