Pastor’s Message for February 2024

Dear Friends,

We have a strange juxtaposition of events coming this month as Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day will share the fourteenth day of the month. There is something fascinating to me about the conjunction of these two events. They seem so different, a date to celebrate love and a day to remember that we are dust. The combination of the two can serve as a reminder that it is the fleeting nature of life and love which makes it so precious.

As we give and receive signs and symbols of love, the somber occasion of the imposition of ashes reminds us that we all stand in need of the grace of God for our daily existence. The sign of the cross can serve as a reminder that love is greater than the frailty of our humanity. God’s love displayed through Jesus Christ is the template of human love. Love can fix what is broken. The ashes remind us that love never dies, it just changes.

Think of Paul the Apostle. He was someone who was radically hostile to the early church and sought to destroy the Church through violence and threats. And yet, Christ did not give him up but sought him out and brought him to a restored relationship with God. His life was so radically transformed that the same man who embodied hatred could write with such eloquence of the qualities of love in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians: Love is patient and kind, is not envious or boastful, keeps no record of wrongs.

As we enter the season of Lent, may God’s gracious love surround and transform us all.

God loves you, and so do I,
Pastor Jim