Encouragement for a lifelong journey of faith

Category: Lent 2021 (Page 1 of 10)

March 27, 2021 – Preparing for Holy Week Part 2

Holy Week begins tomorrow, Palm Sunday, March 28. Holy Week is the annual opportunity to simply live your life in the light of Jesus’ story more than you usually do. We know more about this one week of Jesus’ life than any other part of his life. All of the gospel writers thought it was the most important part. All throughout March and February we’ve been turning away from death and toward life, Jesus’ life—a life that goes through death—the only life that goes through death. So let’s live that life with him. Let’s live the whole week with Jesus.

Start here on the Daily Prayer each morning. Every day will offer a way to experience the story, on your own and in community. 

Today’s Bible reading

Read Matthew 11:20-30 (The Message)

Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

More thoughts for meditation

Jesus promises us that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. This is another surprise that requires us to reevaluate our point of reference. If Holy Week is living freely and lightly, what is actually heavy? Could one of the mysteries of Holy Week be that Christ’s passion is not so heavy as the alternative? The burden of disobedience and sin is death. I suppose that IS a lot heavier than Jesus’ promise of eternal life.

But to know this is not a matter of logic or mere change of attitude. We have to walk our way into it. Working with Jesus on his project, watching how he speaks, responds, listens, loves and serves in the Gospels. Practicing the unforced rhythms of grace, trusting him for what is best, even when we don’t understand. Staying with him through his life, our life, his death, our death. This is his way of teaching us not to be surprised by just how different the scales really are. Expect the unexpected. Hope beyond hope. Trust for life through death.

Suggestions for action

What will prevent you from walking with us in our communal rhythm of Holy Week? Can you anticipate problems and take action now to do what you are planning to do and not be thwarted?

Again. Each day of Holy week starts here on the Daily Prayer, includes a video on YouTube that you will be able to find here in the morning and watch any time during the day. To make the experience more communal, you can also wait to watch with others each night at 8 p.m. and join a Zoom Afterhang immediately after that together-watch of the observance. Lots of ways to be together in this story. All the details at circleofhope.net/lent. How will you walk with us?

March 26, 2021 – Preparing for Holy Week Part 1

Holy Week begins on Sunday, March 28. Holy Week is the annual opportunity to simply live your life in the light of Jesus’ story more than you usually do. We know more about this one week of Jesus’ life than any other part of his life. All of the gospel writers thought it was the most important part. All throughout March and February we’ve been turning away from death and toward life, Jesus’ life—a life that goes through death—the only life that goes through death. So let’s live that life with him. Let’s live the whole week with Jesus.

Start here on the Daily Prayer each morning. Every day will offer a way to experience the story, on your own and in community. 

Today’s Bible reading

Read Romans 6

All of us died to sin. How can we still live in it? Or don’t you know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried together with him through baptism into his death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too can walk in newness of life.– Romans 6:2b-4

More thoughts for meditation

One last time in Romans 6. “Let us be free from dead ways of living / and to share in the newness of life that you give / To be joined in your death/ and to join in your rising / and to join in the breaking of death as we live.” Hopefully our theme chapter for Lent and our theme song for Lent have gotten into your mind and heart in a lasting way.

Have you memorized any part of them? How about “just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too can walk in newness of life.” How about the whole song (linked above)?

On the Friday before Good Friday, we are getting ready for what is to come. As we approach the end, it makes sense now to look back where we have been. What else needs to be remembered? 

Suggestions for action

Make a plan for how to engage with Holy Week. Talk to your cell about your intentions.

Again. Each day of Holy week starts here on the Daily Prayer, includes a video on YouTube that you will be able to find here in the morning and watch any time during the day. To make the experience more communal, you can also wait to watch with others each night at 8 pm and join a Zoom Afterhang immediately after that together-watch of the observance. Lots of ways to be together in this story. All the details at circleofhope.net/lent. How will you walk with us?

March 25, 2021 – Follow Me

Today’s Bible reading

Read Luke 9:57-62

Then He said to another, “Follow Me.”

But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”

Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.”

And another also said, “Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house.”

But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” — Luke 9:59-62

More thoughts for meditation

Jesus is not messing around! He is offering us a singularity of purpose that is rarely experienced by humanity. Our purposes are almost always various. Sometimes it’s hard to tell why we do anything that we do, right? That scattered, mysterious, at times confused sense of purpose is part of the human experience. What shall we do? Bury our parents, be hospitable or preach the kingdom of God? There is an incredible urgency to Jesus’ teaching here. His disciples MUST get down to the master’s business. “you go and preach the kingdom of God” … NOW!

Years and years of intervening familiarity might have worn down the sharp blade on Jesus’ words. How does something that happened so long ago have any urgency now? And yet this call is for you, “Follow me.”

He’s calling us to complete reorientation. Your parents, your customs, your patterns of relating, your obligations — they all need reevaluation in the light of this invitation, “Follow me.” You might still be able to walk in his way and preach his kingdom while still meeting the ordinary expectations of your life, but not all of them, and none of them are worth doing if you haven’t decided again how they fit into your new way of living which began with His, “Follow me.”   

Suggestions for action

What do you think you have to do that you might not have to do? Where are you obliged where you ought to be free? Where are your energies divided where you wish they were concentrated? Where in your life are you looking back? What’s distracting you from a singularity of purpose?

Let’s get practical about it. Write down 1-24 on a piece of paper and see if you can reconstruct how you spent each hour in the past day. Make decisions about your time. Bless it if it is blessed. Change it if it is in need of change. There’s always room for fine tuning even if you’re an old hand at this sort of thing. It might be too hard to reconstruct, so you could start right now with “Daily Prayer” in the first hour of the next 24 hours.

March 24, 2021 – Wholehearted

Today’s Bible reading

Read Romans 6

But thank God that although you used to be slaves of sin, you gave wholehearted obedience to the teaching that was handed down to you, which provides a pattern. Now that you have been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness. — Romans 6:16-18

More thoughts for meditation

Are you tired of Romans 6? If you have been following along with Circle of Hope Daily Prayer at all during Lent you know that we have suggested you read it A LOT. It would be easy to skip over it at this point. That’s probably fine for some, but persisting in it is a real opportunity. Reading scripture again and again is a way to get beyond the words and their basic meaning and into a spiritual awareness. Trying again, after you have tried so many times before is a way to trust beyond your own understanding. That’s a good place to try to get, especially with Romans 6, because this passage can be hard to understand.

We keep working on that same old new pattern. The teaching that was handed down to us from Jesus, through Paul and others who shared the story and the Way. It was wholehearted obedience of the many who came before us which showed us what our new life might look like in Christ.

Keep at the pattern. Keep at the steps. Keep your bearing. Keep your company. Keep up with Jesus. Jesus is walking toward Jerusalem. We are walking with him. Through all the opposition — the oppression, the non-metaphoricall slavery, the addiction, the abuse, the trauma, the despair, the resentment, the obstacles, the weariness, the pain, the illness, the heartache, the powerlessness, the loss — through all of it we walk right next to Jesus, and He makes a way through. He makes a way through death. We have not been stopped, Even if slowed down, we have not lost our way completely — we can’t when the Way himself is with us. The New Pattern lives with us and we are righteous when we are walking with him.

Suggestions for action

Check back in on your intention for this week. What did you plan to do? Have you done it? Recalibrate as needed. Wholehearted obedience doesn’t happen in 48 hours. Starting again is the only way the pattern will ever persist. Staring over might mean starting at the beginning, or it could just be deciding to do again today what you did yesterday, and plan to do tomorrow what you did today. When you are walking free, unenslaved by sin, this repetition has more freshness to it than one might expect.

It’s Oscar Romero Day on Celebrating Our Transhistorical Body where we remember this beautiful champion of love and justice.

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