Today is Ash Wednesday. Our pastors at St. Mark’s UMC in Bloomington have a funeral that conflicts with our noon service, so they have asked me to lead that service. If you are one of those few locals who is planning to come at noon, you might want to skip reading this, because you’ll hear a reasonable facsimile of it later.
CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—
When daughter Katie went to U of IL for grad work, she got a late start on housing and ended up in a Baptist house for grad students. 22 fundamentalist Baptists and Katie. Which meant the fundamentalists were badly outnumbered. One day, one of them said, “Katie, are you saved?” She said, “Yes,” which surprised him. “When were you saved?” he asked, suspiciously. “On Good Friday,” she said.
That’s really the only answer to that question, because we are saved not by our activities, no matter how much we fast and pray and read the Bible and go to church. We are saved by the grace and love of God. Salvation is a gift, not a reward.
But why do we need salvation? Because our relationships are broken. That is what sin is, regardless of how it is expressed: a break in relationship, to God, to the world, to other people, to our own true selves. God takes our fragmented selves and puts them back together, makes them whole.
So if God saves us as an act of mercy, why do we need forty days of Lent, leading up to celebrating Easter resurrection, by fasting and repenting and mourning our sins and sacrificing and…
Jesus was not a big advocate of “spiritual disciplines,” like fasting, which these days is “giving up something for Lent,” especially when they are out in public. He was big on prayer, but even that wasn’t supposed to be on display. [You can read about this in Matthew 6.]
And why ashes? It’s a bit embarrassing to go back to work or walk around town with that ashy cross on our foreheads.
The ashes are a reminder than we shall die. “Ashes to ashes.” And there is nothing we can do about it. It’s the only part of life that is totally out of our control. Oh, yes, we might control the timing of it some, but not the reality of its happening.
We wear the ashes, the mark of death, to remind us that we must learn to trust, trust in God for what comes after death, whatever it may be.
Anthony Newberg, MD, the brain researcher, says that the most important single thing for brain health is faith. Not necessarily religious faith, but trust, trust that it’s okay to keep going on. Christians can trust that way because we have seen how God took care of Jesus.
That sort of trust is not something learned quickly, in a day. It takes 40 days!
John Robert McFarland
I wrote a comment on your previous post about conclusions and sent it by email. It like many of my emails was "demonized" and sent back to me because of wrong address or something. Something probably being the strange field of error that surrounds most of my efforts on-line. I was touched by your article about conclusions and your notes for your Ash Wednesday homily. My 84th year on earth has been a benchmark for me. This year is the first time the reality of my life's conclusion has sunk in. I am not sure why. Perhaps the loss of some dear friends to their deaths, a particularly hard visit to a no-longer-here beloved in a nursing home; or maybe the medical report of my A1C that says I can't eat sweets and starches anymore. I have come to the conclusion that the conclusion has now begun. Each day, from here on out (way out) another thing, or things, will come to a conclusion, until there is nothing left but prayer, faith, and ashes (I am going to be cremated).
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