Once Upon a Time...

Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. Sleeping with Bread – practicing a nightly Examen – was offered as a first tool for Lent. A second tool is seeing the Jesus Story not as prescriptive, but evocative, not as blackboard, but as doorway; it is to read the Gospel as Story, to enter it as real.

Because tomorrow is Sunday, the first of five in Lent, I’d like to climb into the story that you will hear if you happen to go to a Catholic church, or that you may experience on your own. We’ll do a bit more of it tomorrow, then spend some time looking at our two Lenten tools – the nightly Examen and this weekly process of entering the next Jesus Story, the next Gospel.
The word gospel is from the Old English godspel: god-spel :good-story. We often refer to a similar translation as “Good News”, and that will be important during Lent, where the story takes us through experiences of betrayal, brutality, and death. We will find the good in it; more precisely, the good will find us from within it. The story begins: the Good Story of Luke, Chapter 4, verses 1-13, included at the bottom of this posting.
What we’re after is to get into this story. A young man is in the desert, brought there by a spirit that has just entered him when he let his friend John baptize him in the nearby Jordan River. When he lifted his head from the water in which John had submerged him, he had heard a voice, loud and clear as day say to all present there by the river “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!” Imagine that happening to you. Imagine at a work luncheon, or a school play with your kids, or maybe right there in the grocery store a voice coming from the sky and saying that about you, and maybe a dove flying above your head, just in case the people around you don’t know to whom The Voice is referring. That's where this story starts. A man is in the desert hills above the river trying to make sense of the words that The Voice had just said about him. Imagine that it is you. You have just heard those words. You are the beloved daughter, the beloved son. The people are to look at you, to listen to you. And you have fled to the desert hills above the river.

Experiencing this is what we’re after; entering it so that it becomes more than words, words that we may have heard so often that they’ve lost meaning, if they ever had it. The Monks centuries ago meditated on Scripture when there were dozens of them sharing one enormous hand-scribed Bible. They did it by taking time in the Chapel reading the text again and again until they remembered it, word-for-word, but more importantly scene-by-scene. Then they would go to their room and let the story play in their mind, over and over until a door opened and let them in. This is what I hope you will try. Remember, this is not a math problem or a speech to memorize or solve in your head. Come to your senses! The door that opens to you will not be a concept or idea. It will be feeling rough ground on the soles of your feet, or feeling your knees weaken on the parapet of the temple, or seeing the town below. Suddenly you find yourself inside. Play the story from there, from inside. Who are you there? Are you an unseen observer? Are you Jesus, or the devil? Your role will be given to you. Don’t take a role. Read the story over and over with your imagination, as a story, until you can close your eyes and keep the story looping.
Why do this? The Jesus story is about a man who was able to reach out and touch; some would say to heal. He was a man who calmly challenged the powerful. He was a teacher who was followed by crowds. And when who he was and what he did got him in trouble, he accepted death rather than conform to what he saw as wrong. He did all that he did with only the power of love and the certainty of his father’s love. That Voice remained with him through this entire story of his journey to and through death. And his story has remained with our human civilization. This story. And it begins here, in the desert hills above the Jordan where he heard that Voice….

Filled with the holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'one does not live by bread alone.'" Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, "I shall give to you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me." Jesus said to him in reply, "It is written: 'You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.'" Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written: 'He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,' and: 'With their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus said to him in reply, "It also says, 'You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.'"

If you get stuck, let me know. Comment (so we will all learn with you) or e-mail me. Enjoy the "good story".





FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.