Tag: Alexander Schmemann

Holy Week Reflections: The Journey of Repentance

Return to the Lord Your God with All Your Heart – With Jesus, we set our face toward Jerusalem.  We make our pilgrimage with Him by the way of repentance, and thus, return to the dying and rising of Holy Baptism.1

In the gospel of Luke there are five mentions of Christ’s intention to go to Jerusalem. In Luke 9:51 we are told that “when the days draw near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” The language here for “set his face” describes Christ’s determination, “his steely resolve” to do His Father’s bidding. I believe it’s our call as well in this season of Lent to set our faces toward Holy Week.

I’m mindful of the significance of entering fully into all that this week holds. As I read the different gospel accounts of Holy Week I confess a preference for Luke’s gospel account. He is such a grand storyteller and how he leads us into this time is particularly profound. As I have been studying this week I’ve also been struck by the range of emotions we see in Jesus.– His sorrow over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), His wrath in the temple (Luke 19:45), His grief in the garden (Luke 22:45-46), and His joy in the cross (Heb. 12:2).

I think it’s fitting for us, on the eve of Palm Sunday, to do the work of the prayer of examen. (If you want the specifics of the prayer of examen or confessional prayer, I did include the link in my last post, but you can also click here: https://hamewith.org/2023/12/confessional-prayer/)

Let’s find a quiet place and begin to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us those sins, habits or attitudes that need to be forgiven. I think we cannot (or should not) do this work on our own. That would probably put us in jeopardy of either minimizing our sin or keeping us bound in unhealthy guilt or shame. The apostle Paul can help us here -in Col. 3:5-10 he is thorough in describing those sins we were called to put to death in our baptisms. (But I would also recommend finding a trusted friend or pastor to be with you in your confession).

It is the work of the Holy Spirit that we need as we come to confession of sin. We need Him to reveal Christ to us; we need Him to show us our hearts; we need Him to awaken in us a holy contrition, and sorrow over our sins and our forgetfulness.

So, as we come to this prayer, we cry out – Show us Christ, Lord, show us the Father’s love. Let gratitude rise in our hearts in this holy time for all that You, and the Father and the Son have done in our hearts and lives… We remember Your goodness, Your provision for us, Your great faithfulness. We come to this confession as the psalmist did in Psalm 139:23 -24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Test me and know my thoughts! See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting!”

We don’t need to make a ruthless inventory of sins – but we do need to be as specific as we can. Use your prayer journal to do this, or even better do what I suggested earlier: find someone who can be a witness to your confession. As we name them, and confess them we can pray – “Lord, I repent. I turn from this sin.” Alexander Schmemann in writing about repentance says that “repentance as regret, as a desire to return, and a surrender to God’s love and mercy… “is a gift to every Christian. He goes on, “repentance is the shock of man, seeing in himself the ‘image of the ineffable glory,’ [and] realizes that he has defiled, betrayed and rejected it [as bearers of the image of God] in his life.” 2  This sort of contrition and compunction is a gift of the Holy Spirit as we yield our sins up to Christ.

We then go on to ask the Spirit to search our hearts to reveal to us the roots of those sins. If I confess the sin of gossiping about someone I need to see what is at the heart of that sin. Is it envy? Bitterness? Scorn? These too Paul addresses in Colossians 3.

After our confession of sin, we must go on to receive God’s forgiveness in Christ. This is a critical part of our confession. We leave our sins at the cross and take deep into our hearts the grace and mercy of God. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom 6:3)

“The power of sin to rule [our] lives has been destroyed in the cross of Christ: we have died with Christ and have been raised up together with him in newness of life.” (Richard Lovelace)

“Therefore, we are not to set the estimates of our power to conquer sin according to past experiences of our will power but are to fix our attention on Christ and the power of his risen life in which we participate: for we have died, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God.”3

This is the work of every believer. This is the work of love. Confession of sin deepens not only our love for God but for ourselves and others too. Truly confessing and repenting has a way of uniting us with the Body of Christ. Today is the Day of the Lord. Today he calls us to set our eyes on Jerusalem. Begin this journey by bringing your sins, regrets and forgetfulness to Christ. Let this week be a new day for you – a call to once again live out your baptismal identity. We were dead in our sins, and Christ brought us back from death into life. Thanks be to God!

1 http://www.stpaullutheranchurchhamel.org/ashwednesday.html>

2 Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (St Valdimir’s Seminary Press, 1969), 65.

3 Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Inter-Varsity Press), 115.

The Gratitude Project: Moving toward Resurrection

This month (March 23) marks the fourth anniversary of my grandson’s going home to be with Jesus. (For those of you unfamiliar with Zekey’s story I would encourage you to read my son’s blog (thesometimespreacher.com) and my daughter-in-law’s blog (breeloverly.com). Zekey passed into the arms of Jesus at four years old, after suffering  a rare neurological disorder called Batten’s). Because of its proximity to Good Friday and Easter I associate his death with both Lent and Holy Week. In my last post I wrote of Zekey receiving the ashes of Ash Wednesday. And his journey continued from there until he passed into the arms of Jesus  almost a month before Easter that year. I  am reminded that with my memories of  Zekey, just as in the memorial of Good Friday there is the paradox of conflicting emotions. We are relieved because Zekey no long suffers but we miss him with the longing for that reunion that will only come in heaven.

I believe we can honor Christ’s sacrifice by being both saddened (sobered) that the world had come to this place in our brokenness and sadness and sin that God’s only son had to die and joyful (grateful) that in his death is glory. The glory of the cross.  I wonder if Satan rejoiced at Christ’s death or did he already know that in Christ’s dying the world was made new again – that Redemption was purchased through the blood of Christ? Christ experienced both the humiliation of death by crucifixion and its glory because it was through that death that He once and for all could demonstrate his unfailing, his eternal, his lasting love for us, sinners that we are.

How can we turn our backs on that love – either in our presumption to believe we are no longer sinners, or in our despair to believe that nothing can take away our sin? Our task both during Lent and throughout our Christian lives is to live in that space between sin and glory, death and eternal life.

Alexander Schmemann called Lent the season of Bright Sadness.  And he did so, in the knowledge that we as Christians are called to walk the journey (passover) to Resurrection.

“For each year Lent and Easter are, once again, the rediscovery and the recovery by us of what we were made through our own baptismal death and resurrection”.

It strikes me that Christian maturity has a lot to do with our capacity to live in tension – to know we are sinners and at the same time saints; that we are  called to die daily (to our sin) and to live daily (to the hope we have in Christ!) And such is Christian gratitude, which is so much more than the world offers. With Zekey, we could hate the “unmaking” of disease, but be eternally grateful for the redemption of Easter, of Resurrection. Because of Christ – #zekeylives.

One practice of gratitude that I find so helpful is the naming of the sin that binds me, and moving through that confession (to God and others) to receiving God’s grace, His unwavering love, and His unmitigated forgiveness of that sin. I do not need to be grateful for the hard circumstances of my life, or my sin, or the world’s sin… but I can be grateful that God, through His Son redeems what Satan intended for evil. How about you? What part of your story have you seen God redeem? And how does this journey to Easter reflect it?