For years, Christians have pondered the coming of Jesus' life and death. The forty days of Lent have served as reminders of Noah's forty days on the water, of the Israelites' forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and of Jesus' forty days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness. Lent has been a time to consider the ways in which we separate ourselves from God and from each other.
For years, Christians have pondered the coming of Jesus' life and death. The forty days of Lent have served as reminders of Noah's forty days on the water, of the Israelites' forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and of Jesus' forty days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness. Lent has been a time to consider the ways in which we separate ourselves from God and from each other.
Separation – like war and poverty – is part of the human condition. Major Barbara Sherer knew it well, as she approached Ash Wednesday last year. An Army chaplain assigned to the 3rd Infantry, she was in Kuwait, ministering to men and women far from home, separated from their families, knowing that they would soon be moving to war in Iraq. On the last Sunday before Lent – hours before we would have been enjoying our pancake brunch here in Washington - the five tents of their camp’s central dining facility went up in flames in just half an hour. Fortunately, the fire occurred after breakfast and between the scheduled Sunday worship services.
At her request, one of the firefighters scooped up a cup of the ashes for Major Sherer, who had no Palm Sunday palm fronds handy, those being the traditional source of ashes for Ash Wednesday. On Tuesday – Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras – she stirred the ashes to see if she needed to crush them finer and struck something metallic -- a flat metal cross, smudged but otherwise undamaged.
She wears that cross now with her dogtags. Major Sherer wrote of her find, “I can’t even fathom the odds of picking the exact site of that cross out of the acreage destroyed by the fire. It doesn’t matter. The message to me is clear: God walks with us through the terrible firestorms of our lives, and we are lifted unharmed out of the ashes. We may be marked in some way, like the cross of ash placed on our foreheads during Ash Wednesday. However, that mark is a symbol of God’s love and protection.”
Knowing that you are deeply loved and securely protected by God, we invite you in the spirit of Jesus and in the freedom of the truth, to observe a Lent by self-examination, by prayer, by study, by meditating on the teachings revealed in the scriptures, and through other practices and reflections.
Dare to deepen your faith.
Dare to draw closer to the Divine Presence that "bloweth where it listeth and maketh all things new."
A meditation for the Ash Wednesday worship service, 2004
by Deacons Richard Hurst and Sue Mosher