Cried the Children of the Night

Now my soul is troubled: "Save me, save me..."
Before the lungs with water fill
The barrel, temple points
Chests heave, breaks squeal
Droughts deaden
And war our neighbor kills

Save me before
The lightning flashes,
The thunder roars,
And a cliche is written for the very worst offenses.

Suggestive, Sassy, and the Silent Observer

First Austin's #JourneyLent
Week One: February 21, 2015

43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ 44Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 45Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ 46Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ 47When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ 48Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ 49Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ 50Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ 51And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you,* you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ John 1:43-51

Philip is great. I see some of myself in Philip. From this text we ascertain that he's read his history books and knows his faith story. I like it when people have read their testaments. Both of them. All of them. Not just the parts that suit an obscure political agenda (#homosexualityisonlyin6bibleverses #abortionisn'tinany). Philip's belief in his faith story is so integrated into his personal narrative that when Jesus calls him, not only does Philip follow him, but he recruits his friends. Philip knows a good thing when he sees it, and invites others to check it out. He is the best kind of friend. "I found this great new restaurant on East 7th - you gotta try it." Or, "I found the Messiah we've been waiting for, you have to meet him!"

Beresheth Sermon: Lent

I knew in January something was wrong. Usually New Year’s is one of my favorite holidays because I love symbolic gestures for starting over and starting new. I know that nothing monumental really happens in the transfer of minutes from 11:59pm to 12:00am on January 1st. The grandfather clock doesn’t do a little dance or crack open a bottle of bubbly, it just shifts, with a sometimes audible tick and then settles into silence until 60 seonds later it ticks again.

Several weeks after New Year’s though, I began to sense that this was going to be a difficult year.

“No, my heart protested!” I will not have another 2005, not another 2008. I need another good year, 2010 so let’s try and be friends! But alas the feeling of darkness did not lift and within two weeks in February, my best friend lost her job, a friend got lymnphoma with a 40% survival stat, a friend who’s wedding I was to perform in March called and said her fiancé had called off their engagement, and my neighbors’ daughter died.

I cried a lot those two weeks. And then came the imposition of the Ashes.

Dear Lent, I wrote in my diary… No thank you. I don’t care for any this year. Life has already become really hard, I already have a lot to grieve, a lot of service to give, a lengthy wilderness to walk, and I don’t need the church to kill Jesus right now on top of it all.

Because we all kill Christ. It wasn’t just the Jews though they didn’t exactly help the matter. And it wasn’t just the Romans with their fear based God complexes.

It’s you and I every day. With every ugly word we utter to one another, with every jail we fail to visit, with every woman we size up and store in our memory for a later pleasure, every co-worker we step on to get ahead. We too participate in the Death of Christ. And Lent reminds us of that. With every sin we commit we cry out that Ceasar is King that Prosperity is our right, that Individualism is our God.

When in reality, from “ashes [we] have come, and to ashes [we] shall return.”

In reality, we’re each walking through a wilderness and we yearn for the promised land; we yearn for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

So for Lent to force us to examine that Wilderness, to realize that God’s Kingdom is not yet and that it is our job to help usher it in. For Lent to force us to step out of the limelight of Blogs and Facebook and YouTube and American Idol and Survivor and admit that we are nothing without God and no photo tags or comments or like buttons or panel of judges can change that.

Only God can change that.

And sometimes to understand our infinite worth in Christ, we must understand our infinite worthlessness in the world.

Take a hike, Lent, I yelled to no one. I’m already sad. I already know life sucks. Death is already knocking on the doors of people I love all around me. I know life is fragile. I know life is unpredictable. I’m already crying and I don’t want to intentionally go into the darkness any further than I already am!

“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me.”

Except He isn’t with us. On Good Friday, we lose Jesus and we are utterly alone. God has truly died and death has surely won.

But it’s only after death that there can be true resurrection. Only with Good Friday’s Tortuous Death will there be Easter’s Glorious Resurrection.

And so every year as a church, worldwide, we journey into the Wilderness, into the night, into the mourning, hoping and praying that on Sunday light will come again.

It’s like a movie or a good book that we read over and over and each time, we nervously hope that the Bubba won’t die, that this time Batman saves the girl, that this time Celie doesn’t get pregnant, that this time Brute doesn’t plunge the sword, but we’ve seen these movies a hundred times and we know it always happens.

And it has to. You can’t have church that always sings about happiness and love and peace unless the church has known and felt the alternative. You can’t get the resurrection without the death. We can’t know God as fully human if he doesn’t die nor can we know him as fully God if he doesn’t resurrect.

We can’t have one without the other.

And so we have Lent.

Welcome Lent, come on in. There’s an empty seat at the table. While I wish it was Advent’s turn to dinner, I know you’re here to stay. And I’ll eat with you, don’t worry. But in three more weeks, I’ll have to bid you adieu because Easter’s gonna come rolling round and I want to make sure I’m ready. There’s a little chava on the table, help yourself, and tell me what news you’ve got to bring.

There’s gonna be a killin’? You don’t say. Well, I should have known, it happens every year.

Lent.

Here for a while. But not here to stay…

A Lenten Sermon: What Got Jesus Killed

Sermon Text: John 2:12-27

What got Jesus killed? We’re spending six weeks as a church, alongside all other Protestant and Catholic churches and a week ahead of the Greek Orthodox churches preparing for Jesus’ death and resurrection. Six weeks studying Jesus’ death on a cross. Six weeks preparing for Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb.

And in putting ashes on our head and declaring together as a community that indeed, we are all equally depraved and equally sinful in the eyes of God, we say, "from ashes we have come and to ashes we will return." In doing this we acknowledge that we are not worthy. And yet on Easter Sunday, resurrection Sunday, we will discover that God chooses to resurrect us anyway. For six weeks many of us deprive ourselves of a vice or pleasure and focus on our relationship with God. We pray, we repent, we suffer if only a smidgen, because Christ suffered first.

But Why?

Not why do we spend time doing this – the value of admitting we sin and turning from it and to Christ is undeniable by even the most secular cynics. My question is why did Jesus suffer? Why did Jesus die?

Unfortunately, I may never get the answer to that question. Oh there’s lots of theological reasons like that swell little drawing you do on a piece of paper where God is on one side of the page and You are on the other and you need a road to get to God so in the middle of the paper connecting You to God, a cross gets drawn because Jesus is the link between You and God.

Great. We’ve officially reduced the infinite and holy God to a stick drawing. Lovely.

I don’t understand that reasoning quite frankly. And I certainly don’t like the idea of a God dying in order to save me. I mean, God’s God. Why death? A bloody, grueling death? Why not just snap your fingers and get us all to be with you. That’s possible, right?

But that’s not what happened. So perhaps I may get a glimpse of the Why if we return to our sacred text, to the story that is told there. We’ll begin in John 2.

In John, as in the other three gospels, Jesus visits the Temple and upon seeing the men selling the animals for sacrifice and god only knows what else and making a profit of it right there, right next to the holy of holies, Jesus flips. He freaks out and in John we get the real details. He turns over the tables, his face turns red, his muscles bulge, he turns green…

Okay, I’m embellishing. But I loved the Incredible Hulk as a kid. And did you see The Rock play Ba-ROCK Obama on Saturday Night Live last week? Hilarious. And so I picture Jesus getting mad like that. I mean no where else does he trash a joint. When the prostitute is brought before him, he uses a tricky mind game to teach the perpetrators a lesson, then he draws in the sand. He doesn’t start throwing rocks or sand at them, hollering at them for their hypocrisy.

But in the Temple, he does. And therein lies what scholars consider to be the real reason Jesus got hung on a cross. It wasn’t that he was nice to outcasts, or cast demons out of people or made fun of the Pharisees. It was this… it was what he communicated to the religious leaders in the Temple that day.

According to Charles Talbert, a Johannine Scholar, what Jesus does in the Temple is render sacrifice IMPOSSIBLE. The money-changers changed money into shekels. Shekels buy the birds and the bulls. And without the birds, there’s no daily sacrifice for sin. And if there’s no sacrifice, then how can the people be made right in the eyes of God?

What Jesus does in the Temple is similar to what happens in the book of Matthew when Jesus is on the cross, “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split.”

Jesus essentially says, there is no more need for sacrifice because he has come. There is no need to submit yourself to ritualistic cleansing because one has come who has made you clean. There is no need to go to a high priest for a blessing and affirmation, there is one whom you may go to yourself. The curtain is torn, there is no distinction between priest and peasant, no hierarchy to get to God. Jesus and the Father are one and both are accessible. There is no need for sacrifice to appease God or cleanse yourself. God has made the ultimate sacrifice, God has died because Jesus and the Father, as Nicodemus confesses in the very next story and as Jesus admits 8 chapters later are One. Jesus and the Father are One.

Jesus says there’s no need for the sacrificial system anymore. Why? Because He and God are one. And that’s blasphemy. And in making that statement, Jesus made himself a death wish.

Remember the ten commandments?
Number One: “You shall have no other gods before me” (including yourself).
Number Two: “You shall not make for yourself an idol” (or make yourself one – oops. Sorry American Idol), “whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Number Three: “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God,” (for use the name of the Lord when referring to yourself) “for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.”
Deuteronomy 5:7-21 and Exodus 20:3-17

I think you get my point.

And consider this. In the Old Testiment and even some Orthodox Jews today wouldn’t even speak the name of God: Yahweh, so sacred and so other and so holy did they consider God to be. They wouldn’t even speak God’s name. So you can imagine how they would respond to someone who not only spoke the name of God but who equated himself as equal with God. “Why do you do this in God’s house? My house is to be a place of prayer.”

Webster’s defines blasphemy as “an indignity offered to God in words, writing, or signs; impiously irreverent words or signs addressed to, or used in reference to, God; speaking evil of God; also, the act of claiming the attributes or prerogatives of deity. When used generally in statutes or at common law, blasphemy is the use of irreverent words or signs in reference to the Supreme Being in such a way as to produce scandal or provoke violence.”

And really, what could be more irreverent than for a human to equate himself with God? God as a human? Indeed that is scandelous.

And yet, that’s what Jesus claims.

So each of the synoptic gospels ends with the story of Jesus in the Temple functioning as the symbolic “final straw” of Jesus’ irritating ministry. Healing lepers and calling prostitutes clean is one thing, but equality with God? Please. And John begins his story of Jesus’ ministry with the Temple cleansing for a similar reason. This event is so provocative that it must be told first. All the rest of the stories just add to its case.

And that’s it. That’s the crux. Yes, Jesus was a good moral teacher who many of us strive to live our life after. Yes, Jesus won the victory over evil forces in the world. Yes, Jesus ransomed his life so that ours may be saved.

But why?

Because He’s God.

Because He’s God, and we’re not.

Praise be to God.

Maundy Thursday Noonday Sermon

Scripture: Isaiah 116; John 13...


You have one life.

One.

“I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on God as long as I live.”

You have one life.

One.

“What shall I return to the LORD for all his bounty to me?”

You have one life.

One.

I asked the youth several weeks ago at Encounter on a Wednesday night what they would choose to do vocationally if they had a million dollars but were required to work a job nonetheless.

I received a spectrum of answers.

“I’d be a trash man.” No you wouldn’t. “Alright, I’d be a carney!” Fine.
“I’d sell Dr. Pepper.”
“I’d be a fortune teller.”

Interesting answers. Some of the responses were a little more believable though, and actually inspiring.

“I’d be a teacher.” Isn’t that what you want to be now? “Yes, it’s what I want to do.” Good for you.
“I’d be a zoologist.” Really!
“I’d still be a youth minister,” said Kevin.

The community writing the Psalms responded to a similar defining question. They described God as the one who loosed their bonds. God untied the cords binding them, and set them free. Once set free, the community in the Psalms chose to give back. They chose to drink from the cup of salvation, publicly declare their devotion to God and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving.

You have one life. One. What will you do with it?

When we turn to the gospel, to the night Jesus took his cup and gave it to his disciples to drink, took his bread and gave it to them to eat, he did something else. He washed their feet.

He bent low to the ground, crawling off his comfy cushion. On all fours he crawled one by one to the disciples and sitting back on his haunches, he dipped the cleansing cloth into the water basin. He held it to their dirty, cracked, calloused, dust-painted feet and wiped, scrubbed, washed their feet. He performed a servant’s job. Out of his devotion for his disciples, he chose to serve them, do the dirty work so they would be clean.

The foot washing was symbolic of Jesus’ whole ministry. He spent most of his time healing and affirming and loving the children of God, but this foot washing was literal too. As if touching their leprous sores and feeding their crying children and healing their contagious parents and hearing out their ego-centric questions and loving the obnoxiously unlovable people of this world that you and I encounter on a daily basis - people that you and I go to work with or worse yet, for, and sit beside at PTA meetings and sit behind in rush hour traffic, all these obnoxiously unlovable people of which each of us is one… as if that were not enough, he washed his disciples’ feet too.

He gave his life, and he also washed their feet. That’s what Jesus chose to do with his one life here on earth.

And I wonder if perhaps we couldn’t see the worth in each other the way Jesus saw the worth in us. I wonder if we couldn’t spend a little time improving our world for the greater good. I wonder if we couldn’t do what we really want to in life – fully be the children of God we are called to be – unique and beautiful and gifted and flawed and God’s.

You have one life.

One.

I read the other day the letter that the man who gunned down the people at New Life Church in Colorado Springs wrote and left in his car. Angry, confused and frustrated by hypocritical Christians and a quiet God, he took out his angst on a church and killed four people in the process.

He wrote, “I’ve heard good things about what Jesus can do, yet everywhere I go in Christianity, all the Christians I meet or see are miserable, angry, selfish, hypocritical, proud, power-hungry, abusive, uncaring, confused, lustful.”

These are not words I would use to describe my Christ, and truthfully they are not words I’d like to describe his followers, his disciples, his people, me and my community, the community of the Saints.

But that’s what Matthew Murray wrote.

I hope that when I discover that I have been set free by God, that I have one life to live fully and abundantly, I won’t choose to embody any of the repulsive qualities Matthew Murray ascribes to followers of Christ.

And yet, I will. I’m human. I screw up. All those Christians he observed and learned to distrust were humans. He was human when he opened fire on a church ending four lives and then killed himself.

Only human.

“I call upon God…. I lift up the cup of salvation… I become God’s servant… I pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all the people… I offer a thanksgiving sacrifice.”

“I wash your feet and you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

You have one life. One. What will you choose to do with it?

See, your life goes far beyond what job you have, what vocation you choose - million dollars or not. Your one life and my one life include the jobs we have but more importantly, our life really is how we do those jobs. Life is about attitudes and worldviews. It’s about how we treat the people we love and how we treat the people we hate. It’s about eliminating a vocabulary of hate.

Maybe it’s because I’m turning thirty in May or maybe it’s because my ex-boyfriend died last month from cancer, or maybe it’s because I work in a church with humans, you and your friends and me and mine, who experience great pain and make mistakes, or maybe it’s just the change in weather, but recently I have been impressed by the realization that we get one life. One. And I have been reminded that Jesus Christ came to earth not to toss us a rulebook and give a good luck nod, he came so that we may have life and have it more abundantly.

My former pastor and friend who died several years ago used to close our Sunday morning service with the same benediction every week: Love God, embrace beauty and live life to the fullest.” That was what he reminded us to do, who he reminded us to be every week. And if you haven’t experienced the deliverance that comes when you encounter the divine, if you don’t feel the freedom that comes in a connectedness to Christ, if living life to the fullest isn’t even on your radar screen, the I have a message for you:

You have one life.

One.

And God came to earth to make sure you get to live that one life abundantly.

When the psalmist figured that out, he took the cup that Christ offered to the disciples 900 years later (and still offers to us today), he took that cup of salvation and drank from it. He publicly declared his affection for God, just as 6 people here at FBC will do when they are baptized this upcoming Easter Sunday. And he lived a life of Thanksgiving.

We have the same opportunity. We too can become servants not to money or alcohol or bitterness or sex or our jobs or anything else that lures us to the edge of self-loathing or a self-destructing life. Rather, we can become servants to the Life Giver. To the one who lived and died and washed our feet.

“I call upon God…. I lift up the cup of salvation… I become God’s servant… I pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all the people… I offer a thanksgiving sacrifice.”

“I wash your feet and you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

You have one life.

One.

Love God. Embrace Beauty. And live life to the fullest.

Amen.

Ash Wednesday Contemplation

"Tonight we will come and have the ashes of last year’s celebratory palms burned to symbolize the joy that is departed and the suffering that will ensue imposed on our foreheads, and on our lives. The ashes symbolize our confession that from ashes we have come and to ashes we will one day return. In humility, we surrender to this Lenten season and we journey with Christ in his suffering all the way to the cross. This is lent. It is not about chocolate or beads or fish on Fridays, it is about suffering.

Suffering’s not that difficult, I’ve actually got suffering down quite well, thank you – you may say. And I grant you, this world offers its unfair share of hardships under which we all labor, but in choosing to suffer alongside Christ, we often choose to deprive ourselves of something – you know the routine. We give up something and pretend the loss of caffeine or alcohol or television is actual suffering.

But choosing to suffer alongside Christ as we journey to the Christ means choosing to give up something else if we reflect closely. Suffering requires giving up our pride. Suffering requires admitting our sin. And that may be the hardest sacrifice we make: admitting we are wrong and giving up our sin.

At the front of the pews is a pile of leaves. Deadened by the winter winds and cold, these once green leaves have dried and fallen from their life source. They were found lying beneath their origin. And so does our sin cripple and diminish us until we are crusty, dull colored replicas of what we originally were created to be. We will each take a leaf.

And then we will bring that leaf to the front table. We will write our sin in permanent marker on it. We will acknowledge it in our lives and then we get rid of it. We will take the dead leaf with our sin written on it and we will crumple it into the bowl. For just as leaves die and fall from their source, so does their decomposition eventually nourish the tree to bring new life.

We choose a sin. We give it a name and then we give it away. We crumple it and we choose to walk away. And though sin is dangerous and lures us back time and time again, for this time, we acknowledge our weakness and we walk away. We humble ourselves, confess our sin and choose to walk with Christ to the cross where indeed, soon enough, new life will rise again.

Amen."

Last night, before we received the ashes, we each took a dried up leaf, confessed a sin by writing it on the leaf in permanent marker, and crumbled it in our palms letting it fall into a clear bowl set on a black-clothed table underneath the cross. I was the first to go forward after giving the above introduction. I was startled by how loud the leaves crunched in the silent sanctuary with all eyes on my back. Did they wonder what I wrote? Were they guessing, judging me, estimating my confession? Crunch, crackle. The dismantled leaf tumbled into the empty bowl. I wiped my hands on my jeans and returned to my seat, a little overwhelmed. How would I move from the symbolic decomposition of my sin-filled leaf to the true repentance and turning from sin in my own life? I sat down and exhaled.

It took a second, as most communal activities do, and then people crowded patiently into line, anxious for their leaf, ready to confess their chosen sin and let it go. Old women, who couldn't walk by themselves, scuffled up front with their dead leaves. Youth, always quick to participate and bright enough to grasp the symbolism, picked up the markers resolutely. Those who would criticize even doing a "catholic" service wrote on the leaves. Pristine business partners crumpled the dead leaves to dust between their manicured hands. Mothers and daughters, the sick and the well, all lined up for the leaves, and most even lined up for the ashes.

After the service, I picked up the bowl of broken leaves to dispose of them. It was all I could do to keep from spying into the dusty remains to piece together leaf fragments and sin confessed. We are forever voyeurs, fascinated by evil. I didn't, though. I sighed knowing my own sin was enough to keep me busy and dumped the leaves into a trash bag.

Ash Wednesday. From dust you have come and to dust you shall return. 39 days to go.

Lent is beautiful.

I told someone that tonight and surprised myself.

I didn't really learn what Lent was until 2005. Let me re-phrase that. I knew the definition, the tradition, the eating fish on Fridays, I'd even practiced some of it's disciplines. But it wasn't until I became a member of Mosaic and experienced my first real journey through Lent that I understood it. The forty days plus Sundays were a time of constant reflection for me. Never have I been so involved in religion that it became an everyday part of my routine; no, more than that, an everyday part of my consciousness. That year I gave up pop I believe: a drug to keep me going. In addition, I fasted lunches during the week and journaled that half-an-hour instead. It was 2005, there was much pain early on that year (and unbeknownst to me, much more to come), and my prayers were fervent. On Sundays at church, I watched our worship space get darker and darker as we slowly we began removing the candles and dimming the light. By Good Friday it was pitch black in worship. My eyes adjusted some to the darkness, but mostly I just listened intently. And for the first time in my life I cried at the death of someone I'd never met. I cried for Christ. It finally hit me that I loved a man who died, and a tear slid down my cheek.

Easter that year was beautiful though; bright with Easter lilies all around the worship space. We changed the seating completely, we turned on the lights, we decorated with flowers. All was new for the people who entered. And you can see how I really "experienced" Lent emotionally that year.

Last year for Lent I gave up alcohol during the week, and took my college students through the wilderness of Lent as we worshipped and learned together in Beresheth. It's so depressing, my colleagues complained. But it's Lent, I probably replied. And it was a good chance for me to teach some good Baptists college kids what Lent was designed to remind us of.

But it's purpose is not only about things becoming dark, the stripping of the sanctuaries, the black cloths, the unlit candles. It's so much more than that. So this year, thanks to Sam and his cohorts, I was reminded of what I did instinctually and obediently that first year, that Lent is about more than giving up something, it is about giving to (too). So as I had abandoned my lunch, I offered up my prayers. This year again I have given something up, but am focusing more on what I am giving back. (And no, I'm not telling what either of those are - it's private, between me and God, and we'll see what results from it).

In Beresheth last week, Roger spoke about the elements of Lent, how it started, how we are called to help usher in God's will on earth as it is in heavenly. We are called to have heavenly days, to live seeing the world through God's eyes.

And so instead of spending Lent mourning, I will spend it observing, watching God at work, appreciating God's creation and joining God to bring about heaven on earth.

Never the less, for the next four weeks of Beresheth (sans one week in March), we will study what it means to have the ashes smeared across our foreheads: equality, mortality, something-else-I-can't-remember-now, and persecution. I know that sounds depressing. We all know depressing: I watch the news and get depressed. I look at the temperature gauge on my house, take off my sweater, wonder at the mystery of winter, and get nervous. I listen to men and women who speak to me of guilt and sorrow and a desparation to know a God they feel they have let down and it is saddens me. It's depressing not to see ourselves and not see the world as God does.

But that for me is why Lent is beautiful this time around. Because my focus is not on the sorrow, the grieving, the coming to terms with Christ's death only to be released finally by a joyous resurrection. This time it's about heaven on earth, being Christ to each other, recognizing (painfully) our mortality and seeking to make the most of every day, to love every person. Our sin has got to go, there's no time for it. Only time to love God and love each other. So repent, repent, (i've never heard that come out of my mouth) turn around and start over. Not on Easter, but now, today, during Lent. Let's make life beautiful. And if they abhore us for it, so be it. There are worse things in life than to be hated for doing what is good and pure.

You are good and pure. Not of your own essence, not of your own self, not of anything you've done. Just by being you, a child of God, gazing up, repenting, and turning around, ready to behold heaven on earth... and join right in.

Lent, it's beautiful.

I love Ash Wednesday service.

I love the symbolism of the ashes - that we are all on the same ground before God, that we all fall short, that we are all equal, that we all sin, that we all need help. I love that in the Baptist church the people impose the ashes on each other, because we are all priests. I love watching one family member make the cross on another family member, I love watching the young remind the old, short stand on tippy-toes to reach to forheads of the tall. I love it. Priests unto each other.

I love that I get to participate in creating Ash Wednesday services and that I get to be creative. I've helped plan the past two years at FBC and four years ago at UBC Waco. (I remember Kyle calling me 3 years ago to ask, "Now what did we do last year and can you send me some info on it?") I love that there are so many symbolic acts that can be done to communicate the tradition, wisdom and deep meaning of Lent and Ash Wednesday.

I love that at one time, people took their faith so seriously, that they would spend 40 days in "training" learning about God and the tradition, anticipating being baptized on Easter at the end of their educational period.

I love that those people were willing to wear the ashes, be immersed in water, and rise to new life in Christ because they really believed in who God is.

I love that my friends at Cool People Care suggested not giving something up for Lent, but giving something to...

Ash Wednesday is beautiful, and as you may have noticed, I love it. I just wish more churches celebrated the tradition.