LENT 2025
CENTENARY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH
In Between
T
he season of Lent is upon us. Having recognized our collective mortality on Ash Wednesday, we now set out on the slow and steady path toward the cross, where death is destroyed, and love reigns victorious. Our challenge is to stay the course, to avoid a rush toward Easter resolution, to be present to the Lenten journey, to accept our place in the crucible of this season.
Throughout Lent, the Chancel Choir will sing of the ways in which the journey can be trying and complicated: our tendency toward waywardness in Wilberg's Come Thou Fount, longing and anguish in Howells' Like as the Hart and Brahms' How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place, the hardening of heart in the face of despair in Hagenberg's You Do Not Walk Alone, the prospect of debilitating darkness in Paulus' Pilgrims' Hymn. As we voice the turbulence of our humanity, we seek stillness and calm in the midst of it. Beginning March 30, Centenary artists will present an exhibit - Lenten Expressions: Glimpses of Grace - which will call us into an awareness beyond our own limitations. During Holy Week, we will be invited to travel the path of a labyrinth in our sanctuary nave, an experience which invites us into contemplation, creates distance from the distractions of the outside world, and quiets the mind. In this season of Lent, we are called to take up residence in the space of turmoil, of unrest, of in-between. Kate Bowler, Duke Divinity professor and author, knows this space well and frames it as a place of blessedness in her A Blessing for the In-Between: Blessed are we, somewhere unnameable, fully present to our reality. Tracking it, with all its subtle gradations and colors and contrasts, the sweetness and the struggle, the stuck and the not-quite-fitting. Authentic to it, mapping the full strangeness of the new emergent landscape. Blessed are we , dear ones, not calling it too soon. Not settling for the neat and buttoned-up, the too-tied-up, the not-quite-true. Bless all of it, the way we might widen our gaze to encompass it and embrace it. And bless you, moving into the unknown, waiting, daring to hope. In these forty days, may we find blessing and hope in this in-between, a place where our questions are not yet answered, our wounds are not yet healed, our thirst is not yet quenched, our mortality is not yet transformed by Resurrection. - Jonathan Emmons, Director of Music Ministries