Ash Wednesday
Tomorrow we begin the Lenten season with an Ash Wednesday Service at 6:30 pm in the Immanuel sanctuary. You are invited to join us.
Palm branches from last year's Palm Sunday are burned to make the ashes we will use to mark our foreheads as a reminder that God has created us out of the dust of the earth.
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday
God, today our finitude
is rubbed on our foreheads.
The reality of our limits,
our fragile bodies,
spoken over us like a curse:
from dust we are made
to dust we will return.
Some days we need to be reminded
that we are not the perfectibility projects
we set out to be.
We are full of bounce and
brimming with hope.
All woes, solvable.
All problems, a distant whisper.
When we don’t feel like dust,
Bless us, oh God,
in the ways we trick ourselves
into believing,
that our lives are something we’ve made,
that all our accomplishments and
successes and mastered mornings
add up to something independent of you.
But on days like today,
when our heads hang low
Sunk with the grief of our neediness,
Bless us, oh God.
When our joints don’t work
like they should,
when we grow sick or turn gray too soon.
when our bodies betray us...
or perhaps they are doing exactly what
they are supposed to do.
Tell us again
exactly how you made us:
from dust to dust.
Blessed are we, a mess of contradictions,
in our delusions and deep hopes,
in our fragility and finitude.
Amen.
