Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Jeremiah this morning, the prophet announces that, “The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.” Something about this verse is really intriguing to me.

Now, yes—the verse is part of a larger unfolding polemic about and against false gods, about and against our tendency to worship and give honor to things, thoughts, habits, practices, people and powers that despite our strenuous efforts to convince ourselves and others to the contrary are not worthy of our worship. But there’s more here than just polemic. There’s a connection made here between the falseness of these gods and idols and their failure to have created anything.

Or put a different way: our false gods are revealed to be unable to give life because they have none in themselves.

We wouldn’t worship false gods, though, if they didn’t appear to give us something that looked to us like life: pleasure, power, control, for instance. But what sort of real joy can something dead give? What power can a lifeless thing impart? What control can a contingent being really grant? We imagine our idols give us life in part because we have yet to learn and live what real life is. We have yet, in other words, to really live the life of the Cross, the life of sacrifice, vulnerability, and total faithful abandonment to the will of God.

We’re almost directly at the halfway point of our Lenten journey together, and I know I, for one, need this word from Jeremiah today because it makes explicit what a Lenten discipline is really all about: it’s meant to orient us toward Life, the Life of Easter, the Life of God, by stripping us of all the dead, lifeless and contingent things to which we cling.

Which is to say: now is a perfect time to examine your Lenten disciple! Is it pitching you toward the Life of the Cross? Is it disturbing habitual patterns of thinking, living and relating, revealing new ways of being toward God, our neighbor and ourselves that actually look like love? Is it challenging your assumptions of what life really is or means? Does it make your idols, whatever they are, tremble, topple and tumble?

Friend, whatever your Lenten discipline may be, I hope that it’s helping you hunger more keenly for the Life that God has desired to give you since ere the world was made and on which account the world came to be by God’s good will and life-giving Word!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+