As I write this, Easter Monday 2008 is almost half gone. Within the hour, it will be time for the office of nones, a thing that usually means my creative day is done and that the time has come to start with the mail and my backlog of reading materials. Today is a bit off-routine, though, because I have been in transit all day, making my way from Lucy, TN to Grand Rapids, MI. I am sitting in a room of the Prince Center at Calvin College, in fact, even as I type this.

Now that Lent and Easter Sunday have passed over us for another year, we enter today the Great Fifty Days, the litrugical season in which the Church moves from the glory of resurrection through the last days of Jesus’ visible and frequent presence with His disciples within space/time to His ascension, and then to that second most glorious time of the Church’s story: Pentecost itself. During Lent this year, I blogged daily–and with much joy–on beliefnet.com, as many of you may already know. Now that the “The Divine Hours of Lent” series is done, however, it is time to move on and take up residence here.

This is not “my” site in the usual sense of blog sites. Rather, it belongs to a conversation or line of investigation . That is, this is the site on which commentary and suggestions can be made, and questions raised about, the whole business of studying the words of Jesus of Nazareth in a Sayings format. Yes, I want to blog some things here, of course; and God willing, I will do just that every Monday morning on something that, for lack of a better title, we could call, “Monday Morning Blogging.” And in the course of those MMB’s. I fully intend to make some commentary and observations of my own. But I hope also to be able to share some of the approaches, ideas, and reactions that have already begun to come in from other people, both lay and ordained.

The whole radical notion of stripping away the exegetic tools of chapters and versification and even of identifiable narrators renders up not only a Sayings gospel, but also something as close as we will ever get to a “Q” Gospel based on the texts we do have. By definition, that kind of re-positioning is an invitation to a whole range of emotions from anger to startled wonder. It is an invitation as well to engage the words of Jesus in a scripturally pure, but totally re-configured and disorienting way.

Over and over again, I am hearing now from people who say either, “I never knew He said that! And I’ve been reading the Bible all my life!” or “I thought you had made it up, until I went back to that Index and looked up the verses.” Occasionally, someone will also add to that last sentence, “And it made me so mad at first that I blamed you.” Oddly enough, it’s the addition that comforts me the most. Anger is not necessarily a good emotion in and of itself; but it is a very good sign that something of significance has happened to somebody. Blame, likewise, is not necessarily a good thing; but reporting it to the one blamed is almost always a strong sign that something significant has changed in the mind and heart of the one doing the reporting.

So, enough for this Easter Monday. Have a good week, and may the intense focus of Lent continue to shape our patterns and our prayers for the coming days. That’s it for this Monday Morning Blogging…..phyllis tickle