Sunday, March 5, 2023

Second Sunday in Lent

The Revised Common Lectionary passages for the Lord’s Day are:
– First Reading: Genesis 12:1-4a
– Psalm 121
– Second Reading: Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
– Gospel Reading: John 3:1-17

The liturgical color for the day is: Purple

Nicodemus.  He doesn’t get it.  But he comes to Jesus.  Nicodemus experiences pure mystery from on high here.  It makes for a beautiful, memorable, life-shaping night. 

Such is our story.  Nicodemus goes to Jesus at night. Lent may be the night—the dark place.  Yet, in a Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet kind of way night becomes this place of beauty and love and hope.

We may not fully understand how it is that God moves or even how it is that God is calling us to live.

But we come back. We are to come back and seek it again.  We come back and we keep seeking.  And we keep coming back.

We are to understand our living like the night.  Even as the night comes again and again…even as that cycle of day churns on we are to see that every day there is this reaching out and reaching down to us.  Each and every day we grow in this life with that reality.  We grow in that reality that the presence of God is grasping us.

This is our story…that we do not get it all…but, we get some.  Nicodemus left that night without it all figured out, but he had more than what had when he arrived.  This is the Christian life.  We need not have it all figured out—every mystery does not have to be solved.  We get enough to know that in the end…no matter where life takes us—no matter what, in the end, after all of it is past…there is the night.  And I dare say…a happy ending.

Along the way allow that wind of the Spirit to blow where it will.  For where it blows there is this mysterious, wonderful, incredible, boundless and eternal love. 

—

Rev. Dr. Daris Bultena
General Presbyter and Stated Clerk