Dear HUM friends,
Lent comes especially early this year!
We have barely caught our breath from the excitement of Christmas—the celebration of the Lord’s coming among us in the person of Jesus. It’s hard to believe we are about to enter the season of Lent, when, during these forty days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday (not counting Sundays), we fast and pray. We reflect on the condition of our soul, and make our confessions.
I invite you to come and participate in the Ash Wednesday service on February 6, 6:30 p.m.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent. It is a time to begin the forty days of reflection about how we have lived in this past year, possibly even over our entire lives up to now.
We are sinners. Being human qualifies us as sinners—rebellious and resistant, more or less, to following the Way of Christ. We fall short of the perfection we seek. We fall short on our promises to family and friends and the church. We have failed our Lord in so many ways.
Yet, God loves us and is gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. God forgives us when we ask. God accepts us with our warts and blemishes and attitudes. But, he asks for our devotion. He wants us to repent—to be sorry for our faults and mistakes and keep trying to overcome the temptations and selfishness.
Ash Wednesday can be a new beginning. It can be the beginning of a long period of confession and repentance and reconciliation. Ashes imposed on our foreheads are a visible sign that we are sinners in need of forgiveness and reconciliation with one another. Ashes remind us that a repentant heart is a heart open to transformation through the grace of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor, executed for his opposition and resistance to the horrors of Hitler’s tyranny against humanity, wrote about grace in his great book, The Cost of Discipleship:
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Come worship with us on Ash Wednesday and open your heart to real grace. We are called to remember our mortality, acknowledge our sin, make amends to those we have harmed, and become more open to a heart of grace.
New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, in Heart of Christianity, says that faith is the "way of the heart," the act of "beloving" God, of giving one’s whole self to God. Further, he describes repentance as the resolve to go beyond the "mind" that has been shaped by culture, to a "mind" that is Christ-centered. It is the path of salvation.
In Lent, may God transform what needs transforming!
Pastor Ron
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Howland United Methodist Church