Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning…return to the Lord your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
(From Joel 2: 12, 13)
Ash Wednesday Thoughts
Today we begin the Lenten journey with the rather bland monochromatic place of dust and ashes. When I clean out the fireplace, attempting to clean and create space for a new fire, the ashes, just like dust, is difficult to gather into one place. Ashes and dust are messy business and the more we attempt to clean our homes and perhaps our very lives of the messiness of dust and ash, the more it simply falls softly into a different space.
On Ash Wednesday, Many of us will gather in parking lots with ashes to go, or at an in-person worship experience. We are marked with an ash cross on our forehead or hands. The palms used to celebrate the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem during Palm Sunday 2021, have now become ashes that remind us that we too are made of dust. I wonder what this season of Lent will bring? On our way towards the cross, we are invited to walk with Jesus as he begins that journey in the wilderness.
Rather than a dry wilderness, my Lenten journey begins this year in the midst of a “atmospheric river” in the Pacific Northwest. It has been raining and raining. When we go out for walks with Jack, our dog, it takes a while to dry off and clean up the mud from his paws. The mud reminds me of what happens to dust when it gets wet… it turns to mud. Mud is messy and so is the season of Lent.
We bring our mess and our mud to this season of Lent, a season to remember and return to God. These past two years have brought grief, pain, and many of us our tired. Now, as the pandemic begins to recede, we are confronted with war in Ukraine. Sometimes it feels like too much and we may find ourselves weighted down. Can we live fully in the messiness of our world, courageously trusting Jesus? Rather than being afraid, let us embrace each day fully with our whole selves as we walk into the unexpected. May we place our hope in Jesus who heals by spitting into the dust of the earth. Let us continue to pray and work for peace.
A Prayer for Ash Wednesday
God of mercy, we hear your call to return to you with all of our heart. As we reflect upon our response to this call, free us of our fear so that we may follow Christ through all the landscapes we are invited to enter this season of Lent. In the name of Christ we pray. AMEN.
Ash Wednesday Thoughts revised from a 2011 reflection by Roberta J. Egli