February 2008
 

Getting Dirty for Lent                                                       Pastor’s Message

“Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”

                                                                                                                                                –from Genesis 3:19

            The other day, my husband washed my bathrobe as a favor to me.  After he washed it, he hung it neatly on the hook in our hallway.  It is a warm and heavy, made from terry-cloth the color of milk.  Because it is a bit cumbersome to wash, I had been putting this task off, and the robe was getting kind of grungy. So, I was very grateful that he took care of this for me.  It was one of those small, caring acts that marriages are built upon, like making coffee for your spouse or putting the supper dishes away.  

            The very next day, I rose in the morning to prepare our pellet stove for the day.  This involves filling the hopper with fuel, as well as scraping and brushing away the former day’s ashes from the vent.  While doing so, I somehow managed to get the soot all over the sleeve of my newly-cleaned robe.  Trying to wipe the soot away, I made an even bigger smeary mess.  Oh dear.  Now, if I wanted a clean robe, I needed to be more intentional.  Plus, I really didn’t want my husband to see that I had already gotten the robe dirty after fewer than 24 hours. 

            Well, that sooty bathrobe became a metaphor for me.  Sometimes it seems that no matter how hard we try, we fall in the mud.  Sometimes we feel like Pigpen from the Snoopy comic strip.  Wherever he goes, a cloud of dust and dirt follow.  It clings to him—but it also migrates to others. Our humanity rubs off on each other—our sins and mistakes, disappointments, and regrets.  Fresh beginnings and clean bathrobes don’t often stay that way.

            Lent is a time to look at the “dirt” in our lives before we reach for the spray-and-wash.  We literally put ashes (the burnt remains of palm fronds) on our foreheads or hands intentionally to reflect upon and repent of our sins and when we may have fallen short before God.  In the Bible, a struggling Job repents in dust and ashes.  Likewise, according to the gospel of Mark, the very first words of Jesus' public ministry are, “The time has come, the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the Good News!” (Mark 1:15). 

            But whether or not we receive ashes during Lent matters little if the act doesn’t point us in the direction of inner awareness:  awareness of self, awareness of self- in-community, and awareness of God.  More importantly, we ask ourselves if we are aware—if we truly believe-- that God’s incredible mercy and forgiveness extends to our lives in all their messy particularity. 

            Lent is also a time to ponder our mortality.  We have limited time here on earth; none of us know the date and time when we will take our last breath.  There will be a time when we will exchange “this human robe” with all of its smeary stains for an eternal robe prepared for us by God. Our awareness of our mortality is not morbid fixation.  It is an honest acknowledgement that death comes to all, despite our individual circumstances and all the ways that we try to avoid it. We acknowledge that our lives here on earth have certain parameters. Knowing that we have limited time gives us incentive to live our moments in ways that enrich life, rather than diminish it. As Byron Rohrig has written, “the real issue is not the death that is part of the biological process, but the death we bring on ourselves because we forget that we were created in God’s image.”

             Lent is the period in which we walk with Jesus through the desert to the cross. During our walk, we are going to get dirty.  The dust of human experience is going to cling to our clothes.  The hope of Lent is that we will appreciate anew why Jesus did as he did and why those around him responded as they did.  The hope is that by watching them, we might learn something new about ourselves: who we are and why we are, in the sight of God.

            The hope is that we will not remain in the dirt, but will move beyond it—relying not on our own strength alone, but on God’s grace and help to clean what we can not clean by ourselves.

May we discover new ways to move beyond the soot into salvation.

Blessings to you for a reflective Lent,

Rev. Dee