This year during Lent I am reading a devotional by N.T. Wright [who else!] which goes through the gospel of Luke. In the reading for yesterday, Ash Wednesday, Wright makes this statement:
During Lent he invites us to “come with your hopes and longings, your awareness of the ways in which the world is still out of joint.”
Too often we try to pretend that everything is ok…
But it isn’t.
We live in a world that is out of joint, filled with tragedy, pain, and suffering.
Yet this season of Lent celebrates that the ‘out of joint-ness’ of the world doesn’t have the final word. Darkness, despair, and death do not win the day. In Jesus God’s rescue mission–what John Dominic Crossan calls ‘the Great Divine Cleanup’ of the world–has begun.
New creation is bursting forth right in the middle of the old one.
Death is giving way to life.
Light is casting out the darkness.
Hope is triumphing over despair.
Today, wherever you experience that ‘out of joint-ness’, may you meet it with hope and with a longing for God to put it back together again.
grace and peace.
Josh Scott 