Not much time for either browsing the web or writing blog entries today, but just a couple of quick notable links:
George Herbert on Lent from the Ad Trinitatem blog, where there’s much more on Herbert, since today is his commemoration.
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David Bennett at Per Christum blog: Lent is about Good News. Here’s an excerpt. But it’s a short post and you should definitely read it all. Good news indeed!
Some people may dread Lent, because of its emphasis on penance and sacrifice, but I think we must ask ourselves, “what is the purpose of our penance and sacrifice?” Transformation. Transformation of our entire being: body, soul, and spirit. However, Lent is not a “Christian self-help program,” a works-based program that will soon make it on Oprah. Through our observance of Lent, we become more like Christ, the same Christ who offers us his love and grace.
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A commenter on one of our posts appealing for Anglican Lenten resources suggested this page on using the Names of God in meditation from the (Anglican) diocese of San Joaquin. It looks excellent and will probably merit a stand-alone blog post here soon. But for today, I’ll just link it.
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Today’s lectionary includes one of my favorite Scripture passages Titus 2:1-15. James Gibson’s reflections on that passage at This Day in the Word are excellent and so appropriate for Lent:
“For the grace of God has appeared,” Paul writes. It is not in our own strength that we can turn away from the enticements of the world which are always beckoning us to indulge the flesh and glory in our fallenness. Grace is the gift of God which “[brings] salvation to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age.”
Life under the New Covenant of grace is neither rigid legalism nor illicit libertinism. It is, rather, a life yielded to the Spirit of the living God, who alone is able, through the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, “to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.”
As glorious as the grace of God is, however, it is, in this present age, merely a foretaste of the “blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” This is the greater glory for which God’s people wait. But we do not wait for it passively. If we are, indeed, set apart by God as “a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works,” we will never grow weary in doing those good things which make manifest his presence even in the midst of a broken, fallen world longing for its full redemption. For this task, we will always find his grace sufficient.
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That’s all I have time for today… Also, apologies that I haven’t yet put together a Lent sidebar. That will be my task for tomorrow or Sunday.
