A Daily Lent

The Stillpoint Within Tuesday after the Resurrection – April 14, 2020 We are challenged, currently, to be creative, to find different ways to love people. Often, since we have been distanced from one another by the coronavirus threat, we have been told that for right now, we best love people by staying away from them. (And all the introverts say, “I’ve been telling you this for years!”) We make phone calls . . . we use FaceTime . . . try to serve, while maintaining proper distancing. And we pray. We pray for people, if only by whispering the names of those we know who are in need . . . speaking aloud the names of hospitals . . . saying the names of cities and towns that are overwhelmed . . . We meditate . . . we find some contemplative practice to keep us centered and anchored . . . we quietly write poetry . . . we take out a sketchpad and draw or use pastels to doodle or splash some watercolors on a page . . . we regularly drop anchor through a meditative prayer practice (...

The Really Real Is Deeper Than Your Thoughts Wednesday of Holy Week -- April 8, 2020 In 1637, French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote, “ je pense, donc je suis ,” which has been translated, “I think, therefore I am.” Later, in another philosophical work, he translated the phrase into Latin: cogito, ergo sum . In my limited studies through the years, I’ve learned that the phrase provided guidance for the Enlightenment. The phrase not only elevated the human capacity to think and formulate ideas, it advocated that thinking is the core aspect of our humanity. This is our essence, so to speak, the core of what it means to be human. Our being is determined by our capacity to think. So in the centuries since Descartes, we have been enamored with our thoughts, with our capacity to think and reason. These are not unimportant realities, by the way, but are crucial to our progress as humans, crucial to our ongoing becoming. Ideas and thoughts lead us to understand better how to respond t...

Tuesday of the First Week of Lent Daily Reading: Matthew 6:7 – 15 Focus Passage: And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matt. 6:7 – 8) How have we turned prayer sideways? Depending on the translation you read, Jesus says do not babble, don’t use vain repetition, or don’t heap up empty phrases when you pray. The picture is almost comical, as if someone learning to pray observed someone else praying, then merely repeated that person’s language, rhythm, posture, and voice inflection. As a pastor, I learned years ago how to use vocabulary, tone, and volume to make my public prayers sound like they were connecting with God. That they were generally hollow mattered less to me than that people thought I was offering a meaningful prayer. I hope God laughs about those days more than weeps. While prayer is more caught than ...

Saturday after Ash Wednesday Luke 5:27 – 32 After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” I’m struck today by the sight of this table at which Jesus reclined. Around the table were persons of disrepute, those who were considered crooks and traitors, and some who were known “sinners.” Yet, there was a place for all of them at the table of Jesus. I am dismayed by the lines drawn in contemporary life that polarize and cre...

Matthew 22:33 - 41 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who ...

Luke 6:36 "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." The modern translations find "mercy" to be too difficult for contemporary ears. Some of the recent translations use "pity" or "compassion" for mercy. They are fine words, but none communicates quite like "mercy" does. [Could it be that "mercy" is so difficult to translate because it is so foreign to our day-to-day experience? . . . Just thinking out loud here . . .] Mercy is a state of being. One does not become a person of mercy by aiming at it head-on. It is elusive that way. I don't know of 4 easy steps to mercy. With mercy, I believe, you begin by softening the soil of your being, by plowing up some ground in your heart so that the seed of God can find fertile loam. This God-seed is scattered into the world all the time, but too often it finds in us so much hardpan, weed, and rocky soil that it cannot adequately come to fruit. When we begin to recei...