Hey church,
The season of Lent is upon us. I'm not going to preach at you (well, not today, anyway) about what this season could/should mean for us as followers of Jesus. And we don't exactly have a master plan for Lent as a community, just yet. (Have you met us?) ;-) But I'll just tease you with the suggestion that what seems to be taking shape is a Lenten season with practices and gatherings related (in one way or another) to a concept that the Buddha called "non-attachment", and which Jesus talked a lot about as well, eg. in the "
Hakuna Matattitudes" in the Sermon on the Mount.
To begin this journey, please join us on Ash Wednesday (the 9th), at the home of Sandy and Chris Rackley (
contact us if you need directions). Arrive as early as 6:30pm; we'll probably get going between 7 and 7:30. We'll begin with a shared meal - you're welcome to bring a beverage or side to share (or just bring yourself). Please also bring something burnable (not explosive, please) that represents something you need to let go of (or at least think about what this might be, and you can write it down on a piece of paper during the service). We'll share a worship service inspired in part by
this blog post, in which we'll read the Ash Wednesday scriptures, spend 10-15 minutes writing our own prayer of lament, and then burn the things we need to let go of, and make the sign of the cross on each others' foreheads with the communal ashes.
Then, please join us at 10am on Sunday at
Jammin' Java for our first Sunday of Lent, in which we will begin to explore this concept of non-attachment and its relationship to grace, with help from our own Karen Win Vroom, who got us thinking about this stuff in the first place.
The 9:30 am club (open-source musical worship) will be meeting prior to the service - come and join the group! Bring an instrument or your voice and look forward to some time to worship with music.
Please note that we may not be doing our usual post-church lunch at Chipotle this week - we usually adopt some Lenten community practice around giving up a purchased meal and donating the money saved to a worthy cause, and plans for that are still taking shape this year. If you're not on our Core email list, and you want to find out about Sunday's lunch/fellowship plans, please
contact us.
And may your Lenten journey bring you closer to God, and to the footprints of Jesus. (Not those ones in the sand on that poster, though those are cool too. I mean the stuff he did and hoped his followers would do too. Peace.)
Mike Croghan
