Lent

The passage from Luke begins with people telling Jesus about Pilate’s murder of a group of Galileans who were offering sacrifices. One might expect Jesus to have condemned Pilate’s action, but instead he uses the incident as a teaching opportunity to make his own point. The rhetorical question in v.

When we search for a common thread that joins our lectionary texts for this second Sunday of Lent it seems to be the manifestation of the transcendent, the holy, the other, God. This manifestation comes in many ways, often unexpected ways. These texts remind us that life is not just what we see and hear around us.  There is a transcendent reality that appears occasionally in our daily round and makes us look at “everyday” reality as not so everyday after all. Abraham, “David,” Paul and Jesus, different witnesses to a reality which

The Gospel of Luke, as is well known, lacks a notion of the atonement. Although it emphasizes Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is nothing in Luke that suggests the redemptive character of these events. Nor is it legitimate to argue that this motif is implicit.

If one wished to find a link among these four texts for the first Sunday of Lent of 2004 it appears to be the confession of faith. Bear this in mind as we go through the reading of each of these texts in turn, inverting the last two for reasons that will become apparent.

Lent recalls Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. “Full of the Holy Spirit,” and fresh from his baptism, Jesus is led by the Gods’ spirit into the wilderness. However, we understand the complexities of this story, it is clear that Jesus, like shaman and shamanness before him, must go on a “vision quest” in order to clarify his vocation and claim his future as God’s beloved child. And, only Jesus could have been the source of the account of his retreat and temptation in the wilderness.

This is a text about fasting, an appropriate subject for Ash Wednesday. Fasting was usually performed to publicly indicate repentance and to ask for restoration from God. This is also the intention of Christian Ash Wednesday.

Jeremiah 31:31-34

As I begin this exegetical work with you the invasion of Iraq has begun.  Regardless of one's position relative to the war itself, surely we can agree that this is a momentous event in the history of our country and for people of faith everywhere.  The weeks ahead demand bold and vigorous preaching that seeks not simply to comfort and assure people that with God all things will be made new but also connects folks to Jesus' passion for life and the terrible loss that his death brought to his friends and family -- and to God.

Numbers 21:4-9

I see a number of important Process themes in today’s readings.  In the stories of ‘serpents’, the Ephesians’ Church, and the well-known passage from John, we are told that God works with the world as it is and not as we would like it to be or what we think it should be. In each of the readings we see that we are under God’s Grace, or ‘initial aim’, God gives a solution to problems, or a preferred option, then we are free to choose but are then responsible for our actions.