Scattered Ashes

So begins Lent, the church season of penetential preparation for Easter, modeled after Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness. Our ongoing discussion of Scripture and the Incarnation has really struck me so far this Lent. One quick observation about Church time and liturgy, is that one of the grave dangers of both is that they may serve to insulate us from God's inbreaking revelation, which as I have previously pointed out is the problem with non-liturgical churches who practice a principled reading of Scripture. In the end we are human, and fear the God who frightfully loves us. What is exciting to me about liturgy (and particularly Lent) is that the God's rebuke of humanity is all over the passages and liturgies for this season. At Ash Wednesday service, I was again struck by Isaiah's damning of the good religious practices of Israel. To paraphrase Isaiah, as interpreted through Willimon and Hauweras, "Stop trying to get out of life alive. Die already, and let me raise you to new life." Continuing on, this is also the brilliance of Lent, that by reminding us we are going to die, it creates a longing for the new life of Easter. I heard Joyce Meyers this week (on accident) preaching to a congregation of thousands (all with Bible in hand) teaching them that God wanted them to be stable in several areas of their life, and here are four principles to prove it. After I got past being angry about it, I genuinely wondered, "How does one read any of Scripture and think that God is hoping to make people more stable (emotionally, socially, etc...)?" Everytime God shows up he seems to destablize the situation. Abraham was quite happy before he was called. Moses could have worked in his father-in-law's family business forever. Peter made an alright living catching fish. Saul was perfectly happy killing Jewish traitors, and now he has to change his name and everything. Screw stability, God wants to overturn the whole world. Dying and rising from the dead really messes with the stability of the natural order. Ousting rulers and blessing poor people screws with the stability of social orders. To read Scripture as an attempt to make you stable or happy or rich or anything, is to read it too thinly. To read it as principles is to pretend its not really about God, the God who broke into the stability of Egypt and lead Israel wandering around the dessert, or the God who broke into the stable political world of Rome, only to be killed for it, and then has the audacity to break the stability of death by rising from the dead. This is the God who lives and speaks not in principles and truthful guidlines, but IS the truth.