Ash Wednesday-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
Ash Wednesday 2024 (7 and 11:30am)
February 14, 2024
It’s always a little weird when Ash
Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day. It’s
like the secular world and the church world collide in a way that seems starkly
incongruous. But this year, I decided to
lean into the connection to see where it would take me. And where it took me was, unsurprisingly, to
consideration of the heart.
Every year on Ash Wednesday, we recite
or sing Psalm 51 either during the imposition of ashes or just after, and in
that Psalm we ask God to “Create in me, a clean heart, O God, and renew a right
spirit within me.” It has been an
interesting exercise this year for me to think about this day, Ash Wednesday,
and all of Lent in light of this request I am making of God. What does it mean for my heart to be created
clean? What does it look like for God to
renew a right spirit within me?
There’s a camp song that our daughter
learned when she was little that is set to this verse from Psalm 51. She went through a phase where she wanted my
husband to sing it to her every night before bedtime. It goes
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
So fill me. Heal me.
And bring me back to you.
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
What are the ways that
you need God to create a clean heart in you during this Lenten season? What does it look like for God to renew a
right spirit within you? (Or even to
renew you?)
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
What are you longing to
change? What is the deepest desire of
your heart that needs tending to?
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
Lent is a season in which we fast from
practices that break our hearts or break the hearts of others, fasting from
practices that distract us and draw us away from the heart of God.
So
fill me. Heal me. And bring me back to you.
And when we create space in our fasting
then we can embrace practices that are more life-giving, practices that can restore
our hearts with God’s help and gracious presence.
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
This requires truth telling and radical
self-honesty, which is part of the work that we begin this day. And this work can be supported by Lenten
practices or disciplines.
I’ve started reading a new book as a
part of my Lenten practice that looks at fasting and embracing in a new
light. The book is titled A Different
Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hunger by Christine Valters Paintner. And in this book, the author invites us to
get in touch with our true hunger that we so often try to feed or placate with
heart-breaking practices, practices that draw us away from the heart of God and
from our own truest hearts. She has
written a Lenten retreat to encourage us to consider fasting from these
practices and in the space opened by that fast, embracing more life-giving
practices over the different weeks of Lent.
Listen to her invitation:
1. “Fast
from multi-tasking and the destructive energy of inattentiveness… Embrace the practice of beholding each thing,
person, moment, as you respond to that hunger for presence.”
2. “Fast
from anxiety and endless torrent of thoughts that rise up in your mind,
thoughts that paralyze you with fear of the future. [Embrace] the radical trust at the heart of
things and listen to the hunger for contentment in the moment.”
3. Fast
from “speed and rushing through your life.”
Embrace “the grace shimmering right here in… holy pause[s].”
4. “Fast
from being strong and always trying to hold it together, and instead embrace
the profound grace that comes through your vulnerability and tenderness…exploring
[your] hunger for the ability to reveal [y]our wounded places and have them
seen and loved by another.”
5. “Fast
from endless list-making and too many deadlines and enter into the quiet as you
listen for what is ripening and unfolding, what is ready to be born.”
6. “Fast
from certainty and attempting to control the outcome of things so that you
might grow in trust in the great mystery of life.” Embrace the beauty of the unknown and be
nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed.[i]
It's
certainly a different kind of fast than we usually take up, isn’t it? But just maybe, on this Ash Wednesday that is
also Valentine’s Day, we need to give some attention in the coming season to all
the ways that we break our own hearts, and how God is longing to restore and
renew them for us.
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
So
fill me. Heal me. And bring me back to you.
Create
in me, a clean heart O, God, that I might be renewed.
[i] Paintner, Christine Valters. A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True
Hungers in Lent. Broadleaf: Minneapolis, 2024, pp 29-31 in kindle edition.
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