Fourth Sunday in Lent
Third Sunday in Lent
It is an interesting Lenten journey is it not? We Lenten people arrive at this point in the desert together. Elect and baptized, we know that the waters of baptism are the one thing needed for the invitation to eternal life. Given that this is the first scrutiny for the elect let us scrutinize and be scrutinized? It is why I chose the second set of readings this week. If we’ve made the mistake of stacking up jobs and bills and pills and calories and partners in the relentless search for something to kill this thirst, we don’t have to feel ashamed, we just have to quit this fruitless behavior right now. What we are looking for is already here. It takes one trip to this well to be sustained for a lifetime, and more.
The Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well has had her fill of a lot of things. She’s had enough of foreigners, for one; men, for another; husbands, most of all. When Jesus asks her for a drink, it causes her pent-up dissatisfaction to explode. Jesus sees someone he can work with here. I hope you get the point that we are the Samaritan woman. She represents us. We meet a woman who was trying to discover her deepest truth, looking for acceptance, love and trust, rejecting that which fails to satisfy, and engaging Jesus, this Jewish man by the side of the well, in a faith dialogue about what true worship really means. This woman at the well - a woman without a name so she can stand for every woman (and hopefully for every
man) - is a woman who thirsts for truth. She is a woman who longs for relationship (in the midst of all the forces of her culture at work against her, the most obvious being exclusion). Her encounter with Jesus broke into her anguished shattered life and gave her reason to hope, filled her with joy, and invited her to a new way of being and worship in the world.
The Samaritan woman instinctively knew that love was the answer. That’s why she kept returning to the well time and again, seeking communion however brokenly with this husband and that. In Jesus she found what she was looking for, and she was able to leave her bucket behind at last. She also had good news enough to share and sought out her whole village to share it with. That’s why she has become one of the classic Lenten examples of discipleship. When we’re ready to take the good news to the village, we’ll know we’ve arrived.
Happy Lent
Father William
Second Sunday in Lent
We’ve all learned some useful things sitting in a classroom. You can learn a lot in a classroom. But there are some things we’ll never learn from a book, teacher, or memorized fact. Some things have to hit us right between the eyes, or bull’s-eye straight into our hearts. We have to experience these things to know them: like falling in love, being forgiven, or receiving grace in a perilous hour. Poets describe the delirious feeling of seeing a loved one’s face. It’s the same with knowing Jesus. There’s a difference between the classroom lesson about Jesus and the actual encounter of him. Even the disciples, who hung around with Jesus all the time, didn’t really know him.
That’s why the Transfiguration comes as such a surprise, a shock really. The three friends who knew Jesus best—Peter, John, and James—literally “wake up” to the knowledge of who Jesus really is. He’s the fulfillment of every story from the law of Moses to the prophecies of Israel! He’s God’s every promise come to earth and in the flesh! He’s the one they’ve been waiting for! He is the light of the world, shining dazzling white before their eyes! One minute they see Jesus this way. The next minute they don’t. Is it because they fall back asleep? Is that why they remain the ignorant disciples who run from Jesus and deny him in his hour of greatest need? If so, we can’t blame them.
Most of us only see Jesus in little flashes of light, tiny glimmers of understanding that come and go. It’s hard to stay awake all the time. Church is how we help each other do that more. As the gospels present it . . . the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which . . . God’s people—historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant—are being re-created in relation to Jesus himself .That is the invitation of Lent: that we are to be transformed into his image. In the words of Thomas Merton that image is a light of supreme brilliance that dazzles our mind and darkens all its visions and other realities. In the end, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and in doing so, live in the presence of the Lord… the light of our world!
God's presence to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus pulled them through their difficult moments. They could pull themselves up on him. That same God has also made himself into our God, when we were baptized in Jesus name. Lent is meant as an opportunity to sort out whether we are still on course as disciples of Jesus, an opportunity to ask ourselves honestly: Do the Gospel values that Jesus embodied still turn us on? Or have we possibly lost the taste for them? Awake to love!
Happy Lent
Father William