Unsettling Lent , livre ebook

Chalice Press - Angela Parker

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56 pages

English

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Publié par	Chalice Press
Date de parution	01 janvier 0001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780827238657
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents
1. Marked by the Cross
2. Encountering the Mystery of the Kingdom of God
3. What Are You Giving Up?
4. We May be Dust, But We Don’t Have to Look Dusty!
5. Do I Need That Kind of Power?
6. An Urgent Mission
7. The Problem with Home
8. Wait, Are We Going to Church?
9. Timid No More! The Beginning of Healthy Confrontation
10. All Together But Still Different
11. Thy Kingdom Come
12. A Lent Like No Other
13. Keep Your Hands (and your Legislation) to Yourself!
14. The Poor Among Us
15. A Strange Land
16. Jesus and Mass Incarceration
17. Behind Bars
18. Beating Guns
19. Conquered
20. The Spikes
21. The Bible in Real Life
22. Looking in the Face of the Other
23. The Good Parable
24. Us vs. Them
25. Crossing From Certainty to Uncertainty
26. Musing Against the Replacement Conspiracy Theory
27. Whitewashed Monuments
28. Jesus and QAnon
29. Not All Counsel is Good Counsel
30. Caesar’s Trap
31. Cowardly Arrest
32. Death Grip of Rulers
33. Narrow is the Way
34. Augustus, Trumpism, and the Gospel
35. Fringe Benefits
36. King of Kings
37. Are You A Chaplain for the Empire or a Prophet for Transformation?
38. Insurrection
39. Prelude to Resurrection
40. Hosanna!
41. Ready to Be Foolish
42. Are You Ready?
43. Judas Today
44. His (Almost) Final Act
45. Sometimes You Have To Break the System
46. V for Victory?
47. Sunday’s Not Here Yet
48. Time to Shake Things Up!
About the Authors

Copyright ©2022 by Word&Way
All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com .
Bible quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Print: 9780827238640
EPUB: 9780827238657
EPDF: 9780827238664
ChalicePress.com

Dear Readers,
In the fall of 2021 as Advent neared, the editorial team at Word&Way (a Christian media company based in Missouri and founded in 1896) discussed ideas for a possible series related to the impending season. But things didn’t quite feel right.
The second COVID year weighed on us with the Delta variant surging (and unknown to us, the Omicron strain would hit hard during Advent). The racial justice protests of the previous year gave way to a growing whitelash as people attacked efforts to combat racism as some sort of “critical race theory” bogeyman. And the year had started with an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn a democratic election.
How do we think about Advent in a time like that? How do we mark that holy season in such unsettling times?
And that’s when we realized we need to unsettle Advent. After all, Jesus didn’t show up on a silent night in a peaceful land with cute little angels like our domesticated versions of the story too often suggest. Jesus came during a time much like ours. A time of death. A time of racial injustices. A time of insurrection.
So, we launched a pop-up Substack newsletter with a daily devotion emailed each morning to people who signed up. We chose that format since we were already experiencing success with our regular Substack publication, A Public Witness , where Beau Underwood and I continue to publish in-depth reports each week on important issues of faith, culture, and politics. (So sign up at publicwitness. wordandway.org .) About twenty writers joined us in helping with this Unsettling Advent series that you can still read today at advent. wordandway.org (and that even won an award from the Religion Communicators Council). One writer was Angela Parker, who has also written other pieces for Word&Way . Another was Brad Lyons, publisher of Chalice Press. A few months later, over coffee, Beau and I talked with Brad about writing some Lenten devotions. He suggested we need to now unsettle Lent. So, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Beau, Angela, and I plotted together over Zoom to bring this book to life. But now it’s your turn. We hope these devotionals will enrich your experience over these several weeks as we walk toward the cross and the empty tomb. After the first half-week introducing Lent, each week we’ll focus on a new theme: announcing the kingdom, social challenges, crossing boundaries, conspiracies/plotting, social/political context, and then Holy Week.
We hope you’ll be challenged to not let the biblical texts hide behind stained-glass windows and cute coloring pages. We hope these devotionals will challenge and even irritate you as you reflect on them. Because they did for us as we put them together. Thanks for joining us on this unsettling adventure during unusual times.
—Brian Kaylor
1. Marked by the Cross
Genesis 3:19 “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)
I once spent hours on a street corner confronting random strangers with their mortality. My witness was more subtle than shouting, “You’re going to die!” Instead, as they walked by me on a cold spring day, I politely asked them if they wanted to be ritually marked with ashes. It was after they said “yes” that I hit them with the punch while moving my thumb across their forehead: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Like other church pastors, I was participating in a movement called “Ashes to Go” that’s designed to take the Christian rituals of Ash Wednesday beyond the walls of church sanctuaries. While meant to make participation more convenient for busy people, the dislocation of the sacred act also adds to its meaning. Scripture’s morbid witness disrupts a world in denial about the reality of death.
There’s nothing more unsettling than reflecting on the brevity of our existence. Left to our own devices, none of us will make it out alive. So, we place our hope elsewhere. Trusting God with our present days and eternal futures requires us to first get out of the way. Finding the proper orientation requires taking the spotlight off ourselves.
So we start the journey through Lent by marking ourselves with a cross of ashes. A reminder of the death we cannot escape. Turning away from ourselves, we remember that Jesus shares our fate. Now will we let his cross disturb our lives enough to change our world?
Prayer: Holy One, place your mark on us this Lenten season. By admitting we will die, allow us to live with a new hope in the life you offer us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
—Beau Underwood
2. Encountering the Mystery of the Kingdom of God
Mark 4:10-20 “To you have been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables.” (Mark 4:11)
Lent is a time of transition from ordinary times to extraordinary times. Such a transition can be wonderful, encouraging, discombobulating, and even mysterious. Entering a season of mystery means that often our hearts and minds experience disquiet because we have no understanding about how the mystery will unfold before us.
As the twelve disciples encircle Jesus, they are at the beginning of a journey that will unfold the mystery of the kingdom of God before them. As we journey together through Lent 2023, please know that there may be moments when the unfolding mystery will be unsettling. Our journey is a movement from ordinary times to extraordinary times, but it is also a movement from personal spirituality to communal moments of speaking truth to power and speaking truth to ourselves in our present political and social situations.
Even as we begin to unsettle Lent in these extraordinary times, may we indeed begin to look, so that we may perceive, understand, and turn again to be forgiven. In this time, we will ask hard questions. Have we ignored the racial battles going on around us? Have we ignored the rise of White Christian Nationalism? Do we place our proverbial heads in the sand because of political and social difficulties? Have we ignored God’s call to cross boundaries and have conversations with people vastly different from (yet quite similar to) ourselves? Just as the disciples were confused about the unfolding mystery of the kingdom of God, our hope for this devotional is for you to experience the same unsettling even as you proceed with a greater awareness and newness of service to Christ after these forty-seven days.
Prayer: May God’s mercy and grace be upon us as we begin to delve into the mystery of the kingdom of God and our work in God’s movement in the world. Amen.
—Angela N. Parker
3. What Are You Giving Up?
Acts 14:21-25 “Paul and Barnabas appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put their trust.” (Acts 14:23)
Perhaps you’ve already received the question this year. What are you giving up for Lent?
A 2021 poll by YouGov listed the most common things people said they would give up for Lent that year. 1 Food items topped the list, like desserts, soda, fast food, and alcohol. But also in the top ten were things like social media, watching TV, and video games. Apparently, technology and modern treats make it harder to be holy!
While not in that poll, there’s a trend I’ve also noticed on Facebook (because I don’t give up social media for Lent) of people giving up things during Lent that don’t quite fit in the chocolate or video game genres. Like single-use plastic for Lent. The Church of England helped popularize that Lenten challenge in 2018. But I wonder if it misses the point.
If we’re really concerned about the ways we are choking our oceans with islands of plastic waste and d