March 5, 2008
Sunbeams
It’s Lent and it has been for a while, so everybody at my church is already talking about Holy Week and Easter. The schedule came in the email only yesterday. It made me wonder whether Lent has become just another time of anticipation or whether it is as I suspect it should be a time of introspection and taking a shot at the possible rearrangement of priorities.
I’ve never been all that good at “keeping” the season or being penitent at all, for that matter. Not that I don’t have plenty of reason. I grew up a Baptist, however, so about all I knew about Lent was when some of my classmates showed up at certain times with smudges on their foreheads. That wasn’t much, and I wasn’t very cosmopolitan if that was what one had to be to know about such things. Actually, it was not until got into seminary that I found out that the narthex wasn’t called that because of where the church doors would be if they were on a compass rose.
Now I know after all these years that the forty days of Lent haven’t always been forty days but once were shorter. I always thought they were forty days, save Sundays, because that’s how long Jesus stayed in the wilderness, although I suspect he stayed out there Sundays, too, or maybe he counted the Sundays unlike we don’t.
What I suspect now is that Jesus went out in the wilderness for forty days or whatever to find out what it means to be Jesus and found out it wasn’t all that common or promising as a vocation. Considering the way we lay so much on him, you’d have thought he already knew. But knowing what we know now, it’s no wonder he wants us for a sunbeam which seems the least he could ask.
Any way you look at it, we’ve never treated him all that fair, certainly never as fair as we expect him to treat us. Maybe Lent’s a time we can reconsider how we do that and how it might becoming of us to become us. I suspect he could tell us a thing or two about how to do that.
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