What are you doing this Friday? You know it’s  a special day, don’t you? The day we remember Christ’s crucifixion. Will you be taking some time out to think about what that means to you? Unfortunately it will slip the minds of a lot of us.

Stations

I grew up a Catholic and was told to stop whatever I was doing at 3:00pm that day to remember the Cross. Stop and think about it and let it sink in. It was kind  of a rule. Looking back on that now, it wasn’t such a bad idea since it’s so easy to motor through our busy routines at work or at school or wherever, without as much as giving it a thought that entire day.

I wasn’t a very good Catholic and I hardly did any of the good Catholic stuff I was supposed to but there was this one thing that went on at the church each year on Good Friday – a way of remembering – that I thought was pretty cool called the “Stations of the Cross”.

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As Good Friday approaches I’ve been thinking a lot about the Cross and how it was the opposite of what anybody expected and how today  God continues to work in a cross-shaped way in our lives.

The Cross reminds me that there are times when, despite doing your best to follow Jesus and believe he has good stuff in storefor you, suddenly things can go haywire and it looks like God flew the coop? You’re rocked. All the air goes out of your balloon. You ask yourself what’s going on because it looks like you failed and your faith has been a waste of time, just the way the crucifixion at the time made no sense at all to Jesus’ followers and family. To them it looked utterly chaotic and pointless.

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When a foreign  student who’s new to English and to Christianity heard me mention “Leap Of Faith” the other Sunday she whispered to her American friend sitting next to her, “Is ‘leap of faith’ a person?”

I got a kick out of that. She must’ve imagined some super hero dude flying around doing all sorts of crazy things for us.  “…Look up in the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Leap Of Faith Guy!”

But the more I thought about it, I realized she wasn’t that far off.  Sure, Leap Of Faith is a 40 day prayer experiment we’re doing together that will egg us on to pray for some faith-stretching things, but it’s also a leap into the arms of someone very special.

In Hebrews, Jesus is presented as a kind of inventor-architech- engineer-test pilot of this thing we call “faith”. (see Hebrews 12:2). As scary and risky as faith may be for us, we’re not doing something Jesus hasn’t himself road tested. We can’t say, “Sure, taking that leap was easy for Jesus, afterall he was a superstar, but I can’t do it – I’m a wimp”, because he took wimpy humanity upon himself and showed us how faith actually works.
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Call it a corporate jump into the deep end of God’s pool. Leap Of Faith is a faith experiment that we here in the North Brooklyn Vineyard will be undertaking throughout the six weeks leading up to Easter.

These 40 days are Lent, the traditional time the Church prepares for Good Friday. What better way to jump-start our faith, hope and joy, that a very tough year has managed to wear down, than to experience God’s amazing love again.

Our theme will be Growing In The Love and will include daily exercises that we’ll engage in individually and together as a unified community in hopes of going deeper into God’s love and seeing it work in unexpected ways in our lives, the lives of those we care about, and in our church as a whole.

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It never fails. Everytime there’s a crisis or disaster and there’s need for wise and compassionate sensibility, some prominent Christian leader says something stupid? (What’s the biblical term for “jackass”?) I guess it’s the human religious affliction of having to have an answer for everything that makes them so vulnerable to foot-in-mouth disease.

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A mother was putting her child, who was afraid of the dark to bed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark, and besides the angels are near you”, she said. The child replied, “Mom, I don’t want angels, I want a skin face.”
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