Our Lent worship theme, "Where do I Sign?" hits me where I am most vulenerable - my handwriting! I simply have atrocious, unreadable, unbelievably bad handwriting! Just ask Karen or Wendy/Kevin or my family or anyone who has seen - you can hardly read it. It's some genetic default or something! And for Lent, one of the ideas for Spiritual disciplines is to handwrite out the Scrtipures each week. We even have someone doing a 'Scripture Doodle' each Sunday, handwriting, and then displaying and reading a Scripture. I am totally inadequate.
And yet, this week, I tried to handwrite out the Genesis and Mark Scriptures in preparation for preaching. What a disaster. I had to cross out the first word already! It's messy and unreadable - even double spaced. But then again, maybe Scripture itself is messy and gets us into all sorts of trouble. I did find that as I wrote, I started noticing different things - seeing things I might have missed. In the main Genesis passage (9:12-16), I was struck by how many times the word 'Covenant' was used - 4 times... 7 if you count the broader passage it is in. Must be important! I also noticed that the convenant is with humanity, BUT also all flesh - with every living creature. This handwriting got me going on my whole sermon. What is this covenant all about? What are we missing when we rely so much on our selves and our own technology (there was a power failure just before I started hand writing)? What have we done with the created order and what are we destroying? Are we keeping up our side of the covenant? Lots of questions.
This Lent, we are invited to pay attention to a whole series of Scriptures that have to do with God's covenant with us. I encourage you (even dare you!) to handwrite out the Scriptures each Sunday. Or come to the Prayer Room and write your comments in our Lent Prayer Journal. In Passion Week, we will even have the chance to all be Scribes and handwrite out the Passion story in all 4 Gospels. Maybe by doing so, we will catch something we had missed before, and be drawn into the full message and story.
Where do I Sign?
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