News and Notes
From the Pastor
A Little Love Note
From Pastor Melissa
Ash Wednesday Message (Joel 2:12-14; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21)
I will never forget the first Thanksgiving I said grace with my family with three generations and my new boyfriend (who is now my husband) around the table. I don’t remember what I prayed, but I spoke from my heart. After I said, “Amen,” my grandma piped up saying, “And now for the real prayer.”
Now that it’s been many years since that dinner scene, I love to share that story as your pastor. I still fully expect that if I were to pray at a meal, my Grandma would say the same thing. Because I am still a child to her. I don’t always use all of the words she expects to be there. It’s humbling. And, for me, it’s a great reminder that I am perfectly imperfect. That prayer and every prayer before it and every prayer after it isn’t a performance. It’s real talk. It’s real.
Just as Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, our Christian faith isn’t for show. What Jesus calls us to is a faith in which we have an earnest desire for relationship with God. When you are performing, your brain is like a split screen of the audience’s perception of you and what you are saying. God wants your undivided attention, for your brain to be on one channel – and that is tuning in to spending time with God.
This season of Lent is all about our earnest desire to spend time with God – that we want to be in God’s presence and we aren’t just performing because we think it’s what people want us to do. This isn’t about a right or wrong way of doing it. It’s about wanting to do it because you hear God’s call to return, to turn back to God and start fresh with love, just as God called God’s people through the prophet Joel.
Tonight, this Ash Wednesday 2026, I invite you to open your palms in your lap. This posture is one of offering and receiving. It is one of willingness and welcoming. It is a posture of courage in this way – you are willing to enter the presence of God knowing that you will never be the same. In this posture, I invite you to ask God how you might return with all of your heart. Is there something that is keeping you from spending time with God? Maybe there is something for which to honestly express your remorse. Maybe there is something you need to let go of during this Lenten season as you seek to return. Perhaps, there might be something to take up that will help draw you closer to God. Ask how God desires for you to re-imagine your life when you live as a sanctuary for God’s love to be made real in our families and in our community.
Just imagine: when we all turn to God and live as sanctuaries, when there is a communal turning, the whole world is God’s sanctuary. In our Lenten worship series called “The Work of Imagination,” one theological summary for today states, “The imagination required for this work is not fanciful. It is fierce. It is honest. And it begins in dust and quiet, with the courage to turn.” The courage comes from that authentic relationship with God that transforms ordinary practices into acts that respond to God’s love, into acts that nurture community, into acts that have the power to reveal God’s kingdom and to transform the whole world.
And this is where it starts. In the dust and the ashes. In the willingness to begin again.
Love,
Pastor Melissa
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