Our Ashes, God's Breath

 

Psalm 51:1-12, 17

The ashes we use on Ash Wednesday come from burned palms - palms waved with Hosannas and high hopes at Jesus’s coming, then discarded in confusion and disgust when what came next was death instead of victory and triumph.  

There is an honesty and familiarity in the ashes. They’re personal. They represent the incineration of our lost hopes and ruined plans, our decimated dreams and broken relationships. They come from “the debris of good intentions, the residue of our mistakes and failures.” (R.A.)

From ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

 One commentator says, “The[se] words do not refer to some universal concept of inanimate matter nor is the dust from an outside source. No, the ashes are us. The dust is the actualities of our lives. Our physical bodies. Our passions, limitations, mistakes and memories. Our families and friends. Our streets and neighbourhoods. The world in which we live. Our embodied journeys in time and place.”  (Rodney Aist - Wild Goose)

These are the ashes of the burned stores and restaurants in Minneapolis as our city and country cried out in anguish and anger, and this is the dust of the ripped out walls in our church basement to open up space for new life. This is the dirt in which we’ve buried those we love and lost this year, and the dirt from which we grew tomatoes and zucchini to share with our neighbors through the summer. These are the ashes of our bonfires on the church lawn, sitting 10 feet apart when we could not gather side by side indoors. They're the dirt on the boots that trampled through our nation’s capital sounding out loud the chasm of division and pain in the heart of our nation. And these are the spent embers of our energy and enthusiasm for more of this pandemic kind of life after months and months of isolation and distance. 

But “from the cinders of the cross come the soil of resurrection.” (R.A.) From our death, our brokenness and impossibility, God moves to bring new life.  God breathes life into dust to create the Adam, the creature of the earth, Adamah.  We are made from dust, and we bring to God the dust of our lives knowing "what God can do with dust." (as Jan Richardson says.) 
 
Each year at Lent we return to these ashes, as the emptiness, nothingness, from which our God creates. This is the soil we offer to God to grow new life – in us, and in the world. 

It is a relief to gather this way. To see visibly our mortality on the faces of those looking back at us across a screen. We are a community of honesty, and it is here that God meets us.
 
Now we wait. 

We cultivate a spirit of waiting. Waiting for God to do what only God can do. For God to do what God does. 

Lent is a gift. We rest in the honesty and the waiting. 

We hold up our ashes to God and watch for what God will do with them.
May you be blessed in your Lenten wait.


PRAYER PRACTICE
Our Lenten prayer journals are a way for us to pause and process as we receive each week and set intentions for the following week. 

This week:What do these ashes on your own face represent to you? What are the ashes you bring to God, seeking resurrection and life?

From fear: Hope

A Reflection for Ash Wednesday

For 1500 years, Christians have heard these words spoken over them as the sign is made: “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.”  Ash Wednesday puts us in context – as human beings, frail and faulty. But it traces over the sign of the cross made at our baptism – which says, “Beloved, child of God.”  It says both, “Your life is fleeting- and you will die,” and also, “You are part of a much bigger story – both the Christian story, and the story of the love of God without end.” And so for a few moments we see on our very faces and on each other the paradox of our life – both our temporary identity, and also our permanent one.

Our Lenten symbol this year- hope infinity.
Here on bracelets

FROM FEAR: HOPE

All around us, there are plenty of reasons to be afraid: Coronavirus, government and politics, the Climate Crisis, the stock market, our own aging bodies and fading minds, that outstanding test result or bill, the looming deadline, the relationship that feels so tenuous, our failure to be who we want to be, our worries for our kids, or our parents.

Fear paralyzes us.  

It is loud, and looming, and we give it the mic because it’s demanding and authoritative.

Fear make hope seem shallow and silly and ungrounded.  We start to hope and immediately fear roars up behind us, listing all the things that could go wrong.

But hope is stronger than fear. 

Fear is finite – it is temporary and temporal – it comes from the stories we tell ourselves about what might happen. We imagine bad things, we dread loss, we see what’s coming and believe it will overwhelm and defeat us. 

But Hope is infinite – it comes from outside us, reaches from before us and stretches beyond us. Hope is when we exist inside the promise from the Divine about a future we can’t create.  It is grounded in reality, both the real reality that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other no matter what, but also the reality of whatever we are living in and experiencing right now. 

So to get to hope we need to embrace the experiences we are in – even the fear. We need to be willing to look at our sin – which is just a fancy word for our disconnection from God and each other in all the many ways that plays out. We need to tell the truth about the brokenness and even evil, inside us and around us. 

Hope is always about wrongs being made right.  So we need to look wrong in the face and call it wrong.  Lent invites us to do that.

We notice at our own brokenness and the brokenness in the world around us.  We let ourselves feel it and grieve it, and we say boldly, Things are not as they should be! because we know there is more.  Hope is knowing it could be different, it should be different, it will be different.  

Jesus came into all of it-  the fear of it too, his temptation in the wilderness, his terrible grief at the loss of his friend Lazarus,  his all-consuming dread in the garden; Jesus did not back down from the fear. Because he was without sin, which is to say, he was completely connected to God and each other- he could go into the fear and grief and loss and stay connected to God – he could reach through the fear to the hope.  

We are the Body of Christ.  We are the people of hope.  And so we are people who do not cower from fear. We let God pull us through the finite fear to the hope that is infinite.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord remains. 
One day, despite all we see and hear and feel, love triumphs, life prevails. 
Peace will reign.  Justice will rule. The weak will be made strong.  All that has been lost will be restored. This is God’s promise.  The love of God is "vast, unmeasured, boundless, free."  This is our hope. 

This Lent we are choosing to face our fear, trusting God to meet us there with infinite hope.  

From Fear: Hope.

Dust of the earth, finite creatures of fear/ Children of the Divine, bearers of infinite Hope, come and receive the ashes.

Dust and breath

 Joel 2:12-13, Psalm 46

"Be still and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10

Remember that you are dust, And to dust you shall return.

Lent is a reminder that we are human beings, creatures, that we come from earth, soil, dust, and we will return to it.  No matter what we do on this life to try to outlive our humanity, to avoid our weakness, to transcend our station, we still ultimately die, we are creatures, trapped in our creatureliness.

But to be made from dust, to have the breath of life breathed into us…

"The Hebrew name for the divine is composite of the words Hayah, Heveh Yehiyeh (was, is, will be).  It conveys the mystery of timelessness, of infinite beingness." This is our source. This is who holds our life. The name of God is made entirely of vowels and can’t really be pronounced. It is said that if you say the name of God as it is written it would sound like an exhaled breath. 
Let’s do that together.

We just said God’s name.

The first thing a child does when it comes into the world from the waters of its mother’s womb is say the name of God.

The last thing a human being does before leaving this planet is to say the name of God.

Grace is God’s being, shared with us. That God’s love is poured out in love and care for us is the foundation of our own being. We are made to be cared for by our creator. We are made to care for each other.

But so much of the time, we reject the care of others and we pretend we don’t need god’s care.  We act as though we are in it alone. This, by the way, is sin, which we will talk more about this weekend. 

Lent is a whole season to return to the truth of our belonging to God and each other –which isn’t found in strength or invincibility, but in weakness, nothingness, and impossibility.  

Not in anything we do or accomplish or say or become or fail at. Just in our breath. Just by being. We are creatures, made in the image of God.

We cannot, on our own, transcend our nothingness. But we can trust the one who transcends all, the ineffable name, we can trust that our lives are held in something greater, that our being is secure in the love of the one who ministers to us.  God comes into this world in Jesus, taking on all death, all nothingness and impossibility, taking it into Godself so there is nothing anymore that can separate us from God.

Lent is an invitation into the courage to be honest, your real, vulnerable old self, the part that simply is.  The part that comes with breath and body and sadness and longing. It's a chance to take off some armor, to lay down some weapons, to rest in the love of God that holds you, that you mostly act like you don't need when really you absolutely do.

What would you like to let go of to make space in your life for God to encounter you?

What do you use to avoid your nothingness, to build your somethingness, to forget your creatureliness?

When boredom, despair, sadness or emptiness rise up, what do you use to distract yourself?

What's your "go to" pacifier or diversion?

Social media? TV? Snacking? Alcohol? Solitaire? Addictive patterns and habits?

How do you check out of uncomfortable feelings?

What do you use to numb?

This Lent we are going toward our nothingness.

We are welcoming the absence, and seeking God there.

You are invited to fast from (let go of temporarily) whatever it is you use to avoid the abyss.

Turns out we have a God who goes right into our places of suffering and absence, and shares them with us. We generally avoid meeting God there.

This lent we are going there.

Return to me with all your heart. God says.

Be still. our scripture says.

This appears two places in scriptures as a command from God. The first place the command is given, the people of God have been delivered out of Egypt, but Pharoah has changed his mind, and has sent his entire army after them to destroy them. They are at the edge of the Red Sea, the chaos of waters in front of them and Pharoah's whole army behind them, in the face of certain death, and God says,

Be still. The Lord will fight for you.

The second place this command is given is in our Psalm, where it says, Nations are in an uproar, kingdoms totter, God raises his voice and the earth melts.

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still is not an invitation for when you already feel content, when things are going well and you're longing for some spiritual boost. It's for the chaos. For the impossibility. For the crisis, and the injustice and the division and the shame.

When things feel overwhelming around us. Be still.

When you find yourself fleeing your nothingness. Be still.

When you feel weak or lost. Be still.

When you sense the urge to make yourself big, to prove yourself, to insulate yourself. Be still.

Be till and know.

Be still and know I am God.

You are not God.

Stop moving.

Breathe in.

Feel your breath filling your body.

Feel your feet on the ground.

Feel your creatureliness.

Be here. Be now. Be still.

Let God be God.

You be still.

Let God meet you here.

To be made of dust and water

Daniel Bonnell, The Baptism of Christ

Mark 1:9-15

One Wednesday night in cold February, 2008, I stood in line holding my nearly six month old son on my hip as he sucked his little fist and clung to me with his other arm.   In front of me was a dear 99 year old woman. I watched the pastor smear ashes on her soft, wrinkled forehead and say, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” 

I felt my heart rise to my throat and the tears come to my eyes as I witnessed this and thought, not long now.

The pastor’s words felt very true as I watched this woman slowly turn to walk away, leaning heavily on her cane. The truth of our mortality, I thought, right before my eyes.

But I snapped back to attention when the next thing I knew, the pastor was pressing her ash-covered finger to my baby’s own soft, tiny forehead and saying the very same words to him, from dust you came and to dust you shall return. Then the tears did come. I didn’t want what was true for the old woman with a long, full life behind her and one foot in the grave to be true also for my tiny one, not long out of the womb with his whole life in front of him.  But it ‘s true of us all.

And Lent is about telling the truth.

We’ve begun our 40 days of Lent, to mirror Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. It’s the 40 days that lead up to Easter (minus the Sundays, which for Christians are always days of resurrection).  And we begin Lent with these verses from Mark, that pack into a very small space Jesus’ baptism, his temptation in the wilderness, and beginning of his ministry – all in whirlwind kind of storytelling that leaves no room for details.  Baptism. Wilderness. Ministry. Ready, set, go!

Jesus comes up out of the waters of his baptism, and the Spirit like a gentle dove alights on him, and the voice of God says, “You are my child, Beloved One. I am delighted in you.” And then, suddenly, violently, the same Spirit drives him, still dripping, into the wilderness. 

The wilderness is a big motif in scripture and a big metaphor in our lives. Perhaps we think of wilderness as barren and lonely, and it often it is. Isolated, cut off from what gives you security, community, purpose and direction, wilderness feels somehow both wandering and stranded at the same time, with the very real possibility that you will not make it out alive. 

But in Mark’s breathless and brief telling, the wilderness feels almost crowded and noisy, Jesus was surrounded by wild beasts and inundated by temptations delivered by Satan, and ministered to by angels.

And Mark says almost nothing about the temptations.   The other gospels describe this in some detail, but Mark finds it sufficient to say he was tempted by evil incarnate, and leave the rest to the imagination.

Perhaps for Mark it doesn’t matter specifically what the temptation was; just that it was a real temptation.  He wasn’t teased by the devil, or given a safe opportunity to flex his refusal muscles or assert his boundaries, like practicing a language, or doing a training exercise.  This wasn’t a game; Jesus was genuinely tempted. 

Tempted, like we are.  Tempted to hunker in our corners and shout insults at the other side, rallying against our enemies. Tempted to give in to despair, or let anger swallow us up.  Tempted to make our world really small and really safe and really pleasant and ignore anything that feels too big or overwhelming, especially the plights of others.  Tempted to numb the pain – with alcohol, or medications, or pornography, or non-stop work or being sucked into the social media vortex, whatever dangerous addiction or mindless pastime we can find to help us not to feel bad, even if it means we wont feel much at all. 

Temptation is real and all of us face it. Jesus did too.

And in the wilderness, stripped down to desperation, everything offered to him - each deal or suggestion or idea that evil incarnate held before him - seemed really, really good, and he was tempted to give in, to take the sweet relief offered and be done with the struggle.  It was a fight within himself, a battle to resist, complete with doubt and second guessing and anxiety.  Oh, and also there were wild beasts.  Mark doesn’t elaborate on them either.

And then angels come and minister to Jesus in the wilderness.

And that’s all Mark has to say about them too.

But the story doesn’t begin in the wilderness; it all begins with baptism.

And so even as the sign of the ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday made visible, traced over the blessing spoken on us at our own baptisms, we begin Lent here, too, the place of our identity, belonging and naming, Beloved. 

We begin at baptism. Today we will remember our own baptisms as we baptize little Rowen.

When God with us came into this life he took on death alongside us. Before his ministry begins, Jesus is plunged under the water symbolizing chaos and death, and pulled back into the light of breath and life. He metaphorically dies and is risen –and when we are baptized into his death and resurrection, we do the same.

We don’t do it very dramatically here- you should go home and watch the youtube video of the Orthodox priests in Georgia thrusting babies head first into water and then flipping them over and and dunking their feet, three times back and forth, head feet head feet head feet, in less than 5 seconds total, and then dropping them into an outstretched towel before these waterlogged little ones know what hit them and set up wailing.  

Here we just pour an almost tidy amount of water on the head.

But the intention is that it symbolizes our death and our resurrection, both our actual death and our death to all that keeps us from life –and a rising to life in Jesus’ own life and death, now to be defined by love, the Kingdom of God, the reality we choose to live in.

Rowen can’t choose this yet. He gets to be told later that God’s love was spoken and poured over him before he could do anything to earn or reject it. And that it will be the very last thing true about him as well. It never ends. Nothing he can do can make God stop loving him. This is what gets to define him now. Not any success or failure in his life, not anything anyone else thinks about him, or even what he thinks about himself. Only this: God naming him beloved. 

Brittany and Jonathan, when you hand your son over to the waters, you are handing him over to the real reality. You are saying, Yes, death will come for him. But death is not the final word. The final word is life – love, resurrection, hope.  And the first and last word of his identity is beloved, child of God, delight of God’s heart.

The most terrible temptations he will face, pure evil that is in this world, the wild beasts that will threaten to tear him apart, the lonely and barren places he will walk through in his lifetime, cannot separate him from God’s love, cannot change his identity, or his calling. Beloved, child of God in whom God delights.

This means Rowen can live without fearing death. He can live without dodging his vulnerability or hiding his weakness. He can live without avoiding or numbing pain, or striving to try to earn his belonging.

Rowen will be invited to live into his baptismal identity. From this day forward, he is called to discover what it means to belong to God and belong to all others – to let love be what defines him, to receive and give forgiveness, to join in the ministry of God always underway, and to know in the wilderness that he is not alone and that it doesn’t end there.

I wonder if the reason Jesus’ wilderness experience comes immediately after his baptism, is because to truly be human Jesus must come face to face with evil incarnate. Must experience despair, and fear, and temptation, and being ministered to.  

To take in that God has claimed and chosen you to join in God’s reality and bring others into it too, brings you right up against your own complete inability to fulfill that calling, makes you face the despair at the futility of it all, if it is in your own hands. 

Because if it is all in our own hands we are doomed. 

It’s been a hard week. A school shooting brings to light the existence of absolute evil, and the terrible suffering we can often ignore, along with the culpability and failure of us all to be who we are meant to be and to love as we are meant to love, and the utter impossibility of protecting those who need protection and preventing horrible things from happening.  Life is precarious and sometimes terrifying.  And we rage and wail at it and wring our hands and try to overcome our limitations but we are just as helpless to create good and stop evil as we’ve ever been.  The truth of our mortality is right before our eyes. 

And yet, and yet, Jesus comes out of the wilderness proclaiming to the world that there is another way.  That the time is right now.  That God’s transformation of the world is already happening. And that you, and I, and everyone else, is invited us to trust in it, and join in it too. Because it’s not in our hands at all, this is God’s show.

In this time before Easter when we enter Lent, we endeavor to repent, and to trust in this good news, because normally in life, we are not very good at either one of these things.

And then we go with honesty into a kind of wilderness, where we face our fears and the beasts that threaten to tear us apart, where we name evil incarnate,  and feel the temptations to numb or hide, or hurt, or hate, so enticing with their false promises of relief. We go to that place of wilderness honesty and vulnerability. We join Jesus there.

From dust we came and to dust we shall return, every single one of us, ready or not. Lent helps us tell that truth, but also the truth about death being real but not the end. Lent invites us to live into the absurd truth that in weakness and fragility, love overpowers and outlasts hate and evil. 

Because we have looked at death without looking away, we will be ready to welcome life. We will be ready for the good news of the resurrection that opens wide our hearts when we let them be broken first by the truth of our mortality.

Only then can the angels minister to us, and only then can we come out the other side not only proclaiming but believing it for ourselves – that the kingdom of God has come near.  That God’s love and salvation has come into the world, is coming even now, and will one day be all that endures.  Only then are we ready to truly live out our calling – brave and vulnerable and real. On Easter we come out of the wilderness proclaiming to the world that there is another way.  That the time is right now.  That God’s transformation of the world is already happening. And that you, and I, and everyone else, is invited us to trust in it and join in it too. Because it’s not in our hands at all, this is God’s show.

Beloved, children of God, delight of God’s heart, this is the story that defines you, this is the identity into which you are called, this is the truth spoken over you, and this is the life into which you are sent.  Baptism. Wilderness. Ministry. 

Let us join Jesus there and begin again.

Amen.

Why Ashes?

When I told my kids we would be going to church to have the sign of the cross put on our heads, they told me they already had the sign of the cross on their heads. They meant the sign of their baptism; they meant that they belong to God.

Then we had to talk about how this sign we will be making tonight is one they can see, at least for a short time. How we are making this mark to remember that even though we belong to God, we still die and death still has a hold on us. 

That creeped them out a little, why do we need to remember that we die? They asked.

Ash Wednesday begins our Lenten journey to Easter with the sign of the ashes made on us. This ancient sign speaks of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marks our penitence.  

Ashes is a sign of grief and a recollection of death that awaits us all.

We will mark the cross on our foreheads in ashes, visible, smudgy, dark and dusty.  Death.  Mortality.  Frailty. But we will trace the mark of our humanity over top of the unseen but permanent mark of our baptism.

The words spoken at baptism begin:

“In baptism God claims us,

And seals us to show that we belong to God.

God frees us from sin and death,

Uniting us with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection.

Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

One of the most powerful experiences of Ash Wednesday I have ever had was when my son was 5 months old.  Just in front of me as we came forward for our ashes, was a woman who was a beloved pillar of the church, Alice Satterfield; she was 84 years old.

She made her way slowly forward, her body bent over her cane and feet shuffling, and I watched the pastor trace the cross on her forehead in ashes and say to her, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” 

Tears sprang to my eyes when I heard those words spoken over Mrs. Satterfield, not knowing how much longer she would be with us, and realizing how painful it would be when she was gone. 

Then I stepped forward to receive the ashes myself.  The pastor leaned towards me, and with a black-smudged thumb reached out and traced the cross on the forehead of my gurgling baby boy on my hip, and said, “from dust you came and to dust you shall return.”  I gasped and felt as though I had been hit in the stomach. 

It was true, I realized.

What was true for Mrs. Satterfield was true for Owen as well. It is true for everyone.  Even fresh arrivals in this world will go out of it eventually. Nobody escapes death.  Everyone one of us is in need of life.

Why do we need to remember that we die? 

Because it’s true. 

And because remembering that reminds us that we are not God.  That we need salvation. 

And so by receiving this sign of the cross tonight we hold these truths together – that we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, no matter what, we belong to Christ, in whom there is life everlasting. 

But even though the power of death has been broken in Christ, and we will celebrate the resurrection at Easter, we still die.  And we still participate in sin and death in this life.

We are badly in need of the Resurrection. 

Beloved of God, says the water and anointing first, chosen and claimed. Destined for eternity with the creator, empowered by the Spirit for a life of faithfulness and love. 
And dying. Weak, says the ashes on top. Vulnerable, human, broken. 

Tonight you are invited to come forward and welcome the honesty the ashes offer.  To bring your brokenness, your places of sorrow and loss, your places of weakness and failure, the places you forget you belong to life and live instead like you belong to death. 

Let the ashes be your prayer.

Let the ashes invite you to meet God in those places of sin and death, as we journey towards the cross and the hope of the resurrection.

Prayer:

Almighty God,

You have created us out of the dust of the earth.

May these ashes be for us

a sign of our mortality and penitence,

and a reminder that only by your gracious gift

are we given everlasting life;

through Jesus Christ our Savior.

Amen

Remember that you are dust,

And to dust you shall return.

Entering Lent

In honor of Ash Wednesday approaching this week, I am reposting last year's Ash Wednesday Reflection. Enjoy.

image by Jan Richardson, used with permission

When I told Owen about Ash Wednesday, and making a cross on our forehead, he said, “But I already have a cross on my forehead.” 

He was speaking of his baptism. That he is marked as Christ’s own and claimed by God forever.  But his baptism was a baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ, that his very being is now taken up into the life of Christ – the death of Christ, the redemption of Christ.

And every experience he has in this life of death, each loss and pain he suffers and inflicts on others, each time something is taken from his being, each brokenness, each injustice – these things are all taken into Christ who bears them all on the cross.

So, I told him, “This time the cross we make on our forehead is one we can see. It is marked in ashes.  It represents death – Jesus’ death, but our own too. Because we are going into Lent, where we talk about how death has a hold on life, and how we participate in death, and how we all really need God’s life to destroy death.” 

He looked at me and touched his forehead and said, ‘Will you think of Grandma Root when you make your cross on your head?” 

“Yes, I will think of her," I answered, "because she is gone from us and death has separated her from us, and I will think of all the other ways that death separates us from each other. The ways death hurts us in life. Because when we spend some time remembering this, we know that even though death makes a mark on us, we belong to God and that can never change.  And we will be ready to talk about how God destroys death and brings life.”

We go into these next weeks, these 40 days of Lent following Jesus’ journey to the cross, and it helps us remember why.

Why do we celebrate the resurrection anyway?

Why does it matter that we have a God who died for us?

Why do we believe there is any hope in the story of Christ, in God’s story that we are part of? 

And we cannot know the hope, taste the promise, unless we are willing to really face the despair, unless we are willing to spend some time in the shadow side of life: 

the unanswered prayers, 

the guilt over relationships shattered 

and dreams traded away 

and promises broken 

and wounds gouged deep into our souls 

and inflicted on others by our own words or actions. 

Last week after Grandma Root’s funeral, Owen sat in the car holding his popped balloon that he had been playing with the whole day.  He finally sighed a big sigh and said, “Mommy, why are bad things happening?  Why does everything die?  Did God do a bad job making the world?” 

These are Lent questions.  

And too often we rush to answers instead of sitting in the questions.  

Lent gives us a chance to simmer in the questions.

Why do bad things happen? 

Why does everything have to die?  

Why did Jesus die?  

Why is the cross "good news"? 

We can’t know it to be good news until we spend some time in the bad, until we let ourselves stop faking or fearing, stop defending God and ourselves, stop ignoring our complicity and looking past the shame in our lives. 

Lent is an invitation to honesty.

It is a chance to clear away some of the noise- as cheerful or friendly or positive as the noise might be- to get rid of the distractions that protect us from having to face the doubts or the anger, the deep sadness or the piercing regrets.  It is an invitation to enter those things, as fearful as it sounds, to sit with those things and expect that God will encounter us. 

Lent is a time when we acknowledge sin and evil, and our participation in sin and evil, and recognize that we don’t deserve forgiveness but we stand here in need of it anyway,

It is a time when say we have a whole lot of questions and concerns about how the world is run and how life is going, and we are not going to hide them or explain them away; we’re going to swallow our fear and say them outloud, even if they seem too big to fix,

Lent is when we say from dust I came and to dust I will return, ashes to ashes, and we stare death in the face, and admit that we are unable to save ourselves or the world around us, and that we need a savior.

In Lent we stand with our flimsy faith drawn on our foreheads in ashes, of all things, and say as crazy a story as this is, as hard as it is to see hope sometimes,

I am going to risk it,

even with my doubt and my unfaithfulness and my hypocrisy and my self-righteousness, I stand here in the possibility that there might be more going on than I can see, and that redemption may be more real than I can imagine.

So we surrender ourselves to the story, our story, God’s story - that moves now through life’s horror and illusion and brings the Creator ultimately to death at the hands of his own creation and most astonishingly, on its behalf,

we submit ourselves to this story because in this story there might be a hope beyond what we can grasp, and we’re willing to risk letting it grasp us.

So we begin Lent today that we might be made ready for Easter. 

We begin Lent today that our eyes might be opened and our pain might rise to the surface, that our guilt might become obvious to us, that the world’s utter need might stand starkly before us – because there is a promise at the end of this journey,

and we can’t hear the promise in all its cosmic, world-changing power with all the religion and politics and business as usual in our ears,

and we can’t see the promise’s searing brilliance past all the self-importance and busyness, and personal agendas clouding our vision,

and we wont be able to really let the hope of our salvation wash over us, fill us, cleanse us and sustain us if our backs are turned because we’re too occupied being strong, or good, or right.

Lent prepares us for the good news of Easter. 

Bring your questions.  Bring your fears.  Bring your failures.

Lent is an invitation. 

May we accept it.