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This year Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the season of Lent (the 40 days, not counting Sundays, leading up to Easter), falls on March 5^th and Garfield’s House of Prayer will be offering Drive-Thru Ashes in the church parking lot from 7:30-9 AM & Noon to 1 PM. We also will have an Ash Wednesday worship service in the Sanctuary at 6:30 PM where you can receive ashes if you wish.

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

These are the words we hear on Ash Wednesday if we choose to receive ashes on our foreheads, typically in the shape of a cross. Church tradition calls this act the “imposition of ashes” and it is a sign of both our own mortality and our repentance of sin. In secular terms, imposition can have the sense of “an excessive or uncalled for requirement” (per Webster’s Dictionary) and in contemporary American culture, it certainly can seem like an “excessive” requirement to acknowledge our mortality and our sin!

Author Lauren Winner explains why she joins a colleague on Ash Wednesday in “Ashes to Go,” a kind of “liturgical evangelism” in which Episcopal priests stand on street corners, at bus stops, in train stations, and other very public spots and offer to impose ashes on passers-by too busy to get to church (as our House of Prayer will be doing in the church parking lot!). Lauren writes:

What ministers with their ashes are offering is a bodily marker of God’s entry into our death. The ashes Cathie will inscribe on my forehead, and I on hers, let me name truths that most days I cannot or will not name — that I have sinned; also, that I have a body, and I am going to die. To walk around all day with a cross on your head is to walk around in a body inscribed with death. It is also, oddly, to walk around inscribed with hope — the hope that comes through Jesus’ having joined us in our mortality.

Ash Wednesday reminds us to turn around from our busy, self-centered lives and begin a forty-day walk through the sins and injustices we are often oblivious to the rest of the year. We will be singing the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” by Isaac Watts during the 6:30 PM Ash Wednesday service. This hymn takes us to the foot of the cross “on which the Prince of Glory died.” We feel deep sorrow as “from his head, his hands, his feet, / sorrow and love flow mingled down.” And only then are we prepared to sing these words with anything like honest commitment:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

that were an offering far too small;

love so amazing, so divine,

demands my soul, my life, my all.

This Lent & Easter the theme of our Teaching Series is “Better Together: 40 Days of Community” and as we begin the journey to the cross and, ultimately, Christ’s glorious resurrection on Easter, we need companions on the journey. Many of you have already signed up for one of the new 40 Days of Community Small Groups that go along with the series that will start the week of March 10^th. (If you want to sign up for one of the 40 Days of Community Small Groups or the new session of “I Said This, You Heard That” which starts March 4^th, use this link.)