Pastor Mary Virginia Farnham

Are you 95 or older? If so, you’ve already seen Ash Wednesday come on February 6. (The last time was 1913.) For those of us who are younger, though, this is a first and a last for our lifetime. Ash Wednesday won’t fall again on this date until 2160.

One of my most solemn duties as a pastor is to trace a cross of ash on the forehead of worshipers on Ash Wednesday. As I act I also speak: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Those words tug at my heart as I say them. Even if I don’t know the person who kneels before me, I feel the weight of the reminder. The brief interaction at the Communion rail is all the more powerful if I know that the person before me is going through chemotherapy, has just buried a loved one, struggles with depression, has recently stood before the altar to exchange wedding vows, is pregnant, or is in the midst of a painful divorce. I have marked the brow of infants carried in their parents’ arms, seeing in a flash how brief our lifespan really is, even if we live long enough to see Ash Wednesday fall twice on February 6^th .

This could be a morbid exercise except for the shape in which the ash is traced: a cross. I work hard so that folks leave with a clear cross and not a vague smudge on their foreheads! The cross of Christ is a symbol of hope, of spiritual rebirth, as surely as returning robins are a sign of approaching spring.

The ashes, of course, are a reminder that our sins, our failures in love toward God, neighbor and self, have made a funeral pyre of our life. Some of our failures are more dramatic, more destructive, than others, but on Ash Wednesday we confess that “we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23).

Holden Village is the retreat center and family camp in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains where my family vacationed last summer. The Village was evacuated a few weeks after we left because of the wildfires that raged in the Cascades throughout August and September. My husband and I returned over New Year’s break; we saw the blackened trunks of trees that lay in the forest fire’s path. Some of those trees are Ponderosa pines, which only release their seeds in intense heat. We were told this was a “kind” fire, because it burned the underbrush among the trees rather than the trees themselves. The freshly cleared ground, covered with a fresh blanket of ash, newly exposed to the sun because of the incineration of the lower canopy of branches, becomes a perfect nursery for saplings. A whole new crop of trees will owe its existence to last year’s fires. The ash will become fertile mulch for a resurrected forest.

Sin often goes unchecked in this world because we deny our sinfulness. Instead of apologizing for our shortcomings or misdoings, we rationalize our actions, blame the other party, create a smokescreen to cover our sins, or simply live such hustle-bustle lives that we leave ourselves no time for reflection, no sliver of time to engage in that tried-and-true, classic spiritual exercise of an examination of conscience. The name sounds absolutely deadening, terribly old-fashioned and immediately unappealing. But on Ash Wednesday our culture happily, hopefully, helps us slow down long enough to position ourselves to receive ashes, hear the sobering, oh-so-true reminder, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” and prayerfully look at our lives in the light of God’s love and truth.

Here’s another God-given chance for us to acknowledge that we don’t get it right all the time and that we get it wrong much of the time. Here’s our fresh opportunity to turn again (that’s what repent literally means) toward the light and away from the darkness, toward God’s purposes for us and away from our own self-serving agenda, toward all that is life-giving and away from that which is death-dealing, in relationships, in our work life, in our daily habits.

Lent is called the springtime of the soul. Let God light a fire in the underbrush of sin in your life, and clear the ground for resurrected life. The goal of the purification process isn’t pain or punishment but forgiveness and new life. Let the ash become mulch for your soul.

The door to the stable where the Christ Child lays is small.  It is so low that one must kneel in order to enter…. 

 So tradition has it!  We must kneel to enter His presence and adore the newborn King.  I asked the folks at the 7 a.m. Communion service yesterday when they find themselves on their knees.  At prayer, of course….  We kneel to ask forgiveness for our sins, and sometimes we kneel to ”atone” for our “sins.”  We have a candle warmer at home.  In reaching to turn it off, I toppled the glass container filled with melted wax, and watched it coat the top of my good end table, the base of a nearby standing lamp, and the hardwood floor.  I spent half an hour on my knees scraping a puddle of hardened wax off the floor.  We also kneel to clean up messes made by others: the child broke a dish, the cat threw up, the dog snagged a napkin off of the kitchen table and left a path of shredded paper.  We kneel to garden as well: uprooting weeds, planting bulbs, breaking up dry clods, sprinkling fertilizer.  We kneel to play: to roll a ball to child or pet, to begin a wrestling match, to play cards or Scrabble. 

In all these moments of life, we can ”stoop low” to enter the stable.  Humility isn’t pushing our faces into the mud.  It is kneeling in wonder that “God so loved the world…..”  It is asking for pardon, making amends, rejoicing in forgiveness, reveling in both everyday and eternal gifts.

Evelyn Underhill wrote a wonderful poem called Immanence.  It describes the Savior instead of us stooping low….  It ends:

“I come in the little things, saith the Lord:

My starry wings I do forsake

       Love’s highway of humility to take:

       Meekly I fit my stature to your need.

In beggar’s part about your gates

      I shall not cease to plead –

      As man to speak with man –

            Till by such art

I shall achieve my immemorial plan,

           Pass the low lintel of the human heart.”

If God can stoop this low: can we?    Amen

Every family has a storyteller.  On my dad’s side, Aunt Beulah was ours.  When I moved to Manasquan eleven years ago, she shared her childhood memory of the little Italian ladies from  Orange going on pilgrimage to the Shore every August 15th.   The goal was to put their feet in the ocean water.  I wondered why….

For our Roman Catholic and Episcopal brothers and sisters, August 15th is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven.  There’s no Scriptural basis for that event, so we Lutherans don’t teach it.  We do, however, set aside August 15 as the day we commemorate ”Mary, the Mother of our Lord.”  Preparing to share a devotion at this morning’s 7 a.m. service of Holy Communion, I googled ”Mary, the Mother of Jesus, August 15, Sea Water.”  I was hoping someone would connect the dots between Mary and salt water and Italian pilgrims :).  The only reference I found was in an essay in which a man reminisces about his Irish grandmother: ”I hear my Irish grandmother say, ‘Salt water is good for wounds.’  She believed that every year on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, the ocean acquired miraculous powers to heal.  On that day every summer she would force her fifteen grandchildren into the waves at Rockaway Beach.”  (from The Body, Aug./Sept. 2001)

Ah, the connection is healing!   Anyone who’s been tumbled by the waves at the Jersey Shore knows the sting of salt water on a skinned knee.  No need for Bactine before putting on a bandage at home, because the water that caused the wipeout sterilizes the wound…. 

 So what’s in this for a Lutheran??  Well, we also believe in waters that heal.  For us,  the baptismal font holds living water that washes away sin, drowning the old self as surely as if the undertow dragged us under and held us there.  We rise up again, though, as a new creation in Christ, baptized into His death and resurrection. 

Martin Luther wrote a beautiful commentary on the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in Luke 1. 46-55.  In it he refers to Jesus’ mother as “Theotokos,” ”God-bearer,” the Eastern Church’s favorite nickname for her.  We honor Mary as the first one through whom the Word took on flesh, His earthly mother, yes, but also His first disciple.  (Remember her words at the wedding at Cana in Galilee?  “Do whatever He tells you.”  John 2.5)  We are His disciples, too, commissioned in baptism to be little Christs, to incarnate the Gospel, to bear God into the world.  We are also called to be God-bearers. 

Luther didn’t invite us to take a dip in the sea one day a year.  Instead, he said, “Wash your face and remember your baptism” every day.  There we were first  bathed/drowned in the healing waters of forgiveness that cure our sin and our sickness, lifelong, and into eternal life.  Be a God-bearer today and all days.  Amen 

When I lived in Illinois I had a 45 minute highway commute, longer when traffic was bad. I hated chewing up that much time in the car, but have to admit that traveling so far and so long helped me change gears and make a gradual, graceful transition between work and home. Riding along I mentally processed what happened during the day, hashing out my frustrations, detoxing from the trauma I’d witnessed, and anticipating the relaxation and total change of pace as I moved from my professional to my personal life. It was time well spent.

A friend recently shared that she has a daily ritual for transitioning from her lawyer persona to her mommy self. I can almost imagine the powdered wig and dark robes of an English barrister being peeled off, and play clothes donned! She suggested that in our spiritual life we often need to strip off one thing before putting on another. Can I really commit to one more thing, however worthwhile, without putting another involvement to bed? Can I forgive without first letting go of resentment? Can I convince others that God’s love is a gift if I’m acting like I have to earn it?

Are you wearing too many layers for anything to fit right? What would you like to shrug off? “For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1.37)