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Stardust and love. (March 24)

Photo of Minister, Reverend Neil Thorogood. Dear Friends

Lent has arrived. Due to Easter being about as early as it can be this year, Lent has begun whilst we might still be just about getting back to normal after Christmas! The forty days which lead us towards Easter can carry all sorts of meanings. They have been the focus of every kind of advice and practice designed to help us prepare our hearts and minds and souls for the resurrection. Give up this. Take on that. The possibilities are endless. Endless too, maybe, the pressures. Am I doing Lent right? Am I doing Lent at all? Lent could be an engine to increase our guilt. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe.

Is guilt the stuff from which real faith gets forged? Is the God who made us and who saves us a purveyor of guilt? Does God relish our wallowing in feeling that we are shockingly awful? Does God plant seeds of despair in our lives so that they might flourish into trees that bear the fruits of our failures?

Traditionally, in many churches other than the URC, Lent begins with Ash Wednesday when the faithful come to worship and receive on their foreheads a little cross drawn by someone using ash mixed with a little oil. The ash is, traditionally, made by burning the palm crosses from the previous year. As the cross is drawn, words like these are said: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Not about guilt at all, actually. Instead, Lent begins with words and signs that hold together our lives and the life of Christ. We hear words that echo the words at a funeral. We are being reminded of our mortality. We are being reminded that, whatever our status and power, whatever our wealth and learning, whatever state our lives are in, we inhabit fragile bodies which will, one day, stop. Which might invite us to treasure who we are, and everyone around us.

And it is into this fragility, into this precious and precarious thing we know as life, that the life of Jesus is woven. The sign of his presence is a cross of ash and oil, a sign of suffering and weakness. God comes to save us by becoming one of and with us, even when this being with means death.

Ash Wednesday launches us into Lent, even if we have never been ashed (as it is called) ourselves, by pointing us to the heart of Christian faith: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” (Romans 5: 6, New International Version). Lent might be an invitation not to be weighed down by guilt. It might be quite the opposite; the invitation to be set free from all that holds us back from letting God’s love revealed in Jesus touch and transform us.

One of the tremendous privileges I had in my years at the Cambridge Theological Federation was sharing our ecumenical Ash Wednesday worship. Sometimes, we in the URC were the leaders. That probably had all sorts of Reformers spinning in their graves! I found it beautiful. This year, I notice, the preacher in Cambridge was a wonderful Roman Catholic nun I worked with. Sister Gemma Simmonds took the traditional words, and gave them a fabulous gloss: “You are stardust and love, and to that you shall return.” Maybe that’s a thought for us to dwell upon this Lent.

Yours in Christ

Neil