remember that you are dust...

This photo was from a year ago when I preached at the Ash Wednesday service at New Beginnings, the Lutheran church that meets inside the walls of the women’s prison in Denver (and one of the three local communities I am officially in relationship with here in Denver). I was only supposed to preach that night, but in the middle of the service, a woman started having a mild seizure (she’s ok now) and Pastor Terry was in the back with her and several guards. The commotion caused several service-dogs-in-training (this is one of the jobs in prison - the women train dogs!) to bark and strain the their leashes. But chaos is the standard wavelength inside, so the women took it in stride. Terry gave me a shrug and I grabbed her worship folder and just did my best to keep the liturgy going. I hadn’t planned to impose the ashes that night, but there I stood, looking at each of these incredible women: some old, some painfully young, some with face tattoos and broken arms - battered and torn and yet loving and whole - and saying “remember you are but dust, and to dust you shall return”. I was about to take my seat as I rubbed the remaining ashes off my fingers with an institutional kleenex, when Patrice raised her eyebrows and motioned to my forehead. I handed her the ashes, and stood as she gently reminded my of my own mortality. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

You can learn more about this community I love so much here.

My image for Ash Wednesday:

“Here’s my image of Ash Wednesday: If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and we don’t know the distance between the two, then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and the ends are held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet. The water and words from our baptism plus the earth and words from our funerals have come from the past and future to meet us in the present. And in that meeting we are reminded of the promises of God: That we are God’s, that there is no sin, no darkness, and yes, no grave that God will not come to find us in and love us back to life. These promises outlast our earthly bodies and the limits of time.”

Nadia Bolz-Weber

Accidental Saints; Finding God in All The Wrong People (2015)

Join me and Kate Bowler tonight for a short service.

I will be co-leading a short Ash Wednesday Service over on Kate Bowler’s Instagram Live. The beautiful Rachel Kurtz will hop on at the end to lead Just As I am, because I just can’t imagine starting Lent without it. 

Wednesday February 17th, 5p PST/8p EST. 

Kate’s book, Everything Happens for a Reason; And Other Lies I’ve Loved, her memoir about being diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, is honestly one of the best things I’ve ever read when it comes to how we respond to suffering. She is super smart (a professor at Duke Divinity School), and is so beautifully faithful and totally intolerant of vapid bullshit all at the very same time. (Her podcast, Everything Happens is amazing)

Join us. All are welcome. No need to believe the same things we do. 

(If you have old palms from Palm Sunday, these are what are traditionally burnt down to make ashes. But like, obviously most folks don’t have those witting around. You can: dig some ashes out of your fireplace, or maybe write down some stuff you want to let go of doing Lent and then (safely) burn that paper and use that or if nothing else…grab some flour. That would work too.)

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