Traverse the Desert

Notes From the Pastor...

On Monday I drove to Las Cruces for a Clergy meeting with my peers from the border region of New Mexico and Texas.  The long desert view between the Organ and Sacramento mountains always draws me into the spirit of contemplation.

In the local history book, Tularosa, C.L. Sonnichsen countlessly depicts frontier men, women, and children traversing the desert from the populated community of Mesilla to rural outposts in Tularosa, Apache lands, and Lincoln.  The brave souls who traveled through a land that would become White Sands Missile Range did so keeping promises to others and themselves regardless of personal cost.

In the March 7, 2012 issue of  Christian Century I learned: Theologians have frequently viewed betrayal as a grave sin.  For John Calvin, unfaithfulness or infidelity is at the root of the fall.  […]  In Dante’s Inferno, the ninth and lowest circle is for those who betray what they should be most faithful to.

The Lenten journey to the cross is harsh.

We suffer the weekly reminder that Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ.  Yet we fear such identification will cost too much.  While we demean betrayal as a grave sin, it is a great temptation.  After all, we have worked hard to get to where we are and the desert of Lent threatens to take everything we hold dear and let it fade in the sun, wind, and sand of discipleship.

To this I say, stay faithful my friends; keep your Lenten promises.  Jurgen Moltmann, in his great theological work, The Crucified God, informs, only a cowardly faith “tires to protect its ‘most sacred things’, God, Christ, doctrine, morality, because it clearly no longer believes that these are sufficiently powerful to maintain themselves.”

I trust our family of faith will not give into the ‘religion of fear’, but faithfully traverse the desert of the cross.
My prayer: may we possess a brave faith that journeys to the cross, and through our Lenten travels, may we find the cross has journeyed into us.

Grace,
Pastor Ryan