Taking up Crosses

What does a messiah look like anyway? I suppose your answer is going to depend on your situation, depend on what you see as the problems in your life. Messiahs solve problems and they do it with great ease. Messiahs lift burdens without seeming to have to strain themselves very much at all. Messiahs rally the troops, pull people together to get a task done.

We're all looking for one sort of messiah or another.

But what happens when the messiah you find turns out to want to deal with a different problem than the one you had in mind? What happens when that messiah seems to want to throw away all the opportunities that you can see and instead of solving the obvious problems wants you to follow in a whole other direction? What do you do?

That is the sort of scenario we find ourselves in this Sunday, the second Sunday of Lent, as Jesus talks about the suffering and rejection ahead of him.

Join us as we see how Jesus words continue to impact our lives.

To the Desert

Last week it was mountaintops and this week, the first Sunday of Lent, we go to the desert. Mark tells us that after his baptism, Jesus is driven into the desert by the Spirit. Driven, not led by, enticed, or moved by, no Jesus is driven into the desert. Driven is a word that we might use with cattle as we drive them in from the fields. It's not a word that we would necessarily associate with the work of the Holy Spirit, or even think that Jesus could be driven.

But that is what Mark tells us.  Jesus is driven into the desert, before Mark lets him speak a single word, before he is able to start to gather followers, before he is able to start to describe the kingdom he is bringing, to share any good news, he is driven to the desert.

We'll spend some time thinking about that desert experience this Sunday and wonder together how Jesus beginning his ministry, beginning his journey to the cross, touches our desert experiences.

The View from the Mountaintop

Being on the top of a mountain really changes the way that we see the world. We see so much more than we can when we are on the ground and, unless you have a fear of heights, the experience of being on a mountain can lead to a sense of both euphoria and power.

Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday as we remember Jesus taking his disciples up both a physical mountain and a spiritual one. The picture they get overwhelms their minds they suffer fear, in the middle of their exhilaration and yet, also feel that they would like to preserve the experience. Peter suggests they build houses there so they don't need to leave, don't need to go back to the real world with its struggles and troubles.

We'll spend some time together thinking about our own mountaintop experiences, wondering how Jesus might react to the way we handle them.