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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

Ash Wednesday

Year B
February 14, 2024
Rev. Emily Meyer

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 or Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 51:1-17
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

RETURN, REROOT, RESTORE

Rev. Emily Meyer reflects on returning to Love for the sake of our selves, our young people, and the planet.


 

Hymn suggestions: May This Church Be like a Tree, All Creation Sings #1042

Spirit, Open My Heart, All Creation Sings #1043

Songs: Root of the Root (2018), Sara Thomsen; Song like a Seed, 2019

Where Did Jesus Go, (2016), Sara Thomsen; Song Like a Seed, 2019 - for an Easter Sunday following a Lent ‘Rooted in Love’

 

 

Ash Wednesday, landing on Valentine’s Day as it does, offers congregations the perfect opportunity to frame the entirety of Lent as a time to become ‘Rooted in Love’ - Love that creates spaces of safety and belonging; Love that has the power to reconcile and repair.

Our Ash Wednesday texts powerfully set the stage for delving into practices designed to develop our self-compassion and love, individually and communally.[1] They also help us define what a loving community looks like and how it behaves in the world.

It is astounding how familiar both Joel’s and Isaiah’s concerns are.

In their respective writing, both prophets sound an alarm: ‘Blow the trumpet’, Joel bellows; ‘Shout out’, cries isaiah. On God’s behalf, they desperately, urgently want our attention. And not ‘our’, as in some inner circle of leadership or power or membership, nor some marginalized scapegoat group, either, but everyone’s attention: all ages, all identities, all walks of life. Their aim is a communal one - the community is in peril and it is through the community that healing will come. To realize our healing, the prophets call Individuals and communities - all people - to turn from paths of destruction and return to ways of Love.

God is not calling us to more of the same, more status quo, more public piety, or mere shows of deference. God does not care for or about our false practices of right relationship or half-hearted attempts to draw near to God; the world does not need our ‘Minnesota niceness’ or our ‘holiness’. Even our regular worship comes into question by the prophets. We are called to turn from all the systems and ways of oppression and injustice - wherever and however they manifest themselves - and return to the ways of Love.

We are in an ‘early church’ time, a kairos time, an urgent time of change.[2]

Like Larry Rasmussen[3], more and more folx are recognizing that the planet adults are handing over to young people is not habitable in the same way as it has been for the entirety of human history - and we are the ones who have made it less habitable.

The trumpets are blaring: ‘Return!’. The alarms are ringing: ‘Reroot!. The planet itself is shouting: 'Restore!’

The prophets of old warned of gloom and thick darkness; like their original listeners, we see wars - terrifyingly so - and along with our wars, our hills are blackened by wildfires; the grey gloom of hurricanes, tornadoes, and tempests swirls around us; the terrifying whiteness of blizzards blinds and debilitates us - and all of them with greater frequency, greater intensity, and more out of season - than any generation before has seen.

And we have done this: armies and storms are human-made.

The EcoFaith Summit Planning Team recently shared the article, Minnesota Mental Health Professionals Say Climate Concerns Driving Patients to Depression.[4] The crisis of teen mental health that is spreading like those hill-blackening wildfires is directly linked to them: our young people are extremely anxious, concerned, distraught, terrified about the planet they are inheriting.

On their behalf, God does not care for displays of public piety.

The trumpets are blaring: ‘Return!’. The alarms are ringing: ‘Reroot!. The planet itself is shouting: 'Restore!’

Paul was able to commend his ministry to the Church in Corinth because his way of ‘putting no obstacles in anyone’s way’ was to see himself and the church as ‘servants of God’ - followers of Jesus who were willing to endure prison, be afflicted with beatings, share the hardships of sleepless nights and the calamites of riots; they were willing to go hungry out of their commitment to truthful speech; they were rooted in genuine love.

None of this sounds fun, or comfortable, or remotely desirable - yet God promises through Joel, Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul - and saintly neighbors who are doing these things every day - this is the way to hope and healing, to renewal and restoration.

This is what love looks like in kairos times - and always: standing with our raging planet, our rioting siblings, and our ravaged souls. Stand as a community committed to turning from ways of destruction to build up safety and belonging, by participating in and with the real struggles of the times. Heeding the calls of Love to work for justice, end oppression, renew the face of the earth.

In the animated movie, Moana, the hero learns that her not-quite-idyllic island is threatened by blight: it is moving across the ocean, destroying life on island after island - and it has come to her home. Her quest is to find ‘the heart of Te Fiti’, stolen then lost by the demigod Maui, who she enlists to help her in her mission. With the spirit-lifting aid of Hei Hei the rooster, Pua the pot-bellied pig, a host of stingrays, and the ocean itself (creatures/creation must be part of the healing community, too!), Moana and Maui find and restore the Heart, which in turn restores life to each and every blight-blackened island. Not surprisingly, it also restores the joy and freedom missing from Moana’s community, which had become stagnant and isolated by fear. Moana’s journey begins with the heartbeat of a drum resounding deep in the belly of the island where she glimpses her people’s history (Opetaia Foa’i - We Know the Way). Through her journey, Moana rediscovers the heart of her people, their roots as wayfarers, always connected to home and telling ‘the stories of our elders in a never-ending chain’, yet regularly leaving the safety of ‘home’. It is by dragging their ocean-going boats from the cave in which they’d been hidden (new birth!) and crossing the reef of their fears that Moana’s people are healed; it is by returning to and embracing the dangers of the ocean - where ‘we know where we are / we know who we are’ - where young Moana and her people are joyfully restored.

The trumpets are blaring. The alarms are ringing. The planet itself is shouting.

Because God abounds in steadfast love, God is calling us into this same quest, this same mission, this same Lenten journey: to stop the blight - to stop creating and being the blight - and to find and restore our true heart: to fall in love with our beloved planet, with our Divine Creator; to live from the beauty of the clean heart God creates within us; to let Love so fill our being, individually and collectively, that we cannot abide isolation or oppression, so that we refuse to accept the death and destruction of our current ways and systems. To root ourselves in Love so deeply that we overflow with it: that places of belonging and meaning flourish - as families and congregations and communities; that Love’s flourishing spreads and moves across the planet greening hearts and souls, greening the whole of creation, so that ‘healing will spring up quickly’ and rebuilding, repairing, and restoration might begin.

 

 

 

Originally written by Rev. Emily P.L. Meyer for Green Blades Rising Preacher’s Roundtable.

ministrylab@unitedseminary.edu

Find more from Emily Meyer at www.theministrylab.org.


[1] Traci Smith suggests this in her blog, Lent 2024: Rooted in God’s Love, as she offers three practices for doing so, including Lovingkindness Meditations, Practicing Self-Compassion, and Scripture Memorization, particularly 1 Corinthians 13.

 

[2] See ‘Allow Flourishing in Season of Creation’, ELCA Advocacy Blog, September 11, 2023

[3] Keynote speaker at this spring’s EcoFaith Summit. Read The Planet You Inherit (Broadleaf, 2022), for more.

[4] Christopher Ingraham, Minnesota Mental Health Professionals Say Climate Concerns Driving Patients to Depression; Minnesota Reformer, January 04, 2024.

Rev. Emily Meyer
Rev. Emily Meyer
The Ministry Lab
Minneapolis, MN

Rev. Emily Meyer (she/her), Executive Director of The Ministry Lab
As an ordained pastor in the ELCA, Emily interned in Seaside, OR, served as pastor, liturgical artist, and faith formation leader in suburban, ex-urban and rural Minnesota congregations, created and directed the multi-congregational affirmation of baptism program, Confirmation Reformation, and was pastor of Fullness of God Lutheran Church in the retreat center, Holden Village. She currently serves as executive director of The Ministry Lab (St Paul, MN), where she consults and curates and creates resources for progressive UCC, UMC, and PC(USA) congregations throughout Minnesota and the United Theological Seminary community. Rev. Meyer leads contemplative and creative retreats and small groups. Between pastoral gigs, she has enjoyed costume designing, choreographing, and performing. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, with spouse Brian, daughter Natasha, and two Wirehaired Pointing Griffons, Kiko and Zip.

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