Sunday Wrap-Up

The Rediscovery of Ritual

Following our look at the season of lent, we come out of the desert looking for signs of life. As spring unfolds and the earth is reborn, we recognize it's glory as Wholly God's:

LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens. Psalm 8

Yet in leaving the desert, the earth we find is full of distraction, speed and complexity. We crave that silence and focus offered by the desert.

In short, by the fourth century, desert had been marked as redemptive space of the first order. And like their environmentalist heirs, creators of early Christian wilderness romance played upon a trope of pure and empty spaces. Athanasius

Coming out of a desert of Lent, we strive to bring the silence with us. Looking again to the earth we see that God is not only the author of physical earth, but those who dwell within as well.

The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. Psalm 24

We come together as dwellers in his creation and place our jointly focus our gaze heavanward.

Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest. Hebrews 3

And on this Sunday, a day aside, we rest, recognizing the mystery of this wholly other God who cannot be bound by our systemization and analysis.

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for those who enter God's rest also rest from their own work, just as God did from his. Hebrews 4

Holy, holy, holy.

In silence we break bread together. In song we praise Him, in prayer we lift each other up. Returning to the world we find this silence a desert a restoration of a whole life sustained by our Holy Lord.