It's one week out of the year - but what a week!

The saintly Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn often said, "When you pray even one word to God, enter into that word with all your body." One of his listeners objected, "Rabbi, how can a full-grown person enter bodily into a tiny word?" And the rabbi answered him, "Anyone who thinks himself greater than a word of prayer is not the kind of person we are talking about."

As we once again prepare to enter Holy Week, in which we remember the death and resurrection of Christ, we should take with us the words of Rabbi Moshe. For if Holy Week is to have significance, it must be a week of prayer. Even the word "Holy" means that it should be set apart and so this coming week should be different, it should be special, it should be "Set Apart" but for what if it is not prayer.

We know the stories of Holy Week, of Jesus' triumph entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with it's shouts of Hosannas, we know of the Passover meal with Jesus' friends where he literally offers himself up as the blood of the lamb and gives us the promise that when we eat of the bread and drink of the wine his very presence is there to strengthen us, we know of the anguish in the garden and of the betrayal, we know of the mock trial and ridicule, and we know of the painful death on a Calvary hill. We know the story - so what?

So what makes this week "Holy"? What "Set's it apart"? By his passion and death Jesus entered, body and blood, into the words of his prayer. Holy Week calls us beyond a habitual, mechanical repetition of "saying prayers" into the painful process of becoming prayer. If we are to gain from the graces of this Holy Week, we must pray with the zeal and the passion which Rabbi Moshe spoke about. We will have to move beyond the mere recitation of words to invest each word we pray with all our body.

As Jesus reminds us, the love of God requires the total gift of ourselves. We are to love God with ALL our heart, body and soul. To enter prayer with such an intention makes us humble servants and literally "set us apart" allowing us to become the "Holy" servants of our God. Such humble prayer allows us to climb inside each word of prayer, regardless of our size.

Not sure how to start? Well start with a simple "Our Father" (or if you feel like following the model Jesus gave and start with "Daddy", literally the word Abba means Daddy) and recognize that God's response will be the simple "Yes child, I'm listening".

I pray, that as you journey through this Holy Week,whether you are able to partake in the sacred liturgies of the Church, that you may find some ways to make this coming week as prayerful as possible and that you might literally set apart the time to acknowledge the amazing grace the stories hold for all our lives.

I would love to hear what Holy Week means to you and what are those things that you do that help you to "set apart" this week to the glory of God.

Full of grace....just not very graceful,

Pastor Jill

Right side up or upside down

Tonight in our Lenten worship service we are going to hear the story of Phillip meeting the Eunuch (Acts 8: 26-39) along the road going from Jerusalem and Gaza. My bible tells me in the midst of the text that this road "is a wilderness road". During Lent our focus, here at Trinity, has been about "Water in the Wilderness" and we have looked at a lot of passages about wilderness - the Israelites wandering in the wilderness after leaving Egypt, Israelites leaving the exile in Babylon to go through the wilderness back to the Promised Land, Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, and now this wilderness road. There is a lot of wilderness in the bible but if we want to be realistic, there is a lot of wilderness in our own lives too. Now maybe it's not barren land that we have to walk through without food or water but there are days when the wilderness of life just seems to overtake us. I'm pretty sure if I were to have you do a fill in the blank on this sentence "I have experienced walking in the wilderness when ______________happened." You all could find an answer of some kind or another.

So here we are with this Ethiopian eunuch. What do we know about him? Well, we know that it was common in biblical times for officials in royal courts to be physically altered so they could not father children. We know that he was a believer in God because the text tells us he was returning from worshiping in Jerusalem (even though as a eunuch he couldn't enter the temple - effectively making him an outsider) and he was reading from Isaiah. One could only imagine how strange his life must have been - he is from a different culture and ethnicity, he serves the queen of Ethiopia and has sacrificed physically for that post and yet he believes in God and when Phillip begins to tell him about how the very scripture he has been reading has been about Jesus and tells him about the good news of Jesus, this outsider, this one wandering in the wilderness wants to respond to the good news by becoming a follower of Jesus through baptism. "Look," he says, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?" And Phillip baptized him.

In the waters of baptism we go from being an outsider to belonging, we go from wandering in the wilderness to knowing that we are not lost but found and even in spite of ourselves God loves us.

Sometimes when we get lost in the wilderness we feel like our worlds have been turned upside down and we lose perspective and it's is easy to feel alone and forsaken. And yet when we allow the waters of our baptism to drip down our foreheads we are reminded that no matter what, we belong and it can right our world. The eunuch still dripping from the waters of his baptism "went on his way rejoicing".

So how would you answer the question of experiencing the wilderness and fill in the blank (not necessary to actually fill it in) and how has knowing the good news of Jesus Christ changed your perspective? Now I know that this is not a blog where there are a lot of comments but your witness could be the very thing that helps someone else wandering in the wilderness to stop and experience a new perspective - so basically people I want some comments.

Full of grace...just not very graceful,

Pastor Jill

Face of God

Every week during our staff meeting, a member of staff shares a brief devotion with the rest of us. It is helpful for us start our time together remembering the work we do is done in the name of Christ and to stop and allow us to be feed. Every week is a little different but always inspiring. Last week the person who was suppose to led the devotion was unable to be with us and having not prepared something in advance - I punted. "Where have you seen the face of God this week?" Well it didn't take long before we began sharing the ordinary events of life that reflected the extraordinary face of God and it didn't take much for Pastor Dale (the other much wiser and smarter pastor at Trinity) to break out the newest picture of his granddaughter, Kara Grace. As we oohed and awed over just how adorable she is, she became a tangible face of the God for whom we were created and whose likeness we bare.

As I left that meeting, I didn't think much about my own question but then tragedy struck for one of our members. Their home caught fire on Sunday afternoon and destroyed everything in their home. By Sunday night what they could salvage from the disaster was laid out in his parents garage trying to dry out. As I walked into the house I saw the face of God standing at a sink washing off the grime and drying off arts and craft supplies for their 3 year old. As I logged on to Facebook yesterday morning I saw the face of God in posts from across the southeast offering not only prayers but requests to do more. As I talked to his sister I saw the face of God in the story she shared of the teachers at her school who having heard the news that their daughter was upset over losing all her books in the fire brought her aunt each a book to give her niece. I saw the face of God in that 3 year old daughter's father sharing her advice that "Daddy doesn't need to be sad because they could get a new bed - it will be ok".

During Lent we find ourselves in the midst of the wilderness and sometimes in the midst of the wilderness it is easy to get overwhelmed and the reality is that the wilderness of life doesn't always and only happen during lent. But when we actively look for the face of God in our lives then we can echo Isaiah's words from chapter 35: "The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing...They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God."

Where have you seen the face of God in the world this week?

Full of grace...just not very graceful,

Pastor Jill

New Focus

Saturday was a big day in the Henning household, my oldest daughter Sarah got her first pair of glasses. She had had an eye examine a couple of years ago and had been tested at school last month and failed the test at school so off we went to our eye doctor. In order to make the time useful I scheduled my appointment at the same time and so the two of us sat listening to each other decide if this lens made it clearer then the other. We are now an ad for eye glass companies with our fancy new specs. The fun part though was listening to Sarah all the way home and in the days following talking about how clearly she sees things now and how she didn't realize how bad she was seeing until her new glasses showed her the difference. I was just happy to still be able to leave the office with single vision glasses and the hope that my youth is still in tack.

Our trip the eye doctor got me thinking about how Lent is like putting on new glasses, a time to stop and examine our relationship with God and our actions and practices to see how we can change. We are 12 days into this 40 day journey - how is it going for you?

I gave up drinking Diet Coke for Lent (actually I gave it up a couple of weeks early due to a stomach bug) and have tried to really focus on filling my desire to have a diet coke with prayer (let's just say I really want a diet coke, so prayer has been a constant companion on this journey). I have tried to take the money I would have spent on diet coke (at least $3/day) and put it in our fundraiser to raise money for wells in the Congo and my commitment to the Hunger Walk we are participating in a couple of weeks. But even as I do these things - there is so much more I could be doing - my Lenten devotional is too often forgotten and my prayers are focused to much on my demands rather then listening for the will of God. Forty days is a long journey and I still have time to grow.

God invites us to see our relationship with God different during Lent - to see the sacrifice God was willing to make and to see how we can respond to that sacrifice. It's not a time to give something up or do something more because "we have to" but in response to what God was willing to give up for us because God loves us. There are a lot of "have to's" in our world but God doesn't want us to be in relationship with God because we "have to" but because we recognize the love that God has for us and we want to love and live our lives in response to that love.

So how are you seeing things differently this Lent? What have you learned differently about your relationship with God?

One of my favorite sayings a great saint in the church cross stitched for me for my ordination it says: What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God. So how's your gift shaping up?

Full of grace...just not very graceful,

Pastor Jill