Throughout our Lenten journey together, we have been exploring the landscapes of the path. Together, we have discovered the terrain of the wilderness and the interior, the masses and the marketplace, the world and the hour. And as these forty days draw to a close, the landscape begins to look like a familiar road, one that will set our faces like Jesus’s towards the reckoning in Jerusalem.
We know this path of Jesus stretched out before him from the very beginning, but we know too that he is not being dragged or pushed, unwilling to take the steps he knows will be his last. Rather his is a road less traveled, but one he travels fully and freely for the sake of the world he so loves.
As you and I set off to journey along the holiest week of the Christian year, might I invite you to consider the way in which you enter this landscape? Do these Lenten days for you feel like all the rest, hurried and distracted by all that fills your plate? Or have you been able to create some emotional and spiritual space, emptying yourself so that you may be refilled as you enter into this transformative landscape of Love?
In a reflection she wrote on Holy Week, poet, artist, and theologian Jan Richardson reminds us: “There is a time for stillness, for waiting for Christ as he makes his dancing way toward us. And there is a time to be in motion, to set out on a path, knowing that although God is everywhere, and always with us, we sometimes need a journey in order to meet God — and ourselves — anew. This is a week to ask, how do we meet God in motion? How do we move toward the One who is already making his way toward us? Whatever circumstance we may find ourselves in, how do we participate in creating our path? What road is calling to us and has our name written on its stones? And will we go?”
My prayer for you, dear church, is that your Holy Week may be filled with all the fullness this landscape has to offer; that you might find power in weakness, and company on the hardest of roads. And in all in all, may we meet the One whose blessing surrounds us and never lets us go.
Together in the work of Love,
Pastor Emily