What Will Become of Good Friday and Easter Next Monday?

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, is on a mission to restore in the Christian community "matters of maturity, of spiritual formation, of theological aesthetics, of growing up in Christ 'healthy in God, robust in love.'"

"Not long ago," he writes in Practice Resurrection, his latest book,  "a pastor who has made an art form of pole vaulting from church to church told me I was wasting my time on this, there was no challenge to it, it was about as exciting as standing around watching paint dry."

When Peterson suggested to him that "most of our ancestors in both Israel and church have spent most of their time watching the paint dry, that the persevering, patient, unhurried work of growing up in Christ has occupied the center of the church's life for centuries, and that this American marginalization is, well, American ... he dismissed me. He needed, he said, a challenge. I took it from his tone and manner that a challenge was by definition something that could be met and accomplished in forty days. That's all the time, after all, that it took Jesus."

Peterson wonders if we are not prostituting new birth by failing to draw the new born into new life, the forming of our character after conversion around the mystery of Christ's continuing presence in us, which cannot be accomplished on the fly but requires "growing up strong in God, growing to maturity, to the staure of Christ." He does not find pastors and professors, for the most part, "very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to do."

And not only so. "The American church [itself] is uneasy in these conditions. Typically, in the name of 'relevance,' it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture: talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious."

Have I myself lost the wonder of standing quietly before the cross, simply absorbing Christ's spirit in agonizing and dying for all humanity there? How long has it been since the wonder of the open tomb brought me to my knees in silent wonder, love, and praise--not to mention renewed hope? Has faith to me become no more than mental ascent--the personal acceptance of the story of Jesus so that when I die I can go to heaven? Will the living dynamic of Good Friday and Easter be shunted aside next Monday--dissapated, even lost in the commerce and industry of routine daily life?

The church in its wisdom has always seen Advent as a season of waiting on and for Christ's coming. Ought Lent end no less as the season of waiting on his living presence among us and his claim on all our living the rest of our days?

Lord, have mercy! Christ have mercy!