[re]imagine Lent: 3/31/2023
We encourage you to sign up for the 40-40-40 Lenten Challenge, a challenge with our partner Southeastern Iowa Synod to participate in Lenten practices, including these daily devotions. Just signing up counts as participation! More info here.
“The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”
I find this Jesus, the suffering servant, to be welcoming and comforting – one who stretches his arms wide on the cross, willingly bearing suffering and evil knowing that the resurrection dawn will certainly come. His open arms to beckon us all to the foot of the cross, where, joined with him in death we all rise again to new life. He promises to be with you – in your struggles, in your suffering, and in your pain, he sustains you when you’re weary, and sets his face like flint, carrying you through it all.
Jesus offers this sustaining word to all who suffer and honestly, I’m struggling a little this year. As I look around, I have opinions about those whom I believe are perpetrating evil in our world and am stunned at how we can just move on after one or two headlines. I have thoughts about legislation that seeks to dehumanize beautiful children of God who have darker skin or whose gender doesn’t fit a certain dichotomy, or that protects the rights of some over the lives of others. And you’d better believe I have feelings about the way our economy favors the wealthy and systematically keeps people in poverty.
Yet here, as Pr. Benjamin Dueholm says, “Jesus is more than one who submits to the blows. In doing so he affirms his identification with all those to whom the servant is sent—not just the ones who choose not to fight back against their oppressor, but the ones who have no way to do so.”[1]
Imagine how we, church, might live differently if we remembered this reality. Called to love and accompany the suffering and those in need of a sustaining word, and ultimately, called to the cross where we encounter Jesus, the suffering servant, who calls us to come and die with him so that all might be raised.
[1] https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/sundays-coming/servant-who-perseveres-isaiah-504-9a
Prayer
Hosanna! I praise you God, for your saving grace. I praise you for giving me Jesus, your son, who suffered with and for us all. Open my heart and mind to all that it is to be human, that your word might sustain me and empower me to speak that same word to all you put in my path, that the world might come to trust in the resurrection and redemption of all creation.
Amen.
Journal Prompt
As we prepare to enter into Palm/Passion Sunday, I invite you to reflect on the ways that this day encompasses a wide spectrum of human experience: from praise to denial, joy to fear, and palm waving to stone throwing. How have you experienced Jesus’ presence with you in all these times of your own life? How might God be calling the church to reimagine how we talk about this reality with even more and new people?
Week Five Devotions by Rev. Erika Uthe, uthe@seiasynod.org