2/14/15

2015 lenten daily devotional online



The season of Lent is just around the corner. Ash Wednesday, that marks the beginning of Lent, is on February 18 this year (Lent's dates change from year to year since Easter is a lunar festival and, therefore, varies each year). Once again this year University Hill Congregation has created an online daily devotional and invites us to join in the daily discipline of hosting scripture in our lives and life together.

Here is the introduction to this year's Lenten Devotional ...

"Welcome to University Hill Congregation’s fourteenth 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 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 youngest contributors in this year’s devotional are in their first decade of life, the eldest contributor is in her tenth decade. Some live close to our worshipping home on campus at the University of British Columbia, others have moved as far as Sweden and Taiwan. 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 and nearly all of the lectionary texts from Holy Week. Second, as the Lenten Bible study at University Hill this year is an invitation to host the First Letter of Peter, we have included a number of passages from this formative letter.

We invite you to join us in the daily practice of hosting scripture 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 have found this to be a rich experience in which we rediscover scripture and one another. We wish the same for you."

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