Faith in Progress

Lent 5 March 25, 2012 Jeremiah 31:31-34 During the year before Holden and I got married, I read the entire Bible looking for the perfect readings for our wedding.   Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah for this morning is one that made the cut.   I loved the promise God makes about the new covenant that will be written on our hearts so that all of us know the Lord.   The promise that God will be our God and we will be God’s people.   The beauty of that promise, combined with the joy of my wedding, led me to have this very warm and fuzzy feeling about the book of Jeremiah ever since. In reading this passage this past week, though, I couldn’t help wondering about the fulfillment of this promise.   I look around the world and read the newspapers and see very clearly that we humans do not yet seem to have God written clearly on our hearts.   The recent shooting of civilians in Afghanistan, the teenager in Florida seemingly killed because his skin color scared someone, the political p

As a parent, pre-priesthood, I struggled during Lent to find services that would introduce my young children to Lent without giving them nightmares.  But family-friendly services on Ash Wednesday and during Holy Week were hard to come by.  So when I started working at St. Aidan's, one of my favorite projects was creating services that would give children a taste of Lent in an age-appropriate way.  St. Aidan's family Ash Wednesday and Holy Week services have since become two of my favorite services of the year.  Here's a taste of Ash Wednesday... We started outside. I had outlines of butterflies and crayons for kids to color if they wanted - symbols of Easter that we would be saying goodbye to during Lent but that would reappear on Easter (when we'll have them streaming overhead in church). Once the crowd had gathered, we burned a bunch of last year's palm branches to make our own ashes. The kids were entranced. After saying a prayer, I introduced the idea of As