Hosanna: Lent Daybook 38
Scroll all the way to the end of today’s post for an important note about our Holy Week series beginning on Sunday!
Look: Lamb, Nicolas Sanchez - Source
Listen: Hosanna / Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, Josh Garrels - Text | Spotify | YouTube
Read*: Psalm 95, 22; Psalm 141, 143:1-12; Jeremiah 29:1,4-13; Romans 11:13-24; John 11:1-27
Excerpts:
Pray: On Fridays during Lent, we will pray the traditionally-read prayers of the daily office that draw us into Psalm 95, known in Latin as the Invitatory and the Venite. If you’re reading this prayer with another person, one of you can lead with the first phrase and the other response with the bolded words, then reading the last portion (Psalm 95:1-11) together.
O Lord, open our lips; And our mouth shall proclaim your praise.
O God, make speed to save us; O Lord, make haste to help us.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Praise the Lord. The Lord’s Name be praised.
The mercy of the Lord is everlasting: O come, let us adore him.
O come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and show ourselves glad in him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods. In his hand are all the depths of the earth, and the heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands prepared the dry land.
O come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
O that today you would listen to his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as at Meribah, on that day at Massah in the wilderness, when your forebears tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my works. Forty years long I detested that generation and said, ‘This people are wayward in their hearts; they do not know my ways.’ So I swore in my wrath ‘They shall not enter into my rest.’ “
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was, in the beginning, is now and shall be forever. Amen.
Do: Prepare to join us for Holy Week. See my note at the bottom of this post to learn more about the 7 stories of lament I’ll be posting to help us retrieve lament with Jesus this Holy Week.
Today, fast from one kind of food, one meal, or one whole day of eating today. Let your hunger prompt simple dependence and prayer, paying special attention to areas of unresolved grief that need God’s healing attention.
Traditionally, the Church sets aside Lenten Fridays, the weekday of Jesus’ crucifixion, to abstain from eating meat or to a partial (one meal) or whole fast (24 hours without solid food). You can read more about this tradition and its spiritual implications here, here, or here.
Turning the corner to Holy Week
Dear Daybook friends,
In two days we turn the corner into Holy Week. Your companionship through the last 38 days encouraged Brian and me more than any other year. We’re grateful to see the light of resurrection just ahead and we’ll also miss these mornings of meditation together.
First, though, we enter the deepest depths with Jesus. The lectionary slows down to the actual pace Jesus lived his final week on earth. We want to keep watch and pray with him as he, in the mystery of God’s omnipresence, is living in that week as much as he is living in this one with us. To that end, our daily meditations will shift in content and in location.
Each Holy Week since 2013, I’ve published a series of lament stories written by friends and colleagues as a way to help us walk with Christ toward the cross. The guest writers tell stories of walking with Jesus on paths of suffering that include every sort of grief - illness, relational disillusionment, anxiety, joblessness, death of loved ones, and the death of dearly-held dreams. Their stories have helped form my understanding of cruciform suffering and I believe they could also encourage you too.
I hope you’ll invite a friend to join us this Holy Week. For the sake of offering my guests some privacy in this online space, I’ll be publishing their guest posts in the Stories membership area.
If you’re not yet a Stories blog member you can join for $3 a month at this link: https://www.tamarahillmurphy.com/about-stories
This year’s guests include:
‘Father, forgive them’ (Sunday)
‘Today, you will be with me’ by Kendra Jackson (Monday)
‘Behold, your son! Behold, your mother!’ by Todd Hill (Tuesday)
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ by Natalie Murphy (Wednesday)
‘I thirst’ by Aimee Sylvester (Thursday)
‘It is finished’ by Karen Hutton (Friday)
‘Into your hands, I commit my spirit’ by Andrea Bailey Willits (Saturday)
Will you join us as we keep vigil with Jesus this Holy Week?
Peace,
Tamara
p.s. Tomorrow is our final day of Lenten Daybook meditations. I’ll be back with Eastertide Daybook meditations on Resurrection Sunday!