Lenten Choices: High and Long - Part 2

The logic of the seasons starts with Easter.  Without that part of the story our seasonal tradition has no base, no anchor, no movement and no calendar.  All our seasonal traditions hang on Easter and serve our telling especially that part but throughout each season eventually all of the story. 

Year after year we work our way through the story and our traditions help us do that.  Our traditions sustain us and are how we "go long."  The high part is the story itself.  The gospel John tells it best: "In the beginning was the Word. . . " It is "high" because it comes from God.

Those first century Jews-become-Christian congregations understood Easter, with Jesus and his reconfigured messiahship -- accomplished by his death and resurrection -- as the centerpiece of the new story, the good news.  As they expanded the story both backwards by remembering the signs of healing, calming storms, feeding the multitudes and forward through Emmaus, the Galilean shore, the Mount of Olives a consensus emerged. 

With this expanded story new ways of prolonging community life around it emerged as well.  Baptism became the tradition of new inclusion, gifts of the spirit empowered community ministries of all sorts and the laying on of hands marked members for leadership and missions.

The core story never lost its height, as demonstrated by the language of the fourth gospel and the magnitude of the last of the Christian canon's works, the Revelation to John.  One of the measures used by those early congregations to determine whether a text could be included along with the core story was how it repeated or expanded on that loftiness of God's reconciling the world to God's self through the person and work of Jesus who died and was raised.  To conflict with or avoid that claim almost insured exclusion from the emerging canon of scripture. 

High and long are still working principles in the church.  We still listen for God's voice especially in that core story and understand the seasons encircling Easter as informed and measured by it.  And year after year we repeat the traditions to point us toward Easter and to help us to continue, now reborn by it. 

Really, high and long aren't separate choices.  We must let them collaborate and promote each other and call us forward.  As a lenten activity it is only the choice or not to practice a mindfulness of the reconciling God revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth and to be equally mindful that we are tradition-bearers for those who come long after us so that they too may hear God's high calling.