Cleaning House
Dear First Pres SLO Family,
Grace and peace to you in the name of the Messiah Jesus, who invites us to join him in this Lenten journey to the Cross.
Lent invites us to do a little interior housecleaning—to reflect on our lives and to repent where we need to. All of that is meant to be seen in the context of the whole church year: the expectation of Advent, the joy of Christmas, the events of Holy Week and Easter, and the celebration of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Lent is a part of the year, part of the ebb and flow of the journey of faith. It’s like a spring cleaning for the soul.
But all this reflecting and repenting is designed to point us to Christ—to point us to the one who came and lived and died and rose again—Lent isn’t an invitation to navel-gazing, it’s a call to see who Jesus really is.
We need that. After (hopefully) the worst of COVID, with our domestic politics still in shambles, and with a terrible war entering its third week…we need a little glimpse of the Messiah today, right?
Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest and writer. He spent part of his life in service at a home for mentally disabled adults—not unlike the God’s Hidden Treasures ministry that we support in Ukraine. It was in that sacrificial life that he learned the most about who Christ was and is.
In one of his Lenten meditations, Nouwen is talking about the way God became human in the form of Jesus. In some thinking, this act of love required God to become less than God fully is—theologians refer to it as the “Great Condescension”. Nouwen isn’t having any of that. He believed that in becoming human, God show us more, not less, of who God is and what that means for all of us. Here’s what he wrote:
“In his servanthood God does not disfigure himself, he does not take on something alien to himself, he does not act against or in spite of his divine self. On the contrary, it is in his servanthood that God chooses to reveal himself as God to us.”
Whoa. Wait just a second.
Did he really say that “it is in his servanthood that God chooses to reveal himself as God?”
What if what we know about Jesus from his life and ministry—the way he loved people, the way he reached out to enemies and the marginalized, the way he railed against the unjust systems of his day, the way he gave himself for the world he loved—what if that’s not just how Jesus was for a few years? What if that’s what God is like for eternity? I’ve used that Nouwen quote during Lent for years now, but only just in this moment did it start to make sense in a new way.
Lent doesn’t disappoint. Pausing (or at least slowing down a little) to reflect and take inventory of our life and faith, helps us get new glimpses and insights into who God is, and who God invites us to be. I hope this season is a blessing to you and to those you love.
Peace to you in the name of the one who shows us what God is like.
Pastor John