The Second Sunday in Lent: The first tender shoots of a long-delayed spring
The Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 8:31-39; Mark 8:31-38; Psalm 16 or 16:5-11
In humility is the greatest freedom
As long as you have to defend the imaginary self
that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.
As soon as you compare that shadow
with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy,
because you have begun to trade in unrealities
and there is no joy in things that do not exist.
--Thomas Merton
“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
--Jesus of Nazareth
To feed on the bread of heaven, to be clothed in the cloth of the lilies, to drink from a bottomless well of hope and joy…to live a life that seems so foreign, so alien, so devoid of stuff and things…can you imagine living that kind of life?
Jesus may as well have said “you cannot serve God and yourself,” or “you cannot live a false life on the outside, and expect a fulfilled life on the inside,” or “you cannot deal in reality if you aren’t being real.” Any or all of those statements hold water, especially in the world at hand. But that’s exactly what Jesus is asking us to put down…not just in this season of denial and discipline, but every single day. Jesus asks us to put aside everything that distracts us from living and moving in the Kingdom of God…clothes, ego, food, timelines, all of it. So simple, and so very hard…you may as well try to pass a camel through the eye of a needle.
We live in a society of consumers, climbers, consultants, and corporate hacks. We find very little time to listen to the prophets, much less buy stock in the promises. We are coming to a day when we will have to get right with the fact that the things of this world aren’t just passing away, they are already dead. Why would we love a dead thing, much less a whole life full of dead things? Aren’t we an Easter people? Aren’t we a people who believe in Life, and that abundantly? If that’s true, if we are who God says we are, and we love what God has made, why do we cling to the corpses of a life that holds nothing but holes?
God, while immense, is also a God of small things…the first tender shoots of a long-delayed spring, the tentative steps of a new adventure. God is God, and we are not, so I don’t imagine God expects us to go off of what we have proclaimed to be “real life” cold turkey. But I do think God expects us to, once our eyes have been opened to our divided nature, systematically begin to dismantle the stage upon which we have been playing so poorly. Bit by bit, God asks us to shed the unrealities of the rat-race so that we can truly run with honor and in companionship with God and our brothers and sisters…to be radically different in a thousand ordinary ways.
--Rachel
