I commend readers to the excellent exploration of the Joel text by Diane Jacobson in “From Ash to Action: Even the Stones Cry Out,” a Congregational Toolkit for Lent 2026 related to the Palm Sunday Path and this year’s EcoFaith Summit, “From Fear to Fire: Igniting Community for a Planet in Peril” (April 18). Writing the day after the murder of Renee Good, she evokes the significance of lament, which “speaks to God particularly about evil, unfulfilled promises, personal and communal pain, and the world being seriously broken.” In the face of our fractured reality, she writes, “Lament is the truest response. Lament is the truest form of prayer,” and observes that Joel’s lament gives words to our lament today. What are we lamenting today? The toolkit offers a few ideas: “We grieve what is broken, lost, dead, and/or unredeemable. We lament the ways we participate in dying and unredeemable systems and narratives. We lament the loss of lives, safety, and ‘normalcy’ that accompanies the death of systems and corrosive ways of being.” Returning to the Lord in the practice of lament, in the praying or singing of Psalm 51, and in the long confession of sin in the Ash Wednesday liturgy, is about truth-telling, being introspective and honest, both individually and communally, about our active and passive complicity in ways of being that are harmful to people and the earth. It is only through such honesty to God and to each other that the healing and justice we pray for can come about. Diane points to additional verses in this chapter, naming a destructive fire turning the land “like a garden of Eden” into “a desolate wilderness” (2:3), an invitation for the preacher to name specific physical fires that have reduced places to ash, like in California a year ago, causing both humans and creatures to cry out (2:19-20), and metaphorical fires that when stoked also destroy and make God’s creation desolate like racism, nationalism, consumerism, and anthropocentrism. Whether it is the loss of species or human civility, the fragmentation of animal habitats or society, the injustices and victims of ecocide, genocide, or homicide, it takes courage to name out loud the sin of the world in which we participate. Yet it is the start of a renewed relationship with our God who is gracious and merciful, with our neighbors, and with the rest of Creation.

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy describes relationship restoring in terms of “restorying,” a broadening of the narrative scope of who and what we are. In Active Hope, she quotes theologian Harvey Sindima: “We live in the web of life in reciprocity with people, other creatures, and the earth, recognizing that they are part of us and we are part of them” (94). The Isaiah reading lifts up that “kinship” (58:7) especially with people who are oppressed, homeless, poor, naked, and afflicted. Each neighbor has a story, a story that has not fully been written. Entering into relationship with such neighbors, with such kin, we become part of each other’s stories. How might Lenten practices of prayer, giving, and fasting invite us into a practice of “restorying”? Attending to these kin is the fast the LORD chooses, a key to how parched places become spring-fed gardens, how exiles’ ruins will be rebuilt, how the breach is repaired, and how streets to live in are to be restored.

This year, Gloria Dei is observing the 10^th anniversary of the electrical fire that on February 18, 2016 destroyed our sanctuary and damaged much of the rest of the building. Coinciding with Ash Wednesday, the anniversary will not only involve a remembering but also a “restorying” of our journey, then and now, in light of scriptural themes that include fire, exile, and community. As a church, the focus of our rebuilding had to be as much about relationships as about the physical structure. Our faith and ministry also needed to be sustained by a confidence in God’s ability to bring life from dust and ashes. A month after the fire, a council member shared a poem by Jan Richardson that speaks of the blessing that lives within the ashes, and of what the Creator can do with dust, a poem titled, “Blessing the Dust”:

All those days

you felt like dust, like dirt,

as if all you had to do

was turn your face

toward the wind

and be scattered

to the four corners

or swept away

by the smallest breath

as insubstantial—

Did you not know

what the Holy One

can do with dust?

This is the day

we freely say

we are scorched.

This is the hour

we are marked

by what has made it

through the burning.

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

         that lives within

the ancient ashes,

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

So let us be marked

not for sorrow.

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking we are less

than we are

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world is made,

and the stars that blaze

in our bones,

and the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge we bear.

Here in the ashes the poet “restories” us in a broader narrative, connecting us to earth and stardust, to our mortality and our rebirth through God’s saving grace, a “treasure we possess in clay jars” as Paul says in an earlier chapter of Second Corinthians (4:7). Here also is the confidence shared by Paul as he entreats us not to accept God’s grace in vain, but to be reconciled to God and to live into the salvation we have been given. Like Bonhoeffer’s “costly grace” in Discipleship, it is a path that, despite hardships and calamities, is visible and embodied in patience, kindness, truth, right relationships, and genuine love (6:4-7). It may appear to be weak or even dead, but it is the strength and life of the Christian community.

“We have this treasure.” Imagine those words inscribed on your pulpit, as they are on the one at Holden Village. That image comes to mind when I read Jesus’ words in Matthew. Which treasure? Think of where that pulpit is situated, the land, the ecosystem, watershed, and earth. Think of the people who read or preach. Think of the scripture that is opened and proclaimed there, conveying God’s justice and love in Jesus Christ for our time and place. We have this treasure. In each case, treasure is conveyed in something fleeting. Clay jars, earthen vessels, terms that mean fragility, imperfection, impermanence, dust even, but also point to materials carrying something precious: an extraordinary, resurrection power that belongs to God. This power creates and re-creates us, redeems and rebuilds us, restores and “restories” us. This power enables the finite to bear the infinite – a sacramental statement and an affirmation that even we, as imperfect and limited as we are, are called and emboldened to be bearers of God’s redeeming grace. This power – this treasure – we steward, in prayer, fasting, and self-giving, not to draw attention to ourselves, but for our wellbeing and that of the world God loves.