Jesus is LORD! Thoughts on a Lenten Ember Day 3

Jesus is LORD! And he will remain so no matter what. Councils of the Church come and go as do General Synods. We get it right and we get it wrong. Consistently. Participating in the Councils of the Church can be discouraging.

Not long after we accepted the call to St Barnabas in Medicine Hat in 1999 I decided (I hope with The LORD’s prompting) I needed a Spiritual Director. Since I could find no one who had set up shop in The Hat and didn’t want to drive to Lethbridge or Calgary, I decided I’d just approach one of the Roman Catholic priests in town and ask if he’d take me on. Why Catholic? Because Spiritual Direction is in their DNA. When a postulant for the priesthood arrives at a Catholic seminary he is assigned a room and a Spiritual Director. So I approached Fr Wendolin Rolheiser at what was then Christ the King Roman Catholic Church. He wasn’t keen on the idea and no wonder. Catholic priests tend to deal with huge congregations. They have more than enough on their plate. Eventually, praise God, he agreed to take me on and he was excellent. A great blessing.

Why am I telling you this story? Because, in one of our early sessions he gave me a book to read that his brother, Ron, had written. “Oh, no!” I thought. Now I have to read this book by somebody I’d never heard of and I probably wouldn’t like it and I’d have to say nice things about out of politeness for Fr Wendolin’s sake. The book was Seeking Spirituality: Guidelines for Christian Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998) and it was excellent! Ron Rolheiser is also a priest. He and Wendolin were born and raised in Saskatchewan. Fr Ron is now the President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas, and the author of many books. He continues to write columns of spirituality and faith on his blog (http://ronrolheiser.com/en/) and for publications all over the world.

In a recent column Rolheiser wrote about how a group of Christians were discouraged when something they’d planned didn’t work out whereupon William Stringfellow, a lay theologian and activist of the time, told them that in their disappointment he wasn’t hearing anything much

about the Lordship of Jesus. We talk as if we need to save the world, as if everything depends on us. Well, it doesn’t. In the resurrection of Jesus the world is already saved, the powers of death and darkness have already been vanquished. We, we only need to live in such a way so as to show that world that we believe this. (Read the whole column here.)

It’s true, of course. The Lamb wins. So let’s enjoy that truth as we pray through Lenten Ember Day 3 today. The Church waxes and wanes in its faithfulness. So do you and I, but never Jesus.