LENT @ SAINT LUKE

Ash Wednesday

As we enter a season of repentance, we need first to come to terms with what we think of the Bible, particularly of God’s law. If we think of a Bible as a book of arbitrary rules and boundaries that systematically restricts our humanity, crushing the life out of us like an anvil on our chest, then it’s going to be really hard to engage in anything like repentance. If we are honest with ourselves, we’d end up with resentment, more likely. Sure, we can try to act like good Christians and conform externally to the demands of God’s law, but if we are not convinced in our hearts that this way of life is what humans look like when we are thriving, then we run the risk of accumulating bitterness and resentment over time. At some point, we may even ask ourselves, “Was is worth it?”

March 23, 2025

The people of Nineveh were vicious and violent, not the kind of people you would think would be receptive to repentance. Yet Jonah delivered the Lord’s message to them: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jon 3:4). And it worked brilliantly. You could not ask for a more thorough-going repentance than that of Nineveh. The people repented even before the king decreed it, and by the end, everyone in the city, from the king all the way down to the animals, was wearing sackcloth and sitting in ashes. It is a model of repentance in the Bible, and we will contemplate it as a model for our own repentance as well.

March 9, 2025

In this season of repentance, we acknowledge that we have been overwhelmed by the forces of sin and evil in our lives, but we also acknowledge that we have God’s word, which is powerful to tear apart those forces. As the Psalmist says, “The waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. We will not fear though the earth gives way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.” (Ps 46).

March 30, 2025

Faith leads us into the fire of repentance this Lenten season, and every day. This fire is what purifies us and helps us to amend our sinful ways. Faith and fire are two different ways to think about repentance. First, repentance means that we are totally consumed by God’s wrath and have to be resurrected every day. Second, repentance means that we are not hurt at all by God’s wrath, but only the ropes that bind us are burned away.

March 16, 2025

God tells Abraham to kill his only son, and he is willing to go through with it. Somehow this is a picture of faith. But if this is what faith is, do you really want it?

We might try to console ourselves with the thought that everything turned out all right in the end. God really didn’t make Abraham go through with it. Instead, he provided a ram for the sacrifice, which makes us think forward in time to the sacrifice of Christ, where God really did offer up his only Son.

April 6, 2025

The story in the book of Exodus is not only about what happened to the Israelites long ago. It sets forth a pattern of God’s deliverance that we can see repeated multiple times in the Bible and in our own lives as well. The story itself echoes the pattern that God established at creation. It is a story of rescue and restoration And the pattern is repeated in Christ’s resurrection and also in our baptism.