Dear Friends,

This Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, is often referred to as Rose Sunday, or Laetare Sunday (from the Latin for the phrase “Rejoice, O Jerusalem”). In the midst of the season of Lent, we are offered glimpses of the joy that we will experience at Easter.  This a “Refreshment Sunday.”

This Sunday also reminds us that the world that the lives we live are not easily divided into good times or challenging times, even as our worship is not simply divided into seasons of penitence or seasons of praise.

Yes, our liturgy during Lent invites us to walk with Jesus, both through the wilderness of his temptation and his road to the cross. We rightly use words like “repentance” “discipline” “fasting” and “sacrifice” during the season. We refrain from using that joyful “A word.”

But that does not mean that our liturgies, or our lives for that matter, are walled off from joy, praise, and gratitude. Those expressions of our life with God continue to well up in us. And if we happen to be in the midst of the wilderness, they can be  as cool and refreshing as the water of an oasis. According to the gospel of John, when Jesus was gathered with his disciples on what he knew would be the last night of his life, he was yet able to say iin the midst of the pain and fear of that evening: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” (John 15:11)

J. R. R. Tolkien, the British author of The Lord of the Rings, was a devout Christian. In writing about Jesus Christ, he noted, “This is a story that begins and ends in joy.” Here we are, liturgically speaking, between the beginning and the end of that story. It is good for us to observe a holy Lent. We can smile at each other as we forget and catch ourselves at the end of the service starting to say, “Alle…..”.  But let us not forget that joy, gratitude, and praise should not, and cannot be contained, even in the midst of this holy season of Lent.

Faithfully,

Tom