A 7 Central Things Lenten Devotional

                God who was faithful to unfaithful David, God who made good to flow out of the bad relationship between Joseph and his siblings, God we find in Jesus Christ—forgiving sins and healing lives—call us continually to repentance and forgiveness, empower us to be repairers of the breach, give us sensitive spirits and prophetic voices. Make your Church, O Lord, to be a place where victims are heard and cared for, and a people who offer concrete steps toward right relationships. Amen.

  R. and K. Wood, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons It is not good to make excuses for a sin based on it being part of your job or role. Similarly, hiding from sins that are extremes of what you’ve done in the past and it was okay, does not make them any less a sin. In fact, if a “success script” you rely on leads to sin, it is worth reflecting on the entire script; for example, “I just love too much” was maybe a dangerous thing for David’s soul and relationships all along, but he didn’t realize it until it led him to rape and murder. It is not good to describe sin or forgiveness in solely disembodied ways—it can make it hard to know that someone has broken a relationship or that the mending of that relationship has occurred. In that line of thought, it is not good to wallow in a sin after it has been forgiven, after a while it can come off as bragging or picking at a scab.   It is good to take seriously the ways we’ve harmed other people, even if the hurt was uninten...

  A crime forgiven by Neil Owen, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Disestablishment —How do we hear confession and forgiveness? Do the words we use still work? I’m a big proponent of the worship re-writing resource In these and other words, because it forces us to ask questions about language, about the tension between familiarity and surprise . I know when I’ve tweaked the liturgical language of our confession and forgiveness, I inevitably get some interesting responses. Folk who’ve been using the words found on page 77 of the Lutheran Book of Worship since it came out in the 70s are surprised that I seem to be telling them that they are forgiven for their sins . The liturgy had become so familiar that they no longer recognized what the words even meant!               And that right there is the challenge and opportunity of the disestablishment of the chur...

                Sometimes it feels like forgiveness is uplifted as the highest of values, and also the least well explained. A pastor (I know I’ve done this) will breathlessly describe forgiveness as the core of the gospel, or the most important outworking of the Spirit in our lives, or some other nice thing about forgiveness. And we leave it there for everyone to work out on their own. As you can imagine this can lead to guilt for those who don’t forgive, charges of hypocrisy at Christians who don’t forgive well, and folk are taken advantage of, because they forgive in ways that don’t reckon with the reality of being sinned against.               Luckily Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho Tutu wrote The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World which lays out practical steps for forgiveness: 1. Tell the story—Just the...

  When I was in second grade, we had a show and tell day. We each put a precious object of ours onto the radiator by the window and then went down the line looking at one another’s beloved things. One girl had brought a porcelain unicorn her grandmother gave her. It was beautiful, it made me think of fantasy stories and strange enchanted worlds. And at some point, it broke. I don’t know if it caught on my shirt, or if someone else bumped into it. The teacher made a big deal out of the destroyed unicorn, and no one confessed to knocking it over. Its destruction was the center of our classes’ life for multiple days, I know I began to feel guilty, not being sure if I’d somehow been at fault—and I wasn’t the only student worried that they may have somehow destroyed our classmate’s beloved thing—we’d hurt her! Eventually the class took up a collection and replaced the unicorn with a porcelain dragon.               I don’t ...

장영재탐험단, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons               “You are the man!” Said the prophet Nathan to surprised David; David who perhaps did not realize his “taking” of Bathsheba and his murder of her husband Uriah, was anything other than a kingly prerogative. After all, Israel had been warned, if you choose the monarchy instead of the tribal system, kings’ll conscript your men, take your wealth, make war, and take your women.               But David’s “loving too much” and taking on the trappings of Kingship had consequences. Consequences for his Kingdom, his friends and lovers, his family, and his soul. And so, we receive this psalm, “Have mercy on me, O God.” Blot out! Wash! Cleanse! I, I alone have done this! This sin shoots backwards to my very birth. Purge me! Create in me a clean heart! Cast m...