In this wild world, sometimes it feels like we have gathered around a giant blanket, fashioned like a game you played at P.E. or camp. You know the one, the one where everyone grabs a piece of the parachute or the blanket and, moving the large fabric together, we go tossing something up in the air.
Let me tell you what I mean. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper each week, the part of the service with a large cracker on stage and paper lunch sacks scattered around the beer garden, the person presiding over communion invites us to, “lift up your hearts.” And we recite the ancient liturgy and go tossing our hearts up into the air amidst the neon lights in the trees at Axelrad and in your living room as you stream from home. And God meets the hungry belly and hungry soul as we go tossing hearts into the neon lights.
And in this wild world, we each take the small piece of the blanket God has given us, and together we awkwardly heave and ho in the same sort of general pattern, trying to gain enough equilibrium and momentum to toss something up into the air. Something like collective hope, something like joy from the grace we receive, something like bringing beauty to broken places. Tossing them in the air together with a giant heave-ho.
At more than one point this year, I needed the momentum of someone else to help that heart to make it off the ground. It was too heavy to do alone. And sometimes, by God’s grace and because Christ first reached down to lift our hearts to him, I had enough heave to help lift someone else’s.
And this week’s image from Scott Erickson is some of the borrowed lifting momentum. A gift visual art provides; a tool to reflect on being human in a broken world. Jesus knew and used the power of imagery, the power of imagery to convey so many layers to a story. This week’s image echoes with layers, as many layers as stories about heavy hearts and hungry souls.
“This, then, is how you should pray:
‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’”
For Lent 2021, we will reflect on the Lord’s Prayer through images. Images come from Scott Erickson, originally found in May It Be So: Forty Days with the Lord’s Prayer by Justin McRoberts and Scott Erickson (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2019). Images used with permission.