The Painted Prayerbook

“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?”
—Numbers 21.5

From a lectionary reading for Lent 4: Numbers 21.4-9

Reflection for Monday, March 12 (Day 17 of Lent)

We were made for freedom. Formed and fashioned by God, breathing with God’s own breath, we were created to live and move at full stretch and to offer our gifts in complete and unconfined measure. It is a disturbing peculiarity of humans that we have so often resisted this: that across time—and still—we have had such difficulty living into the divine freedom that God intended. We have enslaved others. Or we have taken our freedom lightly. Or we have given it away, trading it for something that looked like security. Or we have let it be taken from us because we didn’t know our own power or didn’t think that freedom was a state we deserved.

When we’re given a taste of freedom—like the people of the Exodus in today’s passage—it can sometimes seem too difficult. It requires vast amounts of intention and courage and faith to live into the liberation for which God has designed us. As the Israelites discovered, freedom is a big, uncharted territory, full of uncertainty and responsibility that can overwhelm our ability to see the gifts and possibilities the unconstrained landscape contains. Faced with that uncertainty and responsibility—and, let’s face it, with the reality that entering the terrain of freedom can involve discomfort and slim or distasteful rations—the confinement of the known can start to look more appealing than the freedom of the unknown.

And so, in the company of the children of Israel who had to learn to live into liberation, I am here today to ask you: Have you given away some part of yourself for the sake of security, or to keep the waters smooth, or because you thought it was expected? To whom or to what are you beholden? Is there some unknown territory that you need to press into with courage and intention in order to live more deeply into the freedom for which God has created you? Is there someone who needs you to come alongside them as they seek to do this in their own lives?

[To use the image “In the Wilderness,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

But we proclaim Christ crucified…
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
—1 Corinthians 1.23-24

From a lectionary reading for Lent 3: 1 Corinthians 1.18-25

Reflection for Saturday, March 10 (Day 16 of Lent)

If there’s anything the wilderness journey of Lent should teach us, it’s that the place where we think we have something all figured out is the place where we should fall on our knees in humility and think again. Like a desert, Lent invites us into a space where seemingly wild contradictions hold together. This is a season to draw close to the God who provides wellsprings in the wilderness, who brings honey from the rock, who offers beauty in the places that seem most barren. And who, Paul tells us in today’s reading, became wisdom and power incarnate in a man whose life ended, by the world’s reckoning, in utter defeat.

This God makes little sense. And so this season challenges us to be present to the God who does not always seem sensible, and to trust that something deeper than sense is at work in our lives. These wilderness days of Lent invite us to stop, to look closely at our landscape, and to open our eyes to how God dwells in what may seem the unlikeliest places: in paradox, in mystery, in what appears to be contradictory, in what the world overlooks or belittles. Lent confronts us with our own certainties and assumptions about how God should act;  it calls us to sit with God’s contradictions until a door opens in their midst.

[To use the image “Christ the Power and Wisdom,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.
—Psalm 19.1

From a lectionary reading for Lent 3: Psalm 19

Reflection for Wednesday, March 7 (Day 13 of Lent)

Sojourner Truth, the famed preacher who was born into slavery in the Southern United States and later became a renowned orator and leader in the abolitionist movement, tells this story from her childhood:

“Ye see we was all brought over from Africa, father, an’ mother an’ I, an’ a lot more of us; an’ we was sold up an’ down, an’ hither an’ yon’; an’ I can ’member, when I was a little thing, not bigger than this ’ere,” pointing to her grandson, “how my ole mammy would sit out o’ doors in the evenin’, an’ look up at the stars an’ groan. She’d groan, an’ groan, an’ says I to her,

“‘Mammy, what makes you groan so?’

“An’ she’d say,

“‘Matter enough, chile! I’m groanin’ to think o’ my poor children: they don’t know where I be, an’ I don’t know where they be; they looks up at the stars, an’ I look up at the stars, but I can’t tell where they be.

“‘Now,’ she said, ‘chile, when you’re grown up, you may be sold away from your mother an’ all your old friends, an’ have great troubles come on ye; an’ when you has these troubles come on ye, ye jes’ go to God, an’ he’ll help ye.’

“An’ I says to her,

“‘Who is God, anyhow, mammy?’

“An’ says she,

“‘Why, chile, you jes’ look up dar. It’s him that made all dem!’”

Sojourner goes on to say that in those childhood days, she didn’t give much thought to God. Yet I like to think that it was on such nights as this that Sojourner began to learn the art of preaching. Sitting beneath the heavens with her mother who drew her gaze toward the skies, where the stars and planets moved in beauty and freedom, Sojourner began to listen to what the heavens were telling, and to absorb the ways that God proclaims God’s presence in creation. With the heavens embedded in her bones, Sojourner would come to know that the One who “made all dem” had also made her: she too was part of the handiwork of God, and the God who had made the heavens to move in freedom had called her to claim and proclaim that freedom for humanity.

In these days, how do we listen to what the heavens are telling, and the firmament proclaims?

The Sojourner Truth quotation is from Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Oxford University Press, 1991).

This reflection is part of the series Teach Me Your Paths: A Pilgrimage into Lent.

[To use the image “The Heavens Are Telling,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery.
—Exodus 20.2

From a lectionary reading for Lent 3: Exodus 20.1-17

Reflection for Monday, March 5 (Day 11 of Lent)

Repeatedly in the story of the Exodus, God reminds the people who God is by describing what God has done for them. God’s saving action becomes a kind of name for the Holy One; what God does is intimately intertwined with who God is, and is how the people come to know God.

I am the Lord, and I will free you…and deliver you from slavery, God tells Moses to say to the people of Israel (Exodus 6.6).

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, God says in today’s reading.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God (Numbers 15.41).

Throughout the Exodus and beyond, God continues to use this kind of naming as God continues to work among the people and reveal more and more of who God is:

I am the Lord who heals you (Exodus 15.26).

I am the Lord; I sanctify you (Leviticus 22.32).

I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who by myself spread out the earth (Isaiah 44.24).

I am the Lord your God, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar (Isaiah 51.15).

I am the Lord your God, who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go (Isaiah 48.17).

In the sacred story that is your own life, how does the name of God appear? How do you describe God based on what God has done for you, how God has become known to you, where God has brought you out of?

This reflection is part of the series Teach Me Your Paths: A Pilgrimage into Lent.

[To use the image “Out of Slavery,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]