Have a miserable Lent? - Rector's Rambling for March 12, 2023

     The sweatshirt pictured here makes me smile when it comes up each year on my Facebook memories.  It is funny to me because I think quite the opposite.  I want people to have a “happy” Lent, and in fact I have wished people just that.

It sounds like an oxymoron – “happy” and “Lent”, but if we remember that the word for happy comes from the same root word as “blessed”, then it certainly is the right greeting!

Lent is a great blessing, even if it is hard and time consuming.  It is supposed to be.  But even more so, it is an opportunity for us to be honest with ourselves about the state of our souls so that we can make inroads toward true blessedness.  True blessedness leads to holiness.  Lent is only miserable because sin doesn’t want us to let go of our habits, and also doesn’t like to be disciplined.  But knowing that it is good for us, and is making us better, can help us go into it and through it with a good attitude.

Today we have a guest preacher, Deacon Zachary Baker.  A graduate of Royal Oak Shrine High School and Oakland University, Zach attended the Virginia Theological Seminary and was ordained a deacon in January by Bishop Provenzano of the Diocese of Long Island.  God Willing Zach will be working within the Diocese of Long Island next month, and ordained a priest this summer.

In 2015 Zach did a short internship at St. John’s before his entering the ordination process, and I am most grateful that he persevered through it into seminary and now ordination.  Zach is our second intern to be ordained: Fr. Alex Quick did a sum
mer internship here in 2009 and now serves as a priest in the Diocese of Western Michigan.  And of course our own Cam Walker is currently half-way finished with his Masters in Divinity, and on ordination track in the Diocese of Long Island as well.                              (sweatshirt from © 2019 Teespring, Inc)