Kyrie: Lent Daybook 9
Take a few deep breaths, settle your body, mind, and heart into a quiet space, and let’s begin with prayer.
Opening prayer: Heavenly Father, make me more like Jesus and more like the true self you’ve created as I savor your loving presence today. Please guide my thoughts and impressions with your Holy Spirit. Amen.
Look: Law and Gospel, Sandra Bowden - Source
Description of work: The rich surface is a Hebrew text from the Ten Commandments, created by layering gold leafing on the collagraph print, then adding colored iridescent craypas to the raised areas. With one additional horizontal cut, the tablets of the Law become four quadrants, suggesting a cross.
Listen: Kyrie I, Fernando Ortega - Lyrics | Spotify | YouTube
Read: Psalm 50; Psalm 59, 60; Deuteronomy 9:23-10:5; Hebrews 4:1-10; John 3:16-21
Excerpts:
The mighty one, God the Lord, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.
Our God comes and does not keep silent; before him is a devouring fire and a mighty tempest all around him. He calls to the heavens above and to the earth, that he may judge his people: “Gather to me my faithful ones, who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!” The heavens declare his righteousness, for God himself is judge.
Selah
“Hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God.
*
But to the wicked God says, “What right have you to recite my statutes or take my covenant on your lips? For you hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you. You make friends with a thief when you see one, and you keep company with adulterers.
You give your mouth free rein for evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your kin; you slander your own mother’s child. These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one just like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.
Mark this, then, you who forget God, or I will tear you apart, and there will be no one to deliver. Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me; to those who go the right way, I will show the salvation of God.”
*
And when the Lord sent you from Kadesh-barnea, saying, ‘Go up and occupy the land that I have given you,’ you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God, neither trusting him nor obeying him. You have been rebellious against the Lord as long as he has known you.
“Throughout the forty days and forty nights that I lay prostrate before the Lord when the Lord intended to destroy you, I prayed to the Lord and said, ‘Lord God, do not destroy your people, your very own possession, whom you redeemed in your greatness, whom you brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; pay no attention to the stubbornness of this people, their wickedness and their sin, lest the land from which you have brought us say, “Because the Lord was not able to bring them into the land that he promised them and because he hated them, he has brought them out to let them die in the wilderness.” For they are your people, your very own possession, whom you brought out by your great power and by your outstretched arm.’
“At that time the Lord said to me, ‘Carve out two tablets of stone like the former ones, and come up to me on the mountain, and make an ark of wood. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you smashed, and you shall put them in the ark.’
*
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For indeed the good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed are entering that rest, just as God has said,
“As in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’ ” though his works were finished since the foundation of the world.
*
O God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses; you have been angry; now restore us! You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open; repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering. You have made your people suffer hard things; you have given us wine to drink that made us reel.
You have set up a banner for those who fear you, to rally to it out of bowshot.
Selah
Give victory with your right hand and answer us, so that those whom you love may be rescued.
*
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. …
And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
*
So then, a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God, for those who enter God’s rest also rest from their labors as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs.
*
But I will sing of your might; I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning. For you have been a fortress for me and a refuge in the day of my distress. O my strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love.
—Psalm 50:1-7; Psalm 50:16-23; Deuteronomy 9:23-10:2; Hebrews 4:1-3; Psalm 60:1-5; John 3:16-17, 19; Hebrews 4:9-11; Psalm 59:16-17
Pray: On Thursdays during Lent, I invite you to sit silently for 5 minutes, praying only the ‘Jesus Prayer.’
The Jesus Prayer is one of the best-known traditions within Orthodoxy. It’s a short, simple prayer that has been widely used, taught, and discussed throughout the history of Eastern Christianity.
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ,
Υἱὲ Θεοῦ,
ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλό
Its words say simply:
Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of God,
have mercy on me the sinner.
As you enter this time of prayer, find a comfortable position. Quiet yourself. Don’t worry about inner and outer distractions. Notice them and let them point you toward the words of the Jesus Prayer. For example, “Oh, there’s my noisy neighbor. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me the sinner.” Or, in response to galloping thoughts about an upcoming event, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me the sinner.” Even, “My neck and wrists are sore from bending over a screen too long today. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me the sinner.”
If you’re able to sit quietly without distraction, notice your breathing and occasionally breathe in “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God” and exhale “have mercy on me the sinner.”
Here’s a bit more about the history of the Jesus Prayer from Spirituality: an introduction to the Jesus Prayer by Patrick Comerford.
“In order to enter more deeply into the life of prayer and to come to grips with the Scriptural challenge to pray unceasingly, the Orthodox tradition offers the Jesus Prayer – which is called the “Prayer of the Heart” (Καρδιακή Προσευχή) by some Church Fathers – as a means of concentration and as a focal point for our inner life.
The exact words of the prayer have varied from the most simple possible involving the name “Jesus,” or “Lord have mercy,” to the more common extended form: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
I also appreciate this insight from Allison Backous Troy: Praying the Jesus Prayer showed me Christ via Faith & Leadership.
Do: Fast TV & Entertainment this week; feast on reading instead!
This week, I’m encouraging us to fast from television (or another form of entertainment) in order to read some poems or good books instead. Pray for God to gift you with a rested mind and an enlarged imagination for His good gifts in the world.
Suggested reading to feast on this week:
*Sunday Scripture readings are taken from Year A of the Book of Common Prayer 2019 (Anglican Church of North America). Daily Scripture readings are taken from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and include both Morning and Evening Psalms (Year 1).