Based on Joel 2:12-17, 2Corinthians 6:1-10, Matthew 6:5-6, 16-21
Tonight we begin the penitential season of Lent. To be penitent is to come to the realization that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and to show remorse for those actions or inactions. What do we come and offer up to God and to each other this evening? We come to offer our honest reflection that we are far from perfect and that we are in need of a God who forgives our sins of commission and omission. Because when we are being honest, there is no escape from the internal and external forces that separate us from God and one another. Our sins take the form of complicity, guilt and shame, fear, mistrust, egotism and hypocrisy (to name just a few) and they are clear and present threats to both our life with God and our life together as beloved community. Ashes are the official sign and symbol of our fallen natures: “From dust you came, to dust you will return.”
However, as we come together repenting of our sins, we come imagining something more – something of a promise awaiting fulfillment. The ash marks on our foreheads or hands is shaped in the symbol of the Cross – the defining victory of God over our deaths. We are all marked in the same way, because as believers in and followers of the Christ, we are saying as a gathered body that our mortality is not an isolating event. Rather, the markings show each of us that our deaths are shared – not just with each other, but with the death of Jesus. Though the ashes might be for you a gritty anticipation of what must come to all who breathe, they should also signify a treasure uniquely discovered by the faithful: imagining a shared invitation to find hope in repentance and faith in the Almighty love of God.
Our Lenten theme this year, which will be built out on our altars each week and reinforced through our worship and Bible study is “Imagination”. Specifically, we are going to reflect upon how God imagined that the “dust of the ground” could be formed into the likeness of God and have God’s image placed inside that form. God further imagined that the breath of life, the Holy Spirit could enliven that dust-form to become a living being, created by God’s own creative love. From this night where we consider how God formed us from the soil we walk upon, we will open ourselves to imagine following a God who forgives and redeems, a God who is always trustworthy and faithful, a God who offers life-giving hope, a God who is infinitely wise, a God who provides the Holy Spirit to live in and with us, a God who entered Jerusalem in triumph and left lifeless, a God who offers salvation, a God who brought life to conquer death.
There is much for us to imagine this Lent. God gave us minds that can imagine so that we would seek after something beyond ourselves – something more powerful than the power we fear the most…our death. Tonight, however, we train our imaginations on the God who created humans from humus – in the Hebrew, adam from adamah. We focus ourselves on the realization that nothing can be created without first imagining that thing or event. Not only did God imagine all of creation into being, God imagined humankind so that God would have a relationship with the created. God could have created us in any form or style, yet we were all created to resemble God – all 8.5 billion of us adams, and within each of us we have the image of our creator.
That holy spark within each of us, that mark of our creator, along with the presence and guidance of God the Holy Spirit has enabled humankind to accomplish the task that God set before it – to be fruitful and to multiply and to be stewards of all that God had created. However, the imaginations that God gave us were corrupted by the evil that is also resident in our world, and so humankind imagined wars, oppression, marginalization, social injustices, murder, incarceration, and all manner of sin both individual and institutional. We sought not to steward all of creation but to subdue it and to bend it to our insatiable wills and desires. We sought to become gods on earth with the knowledge gained from eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Thus, our sin cost us the Garden and our close relationship with God.
God continued to imagine, however, and though God removed Adam and Eve from the Garden, God cared for them and helped their offspring through many trials and tribulations – most of their own making. God’s Holy Spirit sparked the imaginations of Patriarchs, Judges, Prophets, Kings like David and Solomon, and everyday people who continued to seek after God and God’s blessings – seeking to become aware of God at work in the world and then to lend a hand – to put the gifts that God gave to each to work for the common good.
God imagined after all of those creations that one more was needed to show humankind how to live in the kingdom of God here on earth. So, God imagined that God could be born of a woman and that woman’s child could so live and die that all people could be set free from their sins. God imagined a human-God chimera that could embody all that God had originally put into humans and could help humankind become something just slightly lower than the angels. God continues to imagine that we can return to God in penitence and repentance and grow into the mind and heart of Jesus. Tonight, we begin our journey with Jesus along the road that will lead to Jerusalem. Dusty roads that led him from triumph to despair and then to the glory of God. Only God could have imagined resurrection…and because God did, we too can know that from dust we have come, but to glory and everlasting life we will go. Thank be to our God whose imaginings make all things possible! Amen and amen!