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Rector’s Ramblings – March 28, 2024

 This week marked the first training session for van guild members. Two willing servants were in attendance. We went over the policies around van use, the role of those whose ministry is driving the van, and then I did a session on safe driving. It was a brief recap of the safe driving training I learned and then taught in my pre-seminary life with UPS. It’s built on the Smith Safe Driving method, which is well-known and quite popular in the professional driving world. The method is built on five keys to safe driving, one of which is “Get the big picture.”

 

Behind the wheel, this means not following vehicles in front too closely, especially large ones. For example, when we get behind a large truck, it’s like standing in front of a billboard. You can’t see anything but the billboard if you’re in that position. It also means ensuring you’re surveying everything in your field of vision, between buildings, tree lines, guardrails, or whatever is along the roadway. To navigate well, we need to know where we are in relation to many things, as it turns out.

 

As we begin to travel the road through Triduum today, the three holy days made up of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, there is a lot to take in. Somehow, we need a way to get the big picture concerning our faith and lives to understand the crux of these events. If we throw that Latin-derived word, crux, into a blender with all its meanings, we get the sense that we are seeking the foundational, puzzling, difficult, critical moment or turning point with its roots in the cross. The cross of Good Friday is not the destination of our faith, although it is an incredibly important waypoint along the way. No, the Resurrection has always held the figurative and literal keys to the Kingdom.

 

This entire season of Lent has been an invitation to take a step back, away from the things that often loom so large in our day-to-day lives that we can’t see around or through them to the truth of God’s reality, the ultimate destination we all seek, which is to be with God. As discussed in our book group this week, the Christian journey doesn’t have an endpoint on this side of heaven; we are constantly moving, seeking to move toward God. Sometimes, we move forward and sometimes back, but over our lives, the goal is to draw closer to the heart of God and dwell there.

 

Too many Christians boil Jesus’ life and death down to the simple math of the cross, and that, too, can be a billboard we don’t benefit from standing in front of. There is much more nuance and richness than the summary we often recite in the eucharist: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Somewhere in there we need to find ourselves. In the stories of the next three days, we will find ourselves. It is worth the time and attention to take a step back and look around in these stories and in our lives and see how they connect and intersect. In doing so we’ll be able to get the big picture about what we’re doing and where we’re headed. 

 

Tom+

 

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious
to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them
again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and
hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ
your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

Photo credits: Billboard via dreamstime.com subscription