Invitation to freedom: A lenten practice
Who wants to talk about sin? Not me, that’s for sure. Most people I know are pretty stressed out; they want good news, not something that makes them feel worse. As I write this my autocorrect keeps changing the word “sin” to “sun.” My computer can’t even believe I want to talk about it. In…
A season of Spirit
Moses Falco is a Mennonite pastor who grew up Baptist, but for six weeks each year, he takes his cue from the Catholics. At Lent, Falco gives up eating meat—the food that Catholics traditionally abstain from on Ash Wednesday and each Friday in Lent, including Good Friday. Rather than giving meat up on certain days,…
Forgive us our sins
Last year at the beginning of Lent I decided that rather than giving something up, I was going to take something on. I would read Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. What better way to journey toward Good Friday than by immersing myself in a serious theological reflection on the cross of…
No more of this!
One morning in the second full week of Lent, I woke up to the first sign of Easter. It had been a dreary season of violence. In the beginning of March, a shooter injured six people at a Chicago club. On March 15, in New Zealand, a gunman killed 50 worshippers in planned attacks at…
Confession as a personal spiritual practice
This Lenten season I find myself reflecting on the spiritual discipline of confession. What does a healthy practice of confession look like both individually and collectively? Confession played a huge part in my childhood faith. I was taught that you couldn’t pray or be right with God if you had unconfessed sin in your life,…
Give up complaining for Lent?
“You better stop whinin’, pinin’,” Dolly Parton sings in her song, “Better Get to Livin’.” If you’re “underpaid or under appreciated,” you’ll get no sympathy from her. Her advice: Stop complaining and “better get to livin’.” Get your “dreams in line and then just shine, design, refine ’til they come true.” Reverend Will Bowen could…
Evil is right here with me
Something needs to be done about all the hate in the world. This morning I encountered no fewer than three pieces of media expressing incredulity that the internet seems not to have transformed humanity into an oasis of harmony and mutual understanding, but has, instead, degenerated into a cesspool of anger and ignorance. The headlines…
Encountering the vulnerable Jesus
Lent is a 40-day season on the church calendar that brings the story of Jesus into the nitty-gritty of community life. It brings the story into everyone’s own particular time and place. Lent is a time that commemorates the 40 days Jesus spent in solitude, silence and fasting in the wilderness. During this time in…
For what purpose has Christ grabbed hold of you?
A year ago, when a colleague and I spent an intense two days in the beautiful Fraser Valley of B.C. with the writing team for our Leader magazine, I met this passage again as part of the 2016 lectionary texts for Lent. Many important and life-giving words from these texts (including Isaiah 43:16-21, Psalm 126…
Less please: Pop theology for Lent
The customary practice of self-sacrifice during Lent carries tinges of earnest piety and religious compunction. It can feel like a moral “heavy.” But it also has a certain appeal.
