It is when the path is darkest that I’m sure the light is there.

 Jesus invites us to take up the cross  

It is when I am not sure that I feel God the most, said my friend.

It is when the path is darkest that I’m sure the light is there.

It is when I let go that I receive.

It is when I stop guarding myself from God, when I start trusting God, when I step out in faith, into the night, that I find my way.

That I find – his way.

It is not really my way at all; it is his.

If you would follow me, you must deny your self – you must take up your cross and prepare to die with me; you must follow me beyond the grave to the resurrection.

But! You are the Messiah, the expected King. What is going on here? 

It is necessary…

Is it? 

Get behind me, Tempter! For your thoughts are not God’s thoughts nor your ways God’s way: if you try to preserve your self you will lose your self, if you lose your self, you will gain life.

It is when I am not sure that I feel God the most. 

It is when I let go and trust, 

when there is nothing to turn to, 

and no light on the way, 

that I know I am homeward bound.

There is a breath in the midst of the darkness, 

in the absence a pregnant pause:  he is listening; 

the world is listening, he is present.

It is when I find no purpose inside myself, 

and no hidden inner resource, 

that I am most thrown back upon God, who is faithful. 

When the promise is impossible, then it is kept.

When I no longer try to keep it to myself, I fully receive it.

I am most receptive to God’s leading, when I am least sure of my own.

When I am not sure where to go, what to do, where he wants me to go, what he wants me to do, 

it is then that I feel God the most.

It is when he is absent that I know he is here. 

It is when I give up my self, preserving my own life, my way, 

that I find my way, gain my life, and receive my self.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (1956)

Jesus invites us to take up the cross.

Second Sunday in Lent * Year B

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 

Psalm 22:22-30

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

Jesus invites us to become his true disciples: to take up the cross and follow him

JRL+

"Feeling God's presence in times of uncertainty", Keeping the Faith, Arizona Daily Star, Sunday March 28th 2021, E3.

https://tucson.com/feeling-gods-presence-in-times-of-uncertainty/article_4f02e95e-6089-5ca7-bdfa-05bb4eb3b4ce.html

Father of a Multitude

I will make you father of a multitude. Well might Sarah laugh - as she does in the next chapter of the book of Genesis - when she hears God make this promise to her ninety-nine year old husband. She is old too. And yet shall she have pleasure? She asks you. And yet - the day comes when God's improbably promise is fulfilled. Not by the means they concoct - here is Hagar, take her - but by God's own improbable scheme. For he has more in mind than these two's progeny - or Abraham's "seed" (biological offspring). 

    God through these human mean will bring a new joy into the world, a new closeness between humanity and Creator. And not before time. It has taken three thousand years - so far - for us human beings to live into the implications of that promise. To live into that promise and the call in earlier chapters of the same book to both care for and commune with the creation of which we are a part. 

    Over and over God calls on the people to come into relationship, and offers a few ... guidelines. As my friend Lois used to put on the butcher-paper cover over her Bible: "If all else fails, follow the directions." 

    How are we to live? Here is a way: to become the parents of a multitude, the progenitors of faithful offspring beyond count. Beyond count and beyond the charts of genealogists and family therapists. (Tho hoo boy Abraham's children could use some of those as well... ) But the emphasis here is on the gift: the free gift of God to all humankind, through the faithfulness of Abraham and Sarah. And what is that gift?

    No less than life itself, life in communion with God, each other, our own true selves, and all creation.

    So easily broken is the covenant, so faithful is the promise, that we continually are called back into it.

    "If God is speaking, God speaks more often than people hear."--Tanya Luhrmann.

    God is speaking and offering life. A few people fishing, straggled along the shore of a small Mideastern lake, get the message - a bit directly. A man comes toward them along the shore, past the small mammals and large birds and shoreline plants and rocks, a man they may know - from a hill town some nine hours' walk away - or may not have met before: and he inhabits and manifests and makes known clear and loud the Word that is God come to humanity - and this time, to 'simple fisher folk', in the form of a man who works with his hands, and calls them.

    The man along the shore has something to say to the workers mending their nets - the two brothers, the other two brothers, perhaps an independent woman working her own boat - and offers them a wider world.

    Come with me and I will make you fishers of people.

    This calls them away from their everyday occupations. It requires another level of concern, of care, of commitment. 

    Who do you really serve? Ultimately who is your family? Where is your allegiance? Who is your god?

    “To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?”--Toni Morrison, 2002 lecture.

• Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
• Romans 4:13-25
• Mark 8:31-38
• Psalm 22:22-30

http://edgeofenclosure.org/lent2b.html

Tanya Luhrmann, Noel Q King Memorial Lecture, "Voices of Madness, Voices of Spirit" - (https://youtu.be/MTyxhro_Apw).

Toni Morrison, 2002 lecture, quoted in The New York Times: The Essential Toni Morrison by Veronica Chambers, Feb. 18, 2021(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/books/best-toni-morrison-books.html).

The Rev. Dr. John Leech is an Episcopal priest, a Benedictine oblate, and a friend of the Iona Community. He has served congregations in northern California, western Washington, and southern Arizona.

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. Amen.

legacy

Yesterday my wife and I drove to Cochise County to see the Sandhill Cranes. We drove south from Benson through Tombstone and then east into the Sulfur Springs Valley to Whitewater Draw. 

"I see a large bird."

"I see lots of large birds!"

"Wow!" 

We laughed in delight as we walked over to a shallow marsh where the birds were congregating like a crowd of cabbages, or lifting off and flying, circling or moving away high into the sky, always calling to each other. 

When we got back there was a message from a friend. He had looked up "sandhill cranes" and sent me a picture of two. I called them Abram and Sarai.

Then I sent him my own picture, of a multitude of cranes, with the caption, take two, multiply by ten thousand, then set them all a-flight.

In the evening Miles Green sent me a picture he'd just taken of the cranes resting again at sunset.

See for yourself at "cranes com" - https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/viewing/webcamlist/sandhillcrane/cranecam/)

Or go!

So the story of a man and a woman, of Abram and Sarai, now to be called Abraham and Sarah, becoming the blessed forebears of a multitude, and a source of blessing to all people, is not so alien to Arizonans. 

It can happen. 

We have seen it.

A season of promise becomes a heritage of blessing.

So the promise, Paul says, comes to the children of faith, and it is through faith that we inherit the blessing, that we become the children of the promise.

I'd been thinking of Lent as a season of preparation for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter.

But here it is founded in hope. Lent is a season of promise, fulfilled in Good Friday and Easter.

For Jesus' whole life was a testament to faithfulness. Even unto Death he did not fail.

And we share in his rectification, his glorification, his resurrection, as he is raised from the dead in triumph over Death, and his faith communicated through his first witnesses, and comes to us.

Witnesses - for witness is the basis of discipleship, of following Jesus - from Mary at the Tomb to his astonished Apostles, to -- us. We did not see but yet may Believe. 

It is said that one sign of his truth is the crowd of witnesses we have Become.

We have seen life transformed, we have seen hope in the midst of Despair, Joy in the middle of sorrow.

We have seen small become great, and we have seen the mighty overcome by the true.

Faithful adherents, to the promise, joining in the heritage that two small creatures began, that grew into a multitude, a crowd of witnesses like a cloud above us and circling around us, in which we delight, and at last share in peace.

witness

"Unique in the Church, the Camaldolese life is ordered to a three-fold good: solitude, community, and witness." 

-- The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality, Peter-Damian Belisle, O.S.B. Cam., Editor (Liturgical Press, 2002), publisher's description.

As I've been connected to a Camaldolese hermitage since college, I've been thinking about this - especially the third of the three goods. Witness.

In Latin, martyrium. 

It is also, in another guise, the third rail of liberal Protestantism: evangelism. 

And, in that guise - evangelism - that word is a challenge. 

It is the third of three themes of this triennium, the three-year period between General Conventions of the Episcopal Church. Not something I normally pay much heed to -- or even know about. But these three themes are also those chosen by the Episcopal diocese of Arizona as themes for three consecutive diocesan conventions. Those themes are: creation care, evangelism, and racial reconciliation. 

In some ways, ways we cannot expect, evangelism is likely to be the most challenging.

Especially when we recall that evangelism, proclaiming and spreading the good news, involves witness - martyrium - martyrdom.

This has been all too real throughout the history of the church throughout the world. Think of the twentieth-century martyrs, from Kaj Munk who stood up to Hitler to Janani Luwum who stood up to Idi Amin. Janani Luwum, a bishop of the church, which turned out to mean head martyr.  

The point is to proclaim the gospel - but sometimes that means following Jesus to the cross. That is what happened to those men and women, those martyrs, whose witness was relentless in the face of cruelty, ignorance, despair, violence, death - and who live in the resurrection.

We have (I hope) a simpler task: to face ridicule, belittling, silent opposition, resistance, anger, rush to judgment, when we say what we believe, or worse yet, act it out in the public arena.

What have we to gain but our souls?

And so as the institutional church, or churches, face the simple-seeming, happy-appearing, theme of evangelism - hoping perhaps for those young energetic generous families we all want to fill our pews, our collection plates, and our rosters for volunteer tasks - we might want to consider the cost. Not to them, the sad targets of our feeble desires, but them, the children Christ crucified has called to join us in the true church, the church of martyr as well as saint.

What have we to gain but our souls?

https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2016/03/11/making-reconciliation-and-evangelism-the-churchs-new-normal/

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/ministries/evangelism/

Lent List

Stuff I would like to give up for Lent? Oh yes, I made a list. Space does not permit its inclusion here. Nor does tact. Some of it is pretty common. We have lost so much, some of us, people whom we do not see right now, people we will never see gain. Loss and gain. Anticipation and regret. Possibilities, memories. Waiting. Our current situation is unique. And we are not the first.  

A traveler waiting for a visa. A convalescent waiting for release. Parents hoping for a child, workers looking for a job, people on the move seeking a home. 

Situations that are common and simply our own. 

When I was young I saw a children’s book about Robert the Bruce, waiting in his stone room and watching a spider weave its web. It was slow work, but he had the time. Eventually as an adult I learned more about what he was waiting for as well as what he was going to do. He led a country to unity. And yet that was not the end of the story as he yearned for the Holy Land. As it was, he made it about halfway - to Spain. His heart sought Jerusalem but found its final rest at home. (His heart is buried at Melrose Abbey.)

We hear the Bible stories. A would-be mother waiting with her husband for a place to live, a child to love. A widow with no home to go to but one far away, and no family but one unknown. And a people that wants, that longs, to be free. As we do.

Lent is a season of anticipation. Of preparation. Again, so soon after the Christmas cycle has ended. Advent, Nativity, Epiphany, Presentation. Just weeks ago. And now another cycle, the Easter cycle, begins. But it begins in Ashes. 

Wouldn’t you think ashes are the end of a story, not the beginning? But so it is: forty days from Ash Wednesday, not counting Sundays, Christians arrive where other traditions already are: at Easter Sunday, another feast day of celebration, but not before plumbing the depths of Good Friday. A dreadful anticipation. So we remember our mortality - as if we could forget it! This year of all years. 

Remember that you are made of dust taken from the earth, and to the earth you shall return. And yet all along you are in the hands of God.

Always.

The Rev. Dr. John Leech is an Episcopal priest, a Benedictine oblate, and a friend of the Iona Community. He has served congregations in northern California and western Washington, and now in southern Arizona. 

https://tucson.com/you-are-safe-in-the-hands-of-god/article_2f8cbbff-973c-5bfb-aec7-a1c294536efa.html (Arizona Daily Star, February 21, 2021).

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

or Isaiah 58:1-12

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Psalm 103 or 103:8-14

virtual imposition

As we gather for the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday we seek some sign of mortality and penitence, some sign of preparation, for the culmination of the forty days and forty nights of the season is not sorrow but joy, not death but rising again.

And so today we turn our hearts anew to God.

Receive, then, the gift of mortality, and the hope of resurrection, that is built into us from the beginning by our Maker.

Make the sign of the Cross. Do it slowly and mindfully as we pray together.  And remember - it is not about the ashes. Not even today. It is about the Cross and Resurrection. It is about Jesus, and the work he is doing in us, through the Spirit.

Have a blessed Lent. Give something up, take something on - and remember that you are loved in the mercy of God.

For Ash Wednesday.

Clock

 

Chronos, clock time: punch it! punch in, punch out.

At the car wash before the next tick punch in 

at the car wash the time clock waits 

Wait a tick, don’t wait a tick: punch in

At the car wash after the next tick punch out 

at the car wash the time clock waits 

don’t wait, wait — punch it, punch out 

in between wipe off the cars as the track nudges them into freedom or you stand back as some fool drives clear 

Kairos: in the fullness of time the world is born 

in the fullness of time the child is born 

in the fullness of time a man waits at the altar 

At last his bride appears 

where have you been you are right on time

 

Dust

We bless you, O Lord our God, creator of the Universe, for the gift of earth, from whence we come and to which we shall return. We ask your blessing on the ancient peoples who first enjoyed this land and ask your blessing upon us as we join the traditional stewards of this land in its ongoing care. And care for us, Lord, as we contemplate our mortality, our absolute dependence upon you, and as we prepare ourselves for life beyond death in the hope of the resurrection.

Remember that you are dust of the earth and to that earth you shall return.  

We know who we are by the stories we tell

 actionable self-knowledge

We know who we are by the stories we tell. In the economic realm, Robert J. Shiller says that there are ‘perennial narratives’ which ‘affect economic behavior by changing the popular understanding of the economy, by altering public perceptions of economic reality, by creating new ideas about what is meaningful and important and moral, or by suggesting new scripts for individual behavior.’ 

Change “economic’ to ‘political’ and you have a whole new set of experiences to distill.

To theologians we define what we believe by the stories we tell about experiencing God. 

To combine the insights of two of my teachers, narratives teach us what we believe, and our stories of experiencing God tell us what we believe about God - and what to do about it.

Indeed, the story telling itself may become an experience of God. To read or hear a narrative of a conversion experience may itself become a conversion experience. And of course the primary stories we tell, the references for our being, come from the common shared stories of Scripture. 

(To readers of the Hebrew Scripture this is basic and the insights are of long-ago date.)

But what stories do we tell each other as a community and as encountering strangers? Who are we? We tell you by what we do and by how we tell the stories - the ones that really matter to us most of all may be the last we tell...

(Robert J. Shiller, “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events”. Princeton UPr. Quoted by Cass R. Sunstein in the New York Review of Books.January 14, 2021. 32.)

got ashes?

Stuff I want to give up for Lent:

Excess zoom participation (who are we where are we going what are we doing here in this meeting yet another on zoom). Use the telephone, write a letter, or meet up outdoors.

Excess indoors time: get outside! Look up! Even if you are at your desk or on facebook or both ... the mountains surround us.

The same old clothes. Some people - even under your own roof - may be changing the scenery...

Excess following the news. Should have thought of this four years ago.

Watching British people on TV - nope. Not giving that up. Imported vintage drama/comedy relief.

Daily meditation and prayer practices, putting off thereof.

Same old takeout.

Ernest but bad restaurant takeout attempts.

Inattentive cooking. Ooh, busted!

Ashes.

Ashes?

It's not about the ashes. Not even on Ash Wednesday. It is about mortality and resurrection. It is about getting ready for the Great Vigil and Easter Day. 

So we are about preparation for Baptism or the Renewal of Baptismal Vows, as we begin to claim the Christian hope of Paradise, at the end of this trial - trial of mortality, including joys as well as sorrow.

And most of all, surrounding all, love.

***

As we gather for the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday we seek some sign of mortality and penitence, some sign of preparation, for the culmination of all this forty days and forty nights is not sorrow but joy, not death but rising again.

And so today whether you receive ashes on your forehead or only wear them inside, your heart turns anew to God.

Receive, then, the gift of mortality, and the hope of resurrection, that is built into it from the beginning by our Maker.

If you self-administer ashes, please do so during the prayer following the invitation to the observance of a holy Lent. Do it slowly and respectfully - of the sacrament and the others who join you in this solemn moment - as we pray together. 

Make the sign of the Cross, or pinch some dry ashes out of a bowl. And remember - it is not about the ashes. Not even today. It is about the Cross and Resurrection. It is about Jesus, and the work he is doing in you, through the Spirit.

Have a blessed Lent. Give something up, take something on - and remember that you are loved in the mercy of God.

_____________

Dennis Michno writes: The act of receiving ashes must not become the focal point of this day but rather a sign of the day, a sign that is part of the penitential beginning of the season of Lent.

Dennis G. Michno, A Priest's Handbook: The Ceremonies of the Church, ed. 3, 1998. 154.

Howard Galley writes: Lent, the season of preparation for Easter, is a time of penitence, fasting, almsgiving, prayer, and study, which finds its proper climax in the celebration of Holy Baptism and the renewal of Baptismal Vows at Easter.

Howard E. Galley, Ceremonies of the Eucharist: A guide to Celebration. 1989. 42.

* * *

Ash Wednesday: an invitation.

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have

made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and

make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily

lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness,

may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission

and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives

and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever

and ever. Amen.

Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with great

devotion the days of our Lord's passion and resurrection, and

it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a

season of penitence and fasting. This season of Lent provided

a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy

Baptism. It was also a time when those who, because of

notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful

were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to

the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation

was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set

forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all

Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the

observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance;

by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and

meditating on God's holy Word. And, to make a right beginning

of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now

kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.

The Book of Common Prayer, 1979. 264-265.