Holy Trinity Lutheran Church

Gathered by God’s Grace — Lent to Easter

3/3/2005
By: Holy Trinity Lutheran

The theme in our mid-week evening worship services Gathered by God’s Grace invites us to take the hands of people we have never met and share the journey of faith with them. On Sunday mornings this month we take time to reflect on the marks of our discipleship as followers of Jesus.

The two foci provide a good spiritual balance — giving prayerful attention to our personal and corporate spiritual health. The morning themes draw us into reflections of faith through the lens of our local community and personal faith. The evening meditations, on the other hand, help us to see the context of our lives and faith through the wide-angle lens of life in the Body of Christ. To focus on one without the other would be to distort the wideness of God’s mercy, and grace.

I hope you will find a way in the busy days ahead to experience these moments of worship. Lent is a time for taking faith “to the next level” — asking honest questions, taking a deeper look at our lives, and walking with God into the answers and changes that come. If we can do a bit of that together, we may be able to help one another to live our questions and face our challenges in ever more faithful and supportive ways. And with that comes new life … as we draw near to Holy Week and Easter it all comes together — we are gathered by God’s grace, with people of every land, who share the same marks of discipleship and praise the same liberating God of Life.

Lent invites us to awaken our souls in faith-full conversation with God, so that when Easter morning comes we are near enough to the heart of the story to feel the breeze on our faces as the stone is rolled away; to witness naturally to the reality of God’s power in the world and to praise God with a breathless enthusiasm, as the friends of Jesus did on that first Easter morning. As the ELCA vision statement proclaims, together we are Claimed, Gathered and Sent!

Walking with you, in God’s grace,

Pastor Janet