Happy Lent!?!

 

Happy Lent everyone!!  What better way to spend Valentine’s Day than to have your pastor put some ashes from the palms of last Palm Sunday on your forehead (trace the place where the baptismal water of your “Beloved-ness” once evaporated as an eternal claim on your life)?  What romantic words to warm the cockles of your heart than to hear, “From dust you are and to dust you shall return.”  Good lord, I hear you thinking, thanks for this Pastor Eeyore, as you grab your keys to head to the store to get some dark chocolate to take the taste of the Morning Meditation out of your mouth.

 

I get it.  Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday are as different as night and day.  Only that Ash Wednesday is an affirmation that God loves us not in spite of our humanness, but because of it.  God takes on human flesh and form.  I know Lent is often wrapped in a heaping helping of blame and shame and guilt, but that isn’t the only interpretation of this day.  Lent is a season to reflect on our humanness.  The moments our religiosity can cause us like the Priest and Levite to create borders and boundaries to those who are hurting and in the ditches of life.  Lent is a season to honor how we find ways to let loose loving kindness.  Lent is a holy time to also name that we are the one in the ditch needing help and healing from others.  We are all the characters of the Parable of Loving Kindness as the way to life.  We do this through the dust from which God lovingly formed and fashioned you and me.  We are both soil and stardust.  We are both beloved and broken/bruised by the forces of life.  We embody both moments of grace and glaring at others.  We are both reaching out and retreating.  We are messy.  We are beautiful.  We are complicated and contradictory and held by our Creator.  I pray the Parable of Loving Kindness will be an invention to let the words of Jesus lose in your life and be a prayer practice for you and me in the days of Lent.  I pray that we will look at our life seeing when we are wearing the sandals of all the characters in the story of humanity.  I pray God will grant you and guide you through a holy Lent.  With God’s loving kindness to enfold and hold and empower you in these days.  Amen.