Jon C. Swanson's Blog, page 16

Morning.

A prayer for the third Sunday of Lent.

God.

We think of you often as angry, and we want to think of you as loving.
We think of you as loving, and we want to think of you as non-judgmental.
We think of you as non-judgmental, and we want to think of you as, well, as shallowly nice.

We read texts that talk about your boundless graciousness and that talk about people falling into the ground and being killed by snakes.

And we aren’t sure what to think.

About you.

We confess that we want you to be like us more than we wan...

Think carefully.

“What do I do for 300 for Friday?” I asked Nancy.

She walked into my office from her desk in the family room.

“Spring,” she said. “Green grass. The verse I shared on Facebook today.”

Nancy has put Bible verses in emails to a small group of friends or to family. As she’s reading every morning, she sometimes notices something and shares that.

For this season, she’s sometimes putting a sentence or two on Facebook.

Today it was “The Lord of Hosts says this: ‘Think carefully about y...

Longing.

We worry. We worry all the time about messing up, about what might happen.

I was in a conversation the other day talking about not giving people false hope, because I know how stories turn out. I know that the odds of death in this illness are great. And I don’t want people to get their hopes up and then be devastated.

But I realized the other day that sometimes I give people false fear. I distract, I lower expectations. And that’s not helpful either.

Because both false hope and fals...

Sacrifice and a New Bike

Rich Dixon brings us an update.

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Last time our team discussed my odd aversion to accepting assistance.

Our discussion began with a teammate’s uncomfortable assertion that service, in our culture, is often tied to convenience. I don’t remember if anyone said it out loud, but as we talked around this issue, I suspect we were all thinking the same thing.

We’re too comfortable with being comfortable.

I’ll speak for myself – I’m good at talking about sacrifice. Mostly, I’m not a...

Walking toward the danger.

And in the middle of that time, when Jesus is moving toward Jerusalem even though others may not have realized it yet, some Pharisees came and warned him.

As a religious party, the Pharisees probably agreed with Herod about Jesus. He was disruptive to the way things were working. His preaching and healing and power were a threat.

However, these particular Pharisees seem to express actual concern for Jesus. “Protect yourself.”

It’s the way most of us would act if we saw someone being ...

As the line toward death got straighter, Jesus

We spend a lot of time following directions and people and paths. They can get us lost.

So our lesson for today is this: Follow the example of Jesus, because our hope knows there is more to life than what we see.

Jesus was popular, for a while. We’ve heard stories about crowds and followers and healings and miracles. We know that Jesus the son was blessed by the Father and encouraged by the Spirit.

But why did he need encouragement?

Because Jesus, as popular as he was with the peo...

A prayer for the second Sunday in Lent

God.

You and we make promises.

Maybe that’s part of what it means to be a person, to make promises to other people. Commitments. Covenants. Agreements.

We agree to belong to each other. We agree to belong to teams, to communities, to congregations. We say that we will keep faith. And then we don’t.

We confess that we willfully choose to do things that we know are not for the good of those we are committed to.We confess that we unwittingly make choices that damage our relation...

Mea culpa

It’s Latin. It means “my fault.” It’s what I’m telling a group of students today.

I gave the assignment to shoot a video and upload it to the online course. And then to give feedback to other students.

It’s my third time through this course. We’ve survived the previous two times.

However, this time students are having a hard time uploading the videos, the video size is inconsistent, and students aren’t able to see the videos of others.

But there’s more to the story.

The previou...

A small breath.

As I sat in a church at a concert on Tuesday night, listening to a choir singing Kýrie, eléison, “Lord, have mercy”, I thought, “I need to sometimes offer pictures or songs instead of words, because sometimes words aren’t right.”

This stained glass isn’t from that church (It’s from France). And I’m not offering music, today.

But the prayer, “Lord, have mercy,” feels right today.