Lent 2018

Imagine the surprise of a stranger to church stuff who wakes up one Wednesday morning in February and decides to attend the much advertised Ash Wednesday Worship at the neighborhood church.  Ash Wednesday worship is one of the strangest worship services on the church calendar.  Those who define good worship as something which makes them feel good will give this service two thumbs down.   If someone leaves this service and says, "I enjoyed the service, Preacher," you have to wonder if they slept through the whole thing.

 

There is something powerfully disconcerting about walking up to the front of a sanctuary and standing before the preacher who is in your space and looking you in the eye as he says the words of the ritual for Ash Wednesday.  "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return."  Those who hear those words and get the ashes wiped across their forehead get a jolt of reality which is hard to shake.  There is nothing about the moment which makes us feel good.  Most of us never think seriously about our own dying and then there comes this moment inside a worship service where someone is looking us in the eye and saying, "Hey, you!  You are going to die!"

 

As we consider our own mortality, we are preparing ourselves for the celebration of Resurrection Sunday which is surely coming.  Even as there is no resurrection without the cross, neither is there any personal awareness of the power of resurrection unless we seriously look at the reality of our own death.  The church invites us to share in the Lenten journey so that we might make ourselves ready to celebrate and share in its most powerful message which is the message of the resurrection.