Third Sunday of Lent

Psalm 95 • Exodus 17:1-7 • Romans 5:1-11 • John 4:5-42

Just then his disciples came. 

They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman. . . 

John 4:5-42

Jesus continually spoke with women. His mother, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Suzanna (Luke 8:2-3), Mary and Martha of Bethany (Luke 10:38-41), just to name a few instances. And in this story, He spoke to a Samaritan woman, a thing forbidden by rabbinic custom. Men do not speak to women. Of course, the women were always portrayed in some negative light, except for Mary of Bethany. The fact that the Samaritan woman was at the well at noon suggests an array of negative implications.

In many of the Gospel parables, there is an underlying theme that Jesus spoke against the attitude of entitlement. We are entitled to this land because we conquered you. We are entitled to the best because we are superior. By attrition, we may soon learn, the hard way, how this entitlement thing works if we do not lose the attitude. I am as guilty as everyone, so I am not pointing fingers. Suddenly, I have become aware of it because every time an incident occurs that jabs at my sense of entitlement, a little dagger lands in my heart. Holy Spirit has, once again, hit the mark.

Lord God, righteous and Holy, make us aware, as we go through each day, that Jesus, our Redeemer, redeemed each of us, and let us reach out to ALL of our brothers and sisters in new ways, ways that make us feel uncomfortable at first, but that will give us that true sense of peace, the peace of God that passes all understanding. Let us learn from Jesus, not only by His words, but by His actions. In His Holy Name. Amen

Mary Carolyn Lawson

Thursday of the First Week in Lent

Psalm 50 • Deuteronomy 9:23-10:5 • Hebrews 4:1-10 • John 3:16-21

The passage from Hebrews is a meditation on the concluding verses of Psalm 95, the familiar “Invitatory” of Morning Prayer (Book of Common Prayer, p. 82). Actually, these verses are usually omitted from Morning Prayer, as they start the day with an allusion to God’s wrath:

Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!
Harden not your hearts, as your forebears did in the wilderness,
. . . . . .
They put me to the test, though they had seen my works.
Forty years long I detested that generation and said,
“These people are wayward in their hearts; they do not know my ways.”
So I swore in my wrath, “They shall not enter into my rest.”

The author of Hebrews notes that God’s “rest,” that is, God’s reality, justice, and love, is always there like a backdrop to human history, always there to be found to those who listen, those whose hearts are not hardened . We lose faith, we put God to the test, we wander in the wilderness with hard hearts, and God appears as a God of wrath. Yet the door to a relationship with God never closes. God’s “today” is the rest after the six days of creation. It was “today” for those who followed Joshua and again “today” for the author of the psalm, and again today for the writer and the first readers and hearers of Hebrews, and again today for us in Lent 2011. “. . . the promise of entering God’s rest is still open. . . . Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest.” Let us take the time to enter daily and weekly into a sabbath rest, a time of quiet, prayer, and contemplation where we cease our work and “hearken to his voice!”

Vickie Gottlob

Friday After Ash Wednesday

Psalm 95 • Deuteronomy 7:12-16 • Titus 1:1-15 • John 1:35-42

3 For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

Psalm 95

Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary by Werner Herzog, is about Antarctica a place I have never been, nor imagine that I will ever go before I die. The photography is visually stunning and the score includes Tibetan overtone chanting and otherworldly electronic passages. In one scene, a group of scientists lower their bundled bodies prone to the ice. They turn their heads, presenting wool-covered ears to the ice, listening for the clicks and booms of sea lions that travel breathlessly below. They are quiet and still as a prayer.

With similar reverence, we are shown the scientific outposts at the edge of glaciers, penguin rookeries, holes in the ice through which intrepid divers descend to see first-hand the water and land below the frozen ocean. We see the crater of Mt. Erebus, filled with molten lava come up from the depths of the earth.

Beneath the ice that fringes the shore are orange and purple starfish with delicate and deadly legs, poised for dinner. Their prey is a scallop-like mollusk that propels its body through seawater that is colder than the blood of fish.

The people who have been drawn to live and work at the end of the world the mechanics, IceCat drivers, laboratory workers they are like pilgrims, whose travels have brought them to the continent where humans cannot survive without food, shelter, music, companionship, and above all water and warmth. Where scientists track icebergs that are flung into the Southern Ocean, in accordance with the physics of a warming earth and changing global currents, they are witness to the Maker. Making.


6 Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
7 for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.

Leslie Middleton

Ash Wednesday

Psalm 95 • Jonah 3:1-11 • Hebrews 12:1-14 • Luke 18:9-14

MAY JESUS COME TO CHURCH?

“How’d that guy get in?”
an usher whispers to his partner
“Far end of third row right.”

Could be Jesus sitting there,
for all Sam knows;
but how did the man
get past the door?
Not very neat
pretty scrungy, truth to tell.

Later, while driving home,
Sam wondered what to do in future
about visitors “not of our kind.”
Bits from past sermons flashed
“Could that have been Jesus,
lonely hoping for reception;
maybe wondering (as I have done)
whether sermons actually bear fruit
to educated folks like us.
But, why come here?”

Middle of the night,
“On the other hand, why not here?”
Sam couldn’t sleep,
pondering when,
if ever,
the Lord might be acceptable
nowadays
in church
his very presence
interrupting service flow.

Maybe at the altar;
time of consecration;
distant from the congregation.
You know, when the pastor says,
“This is my body” and so forth.

Good try at imagining, Sam;
but, no; not up front either,
unless he first stopped
to vest ‘acceptably.’
Never in a pew
with that puzzled look
which might disturb the preacher!
“We’d better get a plan,
just to be sure next time;
otherwise well,
might get out of hand!”

Doug Vest