2025 Sun March 30
Recent Articles, Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2025
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Lectionary – Lent 4 Year C
Lent 4 is “Mothering Sunday”
Commentary – Lent 4, Year C
Visual Lectionary Lent 4, March 30, 2025
Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son
Focusing on the Prodigal Son
Growing up in Christ! Atlanta, Part 4 – Empathy
So How is Your Lent Going ?
LENT BASICS
“Lent, for me, is the season where God works through me, alongside me, and for me to help me shed the accreted layers of pride…a practice of humility…“Lent demands a rigorous assessment of my life in relationship with God.” – Rev. Michael Byrd, Vicar, Trinity Episcopal, New York
The Call to a Holy Lent
Origins of Lent
Introduction to Lent, 2024
Lent – From Ashes to Alleluias
Season of Lent
Facts about Lent
5 Lenten Questions – Diocese of Atlanta
Voices of Lent
EIGHT LENTEN PRACTICES
“I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” (Book of Common Prayer, page 265)
What are these practices?
1. Prayer during Lent
2. Daily Readings
3. Pretzels in Lent
4. Daily Examen
5. Express Yourself
6. Reducing your carbon footprint
7. Fasting and Feasting
8. Building Happiness in Lent
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
The Stations of the Cross began as the practice of pious pilgrims to Jerusalem who would retrace the final journey of Jesus Christ to Calvary.
Later, for the many who wanted to pass along the same route, but could not make the trip to Jerusalem, a practice developed that eventually took the form of the fourteen stations currently found in almost every church. Many explore the stations on Good Friday.
3 versions of the stations
1. VTS version – video and reflection guide
2. Mary Peterman – paintings
3. Creighton – Catholic version
Lectionary – Lent 4, Year C
I. Theme – Our individual and collective reconciliation with God
“Return of the Prodigal Son” – Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1667-1670)
“He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.'”
The lectionary readings are here or individually:
Old Testament – Joshua 5:9-12 Psalm – Psalm 32 Epistle – 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Gospel – Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Today’s readings invite us into the welcoming, forgiving arms of our loving God. In Joshua, the people of Israel celebrate their home-coming in the promised land, eating, for the first time, of the produce of Canaan. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes our reconciliation to God in and through Christ. The gospel story tells of a father’s prodigal love for his lost sons.
Although the focus shifts just a little bit, to themes of forgiveness and reconciliation. . This week’s readings, however, bring together the individual and the communal. Our reconciliation with God leads us into the “ministry of reconciliation.” Our forgiveness brings wholeness, not just to ourselves, but to others through us. This connection between the “me” and the “we” is such an important theme of the Gospel, and a good place to linger in this week’s worship, while also looking at the implications of the practice of forgiveness for justice in our world.
The theme this week stands out very clearly in these readings – God removes disgrace; God forgives and restores; the prodigal is welcomed home and reconciled to his family; God reconciles us to God’s Self, and to each other, and we are called to do the same. Forgiveness flows from God’s infinite and unconditional grace, and is received through honest confession and repentance. But reconciliation with God, as much as it brings personal healing and restoration, is not only personal. It is also social, drawing us back into reconciliation with others, and into passing on to others the healing and grace we have received
We should seek restoration in the world this week in nature. Be alert to God’s enlivening activity in the world. Look for signs of spring in the most unexpected places, even in the valley of the shadow of death. Bring pussy willows and forsythia branches into the warmth of your home, and enjoy new life as they bloom. Listen as every branch and petal proclaims the good news of the Gospel: that life has put death to death, love has conquered violence, God is our shepherd and a whole new world is possible.
Visual Lectionary Lent 4, March 30, 2025
Click here to view in a new window.
Growing up in Christ! A Lenten series from the Diocese of Atlanta, Part 4 – Empathy
“As we grow up in Christ we will grow in empathy. Empathy is the capacity to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling; what they want, what they believe, what they fear. Empathy is also how we recycle our own heart-hurts turning them into opportunities for connection with others. There is no godly reality that permits our indifference to our neighbors’ well-being.
“As we grow in Christ we will grow in empathy my favorite story from Jesus is a story of a family rupture and the road to repair one son takes his inheritance and heads to the big city. Another son stays dutifully on the farm. You can feel the heat of his resentment. The father’s gaze is focused on his front gate longing for his son’s return. Just imagine his whispered prayers. There are dozens of words that come to mind.
“When you hear this story today I hear empathy. Empathy is the capacity to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling, what they want what they believe and what they fear and even why they make the mistakes they make.
“Empathy is also how we recycle our own heart hurts turning them into opportunities for connection with others. The initation to empathy is central to our life with God. Remember the great commandment is to love God with all your heart mind soul and strength and your neighbor as yourself. There is no God Godly reality that permits our indifference to our neighbors well-being.
“Empathy brought the Run Away Home – he comes to himself. The Bible says empathy is deepened and perfected in reflection. Now he’s clear his actions have injured his family. He rehearses his apology all the way home. It is empathy that prompts the father to run to his returning son. If empathy is understanding, compassion are its legs. Empathy is not the sole property of the intellect. To grow up in Christ is to put Flesh on Christian ideals empathy and compassion are always bundled then. There’s the other son the one who stayed and see the one struggling during this homecoming celebration. The story closes with him forehead to forehead with his father. The father hears that he could have been better and more balanced day to day at empathy rather than reserving it for dramatic occasions. Te sun hears an invitation to think about this family rupture in terms of Lost and Found because only empathy can launch the healing he needs.
“It’s easy to pick sides when you hear this story but I wonder if stretching your empathy wide enough for all the members of this family simultaneously is actually Jesus’s main point.
Lent 4 is “Mothering Sunday”
The fourth Sunday in Lent is traditionally known as “Mothering Sunday” or Refreshment Sunday. In some parts of Great Britain, the custom was to return to the “mother church” or the cathedral for a special service on this day, and it also became customary to celebrate or pay special respect to one’s own mother on this day, a sort of Anglican “Mother’s Day.”
Another custom is the relaxation of austere Lenten observances on this day, the baking of simnel cakes (light fruit cakes covered in marzipan), and in some places the replacement of purple robes and liturgical hangings with rose-colored ones. Simnel cakes are called such because of the fine flour (Latin "simila") they were made of.
A recipe for Simnel cake is here.
Children of all ages were expected to pay a formal visit to their mothers and to bring a Simnel cake as a gift. In return, the mothers gave their children a special blessing. This custom was so well-established that masters were required to give servants enough time off to visit out-of-town mothers – provided the trip did not exceed 5 days! This holiday became Mother’s Day in America.
So How’s Your Lent Going?
We are halfway through Lent with Lent 4, 5 and Palm Sunday to go before getting to Holy Week.
So what are you doing for Lent and how it is going? What should you be doing? Lent is a journey – part of it is looking inside, removing things and taking on new things – building up. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby suggested the following – “At the individual level it draws us to see what we have been saved from, and what we are being saved for.”
“A good Lent makes space for hope by leading us afresh into encounter with the holiness of God.” A good Lent starts with us.
“A good Lent begins with paying attention, with beginning to make straight the way of the Lord by listening… We cannot listen while we fill our ears with our own self-confidence and our own self-worth.
“So, how do we listen? Read Luke’s gospel, taking a small chunk each day, and ask yourself as you read it three simple questions: What does it say? What does it mean? What am I going to do about it? Very simple.
“And what do I do about it? Ask yourself: “How do I make my life more open to Christ because of what this is saying to me?”
“For myself, such reading is part of my own daily discipline of prayer, which includes a lot of other things as well. Time is spent and at the end of jotting down whatever banal or very occasionally less banal thoughts I have, I always put in a couple of lines of what I can do about it.
“Sometimes it is very practical writing to someone or speaking to someone who I may have offended. It may be very simple, merely saying a prayer of sorry, or thank you, or petition for something of which I need reminding.
“A good Lent must overflow in generosity. How do we live a good Lent with those whom we live with? The bumps in the road we need to smooth out for the Lord to come? Relationships that have been neglected and therefore are full of clutter that needs removing?
“They can be very difficult: broken relationships may be easily mendable, little irritations – or it may be that we need, in a good Lent, to take the first step to clearing away a major landslide.
“How do you do it in practice? Openness, transparency, and also go back and use the same approach to scripture as I suggested a few moments ago. One has to treat each person and situation different
“Let me suggest one other. As individuals, even short periods of complete silence during Lent, fasting from noise and conversation and distraction, will be of great value. How little we do of it.
“I’ve had to learn, and I’m still very much learning, that I do not need to do anything in that time. I need only to be willing to listen. It is a time of meditation and reflection, of discovering the God who – all the time – is saying: “Here I am.”
“The discipline of a good Lent is to find again how we welcome the stranger, how we practice hospitality, how we listen.
“A good Lent starts within us. It moves through those most closely around us. It comes into the church and it must be so generously experienced that it overflows into society. We will not really have a Good Lent until that chain is complete, and for that, we pray, may your Kingdom come.”