From Pastor Lara…In Chicago’s Millennium Park, there is a world-famous sculpture called the Cloud Gate. I grew up knowing it by its common name: the Bean. It looks like an alien dropped a soft silver-plated kidney bean out of the sky and into the hard vertical lines of the Chicago skyline. While it was designed to stretch the clouds over its 60-foot-long top as if like a gate, it has become famous as a fantastic place to take selfies. I must have visited the Bean twice in its first year, and I still have the selfies to prove it. The Bean is compelling to modern audiences because it is smooth, edgeless, and reflective. It has no character of its own but instead amusingly distorts the reflections of its surroundings. It’s neutral. It has no hard lines. It makes no claims of truth and demands nothing of those who encounter it.

The God of the Bible is nothing like the Bean. Jesus is not every man; he is the Son of Man. He was born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph. He was raised in a specific community, the people of Israel, with all their particular rituals, practices, and scriptures. They worship a unique God who gives very particular commands for how to live. He dies under Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate, and Caesar. The Bean-Gods of Babylon, Rome, and the far East do not care much for the details of mortals’ lives, but dies for the details of our sins and impending death. Our God is particular.

This particular God was busy saving the world long before Jesus of Nazareth was born in a Galilean backwater barn. The story of our salvation starts in the Old Testament with people like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Hagar, Moses, Shipra, David, Tamar, and Ezekiel. During Lent, we will be exploring God’s saving work through the life-and-death stories of Old Testament characters. Through the Word of God proclaimed, we will be encountered by this detailed and distinct God.

I’ve had this experience multiple times. You walk up to The Bean and discover that it doesn’t feel like much. In art museums, you find portraits with unique faces. Eyes greet you with warmth or stare at you in judgment. Lips smile or sneer. Details tell the story of feast or famine, friends and foes. Most art is an encounter with a peculiar stranger that can make you feel confused, joyful, awed, humbled, afraid. Strangely, there is no feeling of encounter when you walk up to the Bean. It’s cool. But it always left me feeling like I missed something. The encounter was elusive. The meaning wasn’t empty, it was absent.

But walk into the stories of Scripture and be called and claimed by not just a particular God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but by The God. Come have an encounter you couldn’t possibly capture in a selfie, but that instead captures yourself in a grand story of life-and-death and salvation.

Lent Series: Life and Death
February 22 – Adam, Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
March 1 – Abraham, Genesis 12:1-5a
March 8 – Moses, Exodus 17:1-7
March 15 – David, 1 Samuel 16:1-13
March 22 – Ezekiel, Ezekiel 37:1-14
March 29 – Palm Sunday, Philippians 2:5-11