Deliberately Diverse represents the individual thoughts and opinions of a group of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but are gratified by the opportunity to stimulate deliberately diverse discussions in our beloved community.
Today’s column represents the thoughts and opinions of The Reverend Terry Pierce, vicar of St. James’ Episcopal Church in Taylor, not the Taylor Press.
In our church, and many others, the church year is anchored by the seasons of Christmas and Easter. The year begins four Sundays before Christmas Day with the season of Advent – a season of waiting and preparation. During Advent, we wait with anticipation for God to break into our world and our time – to break through what we might imagine as the curtain between the earthly and the divine.
At Christmas, we celebrate that breaking through of God into human time and space.
In Christ, God, the divine, fully enters into our lives.
Following Christmas is Epiphany, when we celebrate God’s manifestation to the Gentiles, to all the peoples of the world, in the revelation of Christ to the Magi. The last Sunday of Epiphany is Transfiguration Sunday when Jesus takes three disciples up the mountain where the Glory of God is manifest in Jesus, another break in the veil between the earthly and the divine. Following the Transfiguration, Jesus turns towards Jerusalem and our story stops looking back to Christmas and begins looking forward to Easter.
On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded that we are mortal and it is only as we are connected to the divinity of Jesus – to our own core of divinity as God’s created beings – that we receive the gift of eternal life.
Jesus is baptized by John and the heavens are torn apart. The only other place this Greek word is used in the gospel of Mark is in the description of the tearing of the temple curtain at the moment Jesus dies on the cross.
In the birth of Christ, God created a new narrative in the world. In Lent, traditionally, those who wished to be baptized in Christ spent a season of fasting, prayer and study to prepare for becoming a part of Christ’s church.
In Lent, we are invited to join with God in the remaking of a broken creation by recognizing our mortality and participating in a new narrative.
We are invited during this Lenten season to journey into the wilderness, to face our own wild natures. On the other side of that journey is the chaos of Good Friday and the silence of the empty tomb through, which we can see the Easter dawn. It is truly a time for reflecting on our relationship with God and our relationship with humans and with creation.
Godspeed.
