"For all things are yours...and you are Christ's;
and Christ is God's." (1 Cor. 3:21, 23)

We began the season of Lent with the call of Ash Wednesday to be honest about ourselves - namely, we are sinners and we are mortal. We took that, in fact, that to be good news: on the one hand, because we acknowledge these realities in the presence of a God who seeks to forgive us and who lovingly created us and continues to hold us even in death, and on the other hand, because it puts things in a proper and healthy perspective as we take on the journey of Lent.

The verse above from 1 Corinthians, part of the readings in the Daily Office today, conveys the same theme. Paul is confronted with a faction within the Corinthian church that has decided that they have arrived spiritually. They preach eloquently, speak in tongues, are full of wisdom... They have no need of anyone else in the community, and really no need anymore for Jesus and his lordship and second coming. They have already made it. In response, Paul - I imagine somewhat gleefully - sets them up. Yes, indeed, says Paul, everything is yours, even life and death, the present and the future. And then he moves in for the kill: and that is only true because you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Suddenly, hotshot Corinthians, you've gone from first to third place, utterly dependent upon God in Christ.

The joy and the challenge of Lent (yes, I used joy and Lent in the same phrase) is to claim the power and the hope and the life that is ours - not as our own doing, but as a gracious gift from God.