Sacred Every Day Part One

The season of Lent begins tomorrow with an Ash Wednesday Service.  Over the next forty days, I want to invite you into sensing the sacred all around you.  So much of faith seems to compartmentalize and categorize life.  We get tripped and trapped into thinking that God lives at church.  But as Eugene Peterson translates John 1, the invitation is to see God moving into our neighborhood, into our lives, awakening us not to a new truth, but one that was hidden ~ like a treasure in the field.  The treasure in your very soul.  Yet, we are also not always great at tending our own soul.  Left to our own devices, it is easy (at least for me) to take some random exit ramp and end up stuck in the weeds and reeds of life.  For me, this invitation is not only about the individual.  We need community.  I need folks who will journey with me in the midst of the ups and downs/twists and turns.  The sacred every day is about seeing the sacred flow or animating energy or God moving, still creating and crafting in our midst.

So, why begin with ashes?  Why start so negative?  Actually ashes have a beauty to them.  Something burned but still useful.  Ashes taken from last year's Palm Sunday service...drenched in joyful "Hosannas" that turn suddenly silent on Friday.  Look back at the last year...have there been moments that went from joy-filled to sorrow soaked in the blink of an eye?  Look around right now, are there relationships that once brought smiles and now cause stress to sit upon your soul?  The universe continues to expand...the earth continues to move...why should our lives be any different.  I see a beauty in ashes with our fingerprints and songs of praise, now re-fashioned and recycled to suggest that joy is not the only pathway to God.  Religion can meet us in the brokenness and less-than-blessed state.

So, we take the ashes and trace the same place on your forehead where the symbol of the cross was made with water.  That is the truth of Ash Wednesday.  We are God's beloved and yet God is not finished with us yet.  We take the ashes of our life...moments we said or did the exact thing we did not want to say or do...and offer even that to God.  Or especially that to God.  We shouldn't have to hide ourselves from God, like a child hides a broken lamp from a parent.  We shouldn't have to put on a happy face thinking that is all God cares about.  We shouldn't have to suggest that life is all perfect and we just want to praise God.  Sometimes we want to lament and sit with Job in the ash of life.  And then, there are the ordinary, ever days of life.  Lunches to make for kids.  Appointments to keep.  Traffic to get stuck in.  Shopping.  Binge watching some series on Netflix all the while saying, "Just one more episode."  Walks to take.  Hands to hold.  Moments...ordinary moments...or as the theologians have said...God shows up disguised as your own life.  Or there is no spiritual life and regular life...your calendar is a living prayer.

This Ash Wednesday, I want to encourage you to attend a service.  Receive the ashes...not with guilt but in the graceful gaze of God whose loves is unconditional.  Sing about the coming forty days and commit to a Lenten journey.  You can give something up.  You can take something on ~ like a prayer practice or volunteering.  You can set aside time every day to sit and listen for God.  The point is not for me to be prescriptive of what to do...but descriptive of the invitation that the glory of God is a human being fully alive and in community with each other.

Then, keep checking back to explore with me the sacred every day this Lent.

Grace and Peace...and May God grant you a holy, sacred, every day Lent.

Amen