In my “Gathered + Scattered” posts I’ve included “Traces from the Lectionary” for the last few posts, but I think I’ll pull them out for a separate post periodically, aiming for Mondays, as a way to also help me start thinking about the sermon especially if I’m preaching the upcoming week.
Trace, as Derrida gives us (as far as I’m able to make out) in his work on language, although there are others that use it: language as something relational, meaning comes from how it differs and defers, it’s a glimpse or glimmering, a kind of haunting, a present absence (or is it absent presence?), a kind of contingency, with effects of qualifying, critiquing, and resonating. An echo, maybe, or something that catches your eye just out of your line of sight, and for me, these days, it’s a way to get at the texts (lectionary, biblical, and beyond), to listen, to engage, to glean, to share.
Well, I really lost steam there. 😅
Somehow the rest of January disappeared, and the only reason I know that we made it through February—all 3 kids are a year older (allegedly, I’m also still in denial): the twins are 13 (!!!) and youngest is now 11.
Here we are approaching the 5th Sunday of Lent. HOW.
I (have preached and) am preaching 4 weeks in a row this season, the 2nd Sunday through the 5th Sunday, and grateful for the chance to spend this extra time more intentionally in the scriptures for Lent. When Andy and I arrived to serve at FPCA in 2020 we were here, in year B, and I’m again at a loss for words…how are we in the second cycle of the 3 year lectionary? In many ways not much has changed, and yet, it feels like everything has around me and within me, too. I wonder if you feel the same strange clash of sensations…?
I’m offering here something perhaps a bit more retrospective—the resources below are from what I found in my archives, and in general, some thoughts around Lent this season, and what’s emerging the most for me this year. After this Sunday I preach Maundy Thursday/Good Friday until April!
On the theme of wilderness:
We’re reading as a church Rachel Held Evans’ Wholehearted Faith, and in one of the circles there was a bit more wondering about wilderness. As someone who loves the image of the wilderness as a way of thinking about faith, and for as long as I can remember (I think college) having been around so many people who think/engage wilderness in this way, too, it was interesting to talk through it.
A while back my Andy’s father, Tom, introduced me to the work of Rev. Dr. Belden C. Lane, professor emeritus of Theological Studies, American Religion and History of Spirituality at St. Louis University. He also happened to be a friend from Tom’s seminary days when he was studying to become a minister and Lane was in the doctoral program at Princeton Seminary. In 2021 I read for Lent one of his latest, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality.
Lane tells a story about a man, a pilot, who in 1935 was on a mail flight between Paris and Saigon that crashed in the Libyan Desert west of the Nile. It was in the same place the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century had withdrawn to seek the face of God in a landscape of emptiness. He was able to survive and live by cultivating the particular virtues that others before him had centuries earlier. He later chronicled how over a period of 3 days he walked 124 miles without water through desert sands before stumbling half dead into the path of bedouin caravan. He was told no one could survive more than nineteen hours in the desert without water. What saved him were two things: he was meticulously observant of his surroundings, noticing an unusual northeast wind full of moisture that delayed the dehydration of his body and brought a light dew he could collect on parachute silk. The other was that he remained stubbornly indifferent to panic, pain, and despair, and focused on staying alive.
This near brush with death would figure prominently in his 1939 memoir, in a book called Wind, Sand, and Stars. The man was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who also penned one of the best-selling and most translated books -- Le Petit Prince -- The Little Prince, of which his harrowing time in the desert also became inspiration.
On the Incarnation
From a reflection at The Christian Century a few years ago:
“Destroy this temple,” Jesus says to the leaders who ask him for a sign, “and in three days I will raise it up.” In John’s Gospel Jesus isn’t talking about changing the policies around who sells what when. This isn’t about reforming temple practices. He wants to turn over tables, yes, but also to turn over the very pillars of existence through his very existence. Later when Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1–30), he says to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” The hearers of this Gospel would have that scandalous image in front of them already—the rubble and wreckage of their temple. As this week’s passage concludes, after the resurrection the disciples remembered Jesus’ words about the temple, “and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”
On Healing and Wholeness
On the 5th Sunday, yesterday, we included a healing and wholeness liturgy (mostly taken from the BCW). I noticed a thread from ashes to water (Andy led a liturgy with water in which we were invited to remember our baptism on the first Sunday of Lent) to oil.
What I shared to introduce the liturgy: John 3:17 “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
The season of Lent is a time of prayer, fasting and self-examination in preparation for the celebration of the resurrection of the Lord at Easter. We began the season with ashes and the words “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” as a reminder of our fragility and humanity. On the first Sunday of Lent, with water Andy invited us to remember our belovedness, in the same way that Jesus did before he entered the wilderness.
Today we remember with oil our need for healing and wholeness, for every season of our lives but especially those seasons of wilderness, as individuals, as well as the need for healing and wholeness for the world.
With each act, with simple and ordinary stuff—ashes, water, oil—we offer the sign of the cross, to remember Christ’s redemptive death, and all the ways God saves us daily. We anoint one another as a reminder that God carries and holds us, walks with us in grief and sorrow, and promises life.
Other places I put some thoughts down this Lent.
On Contested Signs
I joined the editorial team for the Politics of Scripture series of Political Theology and wrote my first blog there on John 12:20–33.
From the conclusion:
What kind of life does Jesus proffer in the gospel of John? We know it’s the kind of life that doesn’t neatly fit into our categories of life, but even more ungovernable, undefinable, and unmanageable is how life should proceed, how it should end, and what it should mean. The signs are strange, but there is a sign of the possibility of something more, something else, something otherwise (to pick up on Ashon Crawley’s use of the word) even if it doesn’t immediately make sense. For the next several chapters before his death, Jesus will spend time with his disciples, teaching them and telling them more about this life, and reminding them that through it all he is with them. At “this hour,” these signs tell us especially when we need it most: keep going.
On the Cross(beam)
You can also find me at Diana Butler Bass’ substack, The Cottage, with a video reflection on the “patibulum,” or the crossbeam.
A little bit of text from the reflection:
I wonder about Jesus’ arms and hands, too. All they touched and carried and soothed, flesh and wood, and then the way they looked on the cross. I recall visiting a church once—when and where are lost on me—and seeing the crucifix. It was an unusual one—a figure hanging only from the crossbeam. It seemed strange and compelling and arresting at the same time. Like something was missing but still somehow there. The stauros, the upright stake or pale, grounds the cross, it has a grounding effect, a way of making it seem more real or realistic rather than this odd floating image.
And yet, perhaps I’ve grown so accustomed to the image of the cross with both the vertical and horizontal that the invitation to see it in a new way, or to simply look at it in this moment invites me to just pause and wonder. So I wonder about the crossbeam itself, and what it might suggest if we simply took the vertical away. If we take away the stauros, or the vertical, the patibulum becomes a levitating object. Magical, in a way, suspended in air, defying the force of gravity.
Some Photos
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Have a peaceful rest of the week, friends.