Student Book: Scriptures for the Church Seasons Lent 2010 (Celebrate the Risen Christ) - Softcover

Langford, Andy; Langford, Sally

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687659817 ISBN 13: 9780687659814

Publisher: Abingdon Press, 2009

Synopsis

A five-session group study that includes questions for reflection and commentary on the Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Celebrate the Risen Christ Student 2010

A Lenten Study Based on the Revised Common LectionaryBy Sally Langford

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2009 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-687-65981-4

Chapter One

Trust in God

Scriptures for Lent: The First Sunday Deuteronomy 26:1-11 Romans 10:8b-13 Luke 4:1-13

Lent has begun. The word lent comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for "spring," a season that features the shortening of nights and a lengthening of days. In our garden, we have planted beautiful wildflowers called Lenten roses. These hardy white flowers bloom early every spring as a hint of resurrection possibility amidst other still hibernating plants.

The forty days of Lent recall forty years of wandering in the wilderness in the story of Moses and the people of Israel; the forty days Elijah fasted in the wilderness; and, particularly, the forty days of Jesus' wilderness retreat, which followed his baptism by John. These forty days can also be a time of disciplined reflection, study, and preparation of our hearts and souls.

Do you remember the movie Batman Begins? Batman is the comic book hero who has no super powers but practices serious athletic discipline, dresses in black, drives a cool car, and works out of a cave under a mansion. In the movie, the young boy Bruce Wayne comes face to face with the terrors of the world. First, Wayne falls into a dark cave of bats. Then the boy witnesses the robbery and murder of his parents. Finally, Wayne watches as evil people wreak havoc on his beloved Gotham City.

Fear, anger, and despair threaten to destroy Bruce Wayne. He travels the world to escape the darkness, eventually being tempted to become violent and vengeful himself. Wayne chooses to use all of his strength, intellect, wealth, and a wide array of high-tech weapons to fight injustice. His turn-around began when his teacher passionately asked Wayne, "Are you ready to begin?" Wayne donned the black mask of Batman and took on the sinister forces that threaten good people.

"Are you ready to begin?" is God's ongoing question to us. In the midst of a dark season, when chaos seems to rule the world and sin remains pervasive, we are invited to travel from darkness to light. We may choose to conform to this world and its values or to heed God's call to be transformed. We will recognize our inability to save ourselves and recognize our need for God. We may commit to keeping the Lenten disciplines, but almost all of us will fail. We suspect, as in years before, that Sally will not be able to withdraw from chocolate and that Andy will fail to keep up with his exercise program. The goal of Lent, however, is not to keep the disciplines perfectly but to put ourselves in the position to receive God's grace. Even when we are faithless, God remains faithful.

In our Scripture passage for today, we find Jesus in the wilderness, where he was tempted by the devil after forty days of prayer. Profound trust in God sustained Jesus during the days of prayer and at the time of temptation.

Trusting in God permeates all the Scripture passages for this week. Moses reminded the Israelites as they prepared to enter the Holy Land that they could trust God, the One who liberated them from slavery in Egypt. Paul wrote to the Roman Christians, who lived in the greatest and most corrupt city in the world, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

May you hear this week that ours is a God who can be trusted to liberate us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

WANDERING ARAMEANS DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11

The Book of Deuteronomy records the witness of Moses as he led the people through the Sinai wilderness toward the Promised Land. Long associated with King Josiah's religious reforms in the seventh century before Christ, the whole book rehearses the history of God with the people of the covenant. This Scripture also challenges us to be faithful to God's covenant.

Picture the setting for Moses' challenge to the Israelites. The people of Israel had made one last stop after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Following their exodus from Egypt and four decades of traveling through the desert, the people were ready to cross over the river Jordan into Canaan, the Promised Land. However, before the people traveled any further, Moses paused to give them final instructions: "After you have entered Canaan, and when you are settled and living off the land, do not forget that God has given you that land. Each year, as an act of remembrance, offer your first harvested fruits in thanksgiving to God. In the holy sanctuary, remember again the story of God's care."

Moses told the people to remember that just as God had been with them in the past, so too was God with them in the present and would be with them in the future.

In this desolate location, overlooking the Jericho oasis, Moses instructed the people as they saw in the near distance the land promised to them through Abraham. A thousand years later, in these same rugged mountains, Jesus would pray and struggle against the devil at the beginning of his ministry. It was no wonder that Jesus quoted Deuteronomy three times during his conversation with Satan (Luke 4:4, 8, 12).

After listening to Moses, the Israelites crossed the river Jordan into the land of Canaan. In the years to come, the people offered to God the first fruits of the ground. Their offerings of the first fruits from the late summer harvest were gifts of gratitude for God's providential care. The people offered those fruits to God, not out of a sense of obligation or through constraint but out of a deep sense of gratitude and joy.

"A wandering Aramean" refers to Jacob, the son of Isaac, who God renamed Israel. However, the description could just as well fit all Israelites who had been rescued from slavery in Egypt and given the amazing gift of a new covenant with God and a new beginning in the Promised Land.

Past and present generations of Israelites become one in this passage from Deuteronomy. The worshiper was called to confess, "Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us" (Deuteronomy 26:3). The Israelites who lived years after the people of Israel first entered the Promised Land were just as dependent upon God's saving grace as were those people who had escaped from slavery in Egypt and traveled through the wilderness with Moses.

An interesting part of this tradition was that the worshiping community that offered its first fruits to God was never a closed community. The instructions from Moses further specified that aliens living among them should be invited to share in the harvest bounty. God's grace was so bountiful that there was always enough to share with others. Whenever God's people began to believe that God's bounty was only for them, this story served as a correction. Everyone may be part of God's community.

During these weeks of Lent we, like the ancient Israelites, can also remember anew our dependence upon God. In days past, we may have acted as though our hard work, our money, our possessions, or our military might could save us. However, we owe our lives, our very being, to God's love and grace. Lent gives us the opportunity to recall and celebrate God's blessings. We can rehearse the many different ways that God has blessed us in years past; and with a heart full of gratitude, we can offer our allegiance and praise to God.

Our first clergy appointment together was to seven small congregations in the North Carolina mountains. We, along with our one-year-old daughter, drove north six hours from Atlanta. We traveled into the mountains with all of our worldly belongings piled into a small rental truck, behind which we towed Andy's old VW Beetle. We were inexperienced in ministry. Neither of us had grown up in the mountains. We had no relatives living close by. Indeed, we did not know a single soul in the county to which we were moving. Yet we trusted that God was with us in our travel and in the new home that we would establish. Whatever challenges would come our way, we knew that God and the Christians in those congregations would be there to support us, and so it was. Our four years in the mountains were among the best in our lives.

When has God called you to leave behind places and people you know and to journey to a new land? How has God blessed you on the journey? How can you express your gratitude to God during your Lenten journey?

CONFESS THAT JESUS IS LORD ROMANS 10:8B-13

Paul, the fanatical rabbi who became an apostle, proclaimed a simple truth that he quoted from the prophet Joel: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Romans 10:13; Joel 2:32). Paul had never met any of these Christians to whom he wrote; they had discovered Jesus through other preachers. These new followers of Jesus did not live in a physical wilderness. They inhabited the most powerful and extravagant capital in the world, yet imperial Rome was as far from the kingdom of God as east is from west. Those new disciples lived in a spiritual wilderness with no religious landmarks ever seen by Jesus or Paul.

Despite that spiritual distance, Paul believed that those first Christians were part of Jesus' new community. Paul made his affirmation based on his belief that God's gift of salvation through Jesus Christ was extended to all persons who had faith.

Paul wrote his letter to the church in Rome at the end of his third missionary journey to Asia Minor and Greece, around A.D. 57. Paul was staying in Corinth, but he would soon travel to Jerusalem with a financial offering for the needy Jewish Christians. From Jerusalem, Paul hoped to journey westward to Rome and Spain. In fact, Paul would make that journey from Jerusalem to Rome, not as a free man but as a prisoner of the Roman government. He would arrive in Rome, not of his own volition but under Roman guard.

Paul may well have been addressing in his letter to the Romans the tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians. The Jewish Christians understood themselves as God's covenant people, while the Gentile Christians came to faith outside the traditions of Jewish law. Profound cultural differences may well have been affected by the expulsion of Jews from Rome in the late 40's and their subsequent return when the decree was rescinded after the death of Claudius in A.D. 54. Paul would be encountering a divided congregation of Jewish and Gentile Christians who were uneasy with one another.

According to Paul, none of the Roman Christians had a more privileged position before God. The religious actions of neither the Jewish Christians nor the Gentile Christians made them right with God. There was no pecking order, Paul wrote, "since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). All of them were nomads together in the wilderness. The Roman Christians could do or think nothing on their own to receive God's gift of righteousness, yet everyone of them would be saved! Jewish and Gentile Christians were blessed by God. Salvation was a gift from God, not an achievement by human beings.

John Wesley, the father of The United Methodist Church, also struggled to understand that truth of free grace. For the first thirty years of his life, Wesley struggled hard to be a faithful Christian, observing faithfully many religious disciplines; but none of those practices provided for him the assurance of his faith. Then on May 24, 1738, Wesley had a profound religious experience at a Bible study in London while reflecting on Paul's wisdom for the Romans. Wesley described his experience:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where a member was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while the reader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that Jesus Christ had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

Sometimes Christians today also have a difficult time accepting God's gift of grace. Sally remembers the altar call at the end of Sunday morning worship service in her home church in Georgia. As a youth, Sally responded to the altar call and walked down the aisle to the front of the church, not once but on numerous occasions. Now there is nothing wrong with altar calls; we all need to be invited to commit our lives to Jesus Christ. The problem for Sally was that she did not trust that God had saved her the first time she walked down the aisle. She thought she needed to prove her devotion to Jesus all over again and to keep striving for worthiness in the eyes of God. Not so, says Paul. God is generous, and "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (10:13).

An old story relates how a Christian missionary was attempting to translate the New Testament but could not find the right word for "faith." The missionary was searching for a word to express a deep trust in God's power to save. One day, while the translator was working, a native messenger delivered some news and then fell exhausted into a chair. The missionary had a spark of insight. "Explain to me," the missionary asked the messenger, "how it feels to throw yourself into that chair, knowing that the chair will hold you upright." On the chair, the messenger replied with one native word that meant "I trust the chair with my whole weight." That was the word the missionary used for "faith."

That is how we throw ourselves upon God. Through the gift of Jesus Christ, God saves us. We can trust our whole being on that belief.

How do you understand the relationship between your beliefs and actions and the gift of God's salvation in Jesus Christ? How do you experience God's grace?

JESUS IN THE WILDERNESS LUKE 4:1-13

Picture the scene. The Mount of Temptation, known only through tradition, overlooks the lower Jordan River valley. The mountains are tall, rugged, and barren and stand above the oasis of Jericho, an area rich with water, fig trees, and cattle. Following his baptism by John in the Jordan, Jesus left the fertile valley and journeyed into the mountains for forty days of prayer and reflection. In Native American cultures, such a journey is called a vision quest, a time apart for a young adult to seek a vision from God.

During Jesus' vision quest, he prepared through prayer for his earthly ministry and his death on the cross. Agreeing to God's plan for him was not easy for Jesus. As we read in this Scripture, Jesus was tempted to let go of God's purpose for his life and to accept instead the devil's offers of an easy way out.

The devil came to Jesus after Jesus had abstained from food for several weeks and was hungry, thirsty, and vulnerable. The word for "devil" in Greek is diabolos; it means "prone to slander," "a slanderer," or "accusing falsely." The word is also applied to anyone who opposes the will of God. The devil's intention was to separate

Jesus from his commitment to his God-given ministry in the world. Jesus faced three temptations. First, the devil tempted Jesus to end his hunger quickly by commanding a nearby stone to become bread that he could eat. Jesus confessed instead, "One does not live by bread alone" (Luke 4:4).

Second, the devil tempted Jesus by showing him all the kingdoms of the world. Political power was his for the taking, if only Jesus would worship the devil. Still Jesus was faithful and repeated the words of Scripture: "Worship the Lord your God, / and serve only him" (verse 8).

The devil, however, was persistent in his efforts to get Jesus off track. So as a third temptation, he took Jesus to Jerusalem and stood with him on the pinnacle of the Jewish Temple. There he challenged Jesus to jump in order that he might demonstrate how he, the Son of God, would be rescued from death by God's angels. Once again, Jesus stood firm in the face of temptation: "Do not put the Lord your God to the test," Jesus countered.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Celebrate the Risen Christ Student 2010by Sally Langford Copyright © 2009 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0687659817
• ISBN 13: 9780687659814
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64