Ash Wednesday commemorates the beginning of the season of Lent, a time of intense listening in which we tune our ears to God by giving up things that might be getting in the way of listening, or take up new ways of listening.
Come by at your convenience. We’ll have six interactive prayer stations set up in the sanctuary. Pastor Melissa will be there to offer the imposition of ashes.
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday
All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial— Did you not know what the
Holy One can do with dust?
This is the day we freely say we are scorched.
This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning.
This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes, that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.
So let us be marked not for sorrow.
And let us be marked not for shame.
Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made,
and the stars that blaze in our bones, and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.
–Jan Richardson
United Presbyterian Church 