2014 online daily lenten devotional

"Blessing the Dust" by Jan Richardson

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. It is the day when Christians begin the season of Lent, a forty day preparation for Easter. Those who take the time to count the days until Easter Sunday will note that it actually totals forty-seven days in all. That is because the Lenten season of preparation and fasting does not count the Sundays. Sundays, for us, are always mini-Easter celebrations. For University Hill Congregation this is the thirteenth year in which we have marked Lent by creating our own home-made Lenten daily devotional book. In the early years it was a hard-copy printed booklet for use within our congregation. Now it is an online resource used by our congregation and others who join us in the practice of reading, hosting and praying scripture as a means of continuing our formation as faithful witnesses to God's grace revealed in Jesus. You are most welcome to join us in this practice and are invited to spread the word to others who may be interested. Here is the introduction to this year's devotional, along with a link that will take you to it ...

Welcome to University Hill Congregation’s thirteenth annual Lenten Devotional. Here you will find forty-seven daily scripture readings, each accompanied by a response offered by a member of our community. We invite one another to welcome scripture as a holy guest, offering each text hospitality in our midst, listening with curiosity for a living Word from God addressed to our life here and now.
 
We find that this annual practice is one of the ways in which we are recovering our memory as a Christian community. The contributors in this year’s devotional range in age from wise children to young at heart elders. Most of the contributors live close to our worshipping home at the University of British Columbia, others have travelled as far as Saskatchewan, Quebec, Portugal and Sweden. We include university students and professors, retirees and workers of all sorts, some new to Christianity and some steeped in the faith. We share in common the hope that, through scripture, God is re-scripting our lives and life together so that the strange, new world of the Bible becomes the real world in which we live.

The forty-seven texts included in this year’s devotional are derived from two sources. First, we have included all of the lectionary texts from the six Sundays of Lent and from Easter Sunday along with lectionary texts from Ash Wednesday as well as a selection of texts from Holy Week. Second, during the Season after Epiphany a number of us at University Hill gathered weekly to host the Psalms of Ascent - the psalms of pilgrimage (Psalms 120 to 134). We have included all of the Psalms of Ascent in this year’s Lenten Devotional as companions on our shared pilgrimage to Easter. 

We invite you to join us in the daily practice of hosting scripture during Lent and, in doing so, in listening for God’s living Word today. We encourage you to consider developing this practice in your own congregation. We find this to be a rich shared experience in which we rediscover scripture and one another. We wish the same for you.

Here is a link to University Hill Congregation's daily Lenten Devotional.