March 2014 – A Seminarian’s Letters Home

 

To the membership of Circle of Faith Parish:

Greetings to you all from Evanston, IL! Welcome to the purple time of the church year – welcome to Lent. We begin our pilgrimage to the cross and empty tomb on March 5th. But before we can get there, we need to travel through one of the most somber days of the year, Ash Wednesday.

A few years ago, while I was working at a church in Iowa, I was teaching a Vacation Bible School lesson about the cross; seminarians always get those kind of topics. I told the kids that, once a year, there’s a day when we use ashes to mark the cross on our foreheads. One four-year-old asked me, “Whose ashes are they, Carl?” I thought it was funny at the time, but the words hit me a new way on the next Ash Wednesday, when I put ashes on the forehead of a woman who was about to die of cancer, and of a man whose wife had just died. Ashes, and the words that accompany them, are scary things. Or are they?

Some time later, I heard a children’s sermon where the pastor was telling the kids about his son’s favorite day of the year – Ash Wednesday. He had told his son that, on the day he was baptized, God put a mark on his forehead, a mark that only God could see. His son loved Ash Wednesday because he figured out that, on that one day of the year, what was sup-posed to be the scariest day of all, he got to see what God could always see. It is that promise we celebrate as we place the ashes on our faces. Dust we all are and to dust we shall all return. Yet, in the dust and ashes we shall be remembered, and from them, by the mercy of God, we shall rise again one day.

Walking out into the wilderness of Lent, let us pray for God’s blessing, using these words:

Merciful God, accompany our journey through these forty days. Renew us in the gift of baptism, that we may provide for those who are poor, pray for those in need, fast from self-indulgence, and above all, that we may find our treasure in the life of your Son, Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. Amen. [ELW, Ash Wednesday]

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Your fellow member and pilgrim,

Carl P. Rabbe, M.Div.