Summary: A few years ago there was a huge grass and brush fire to the south of us in the Arbuckle hills. That familiar hill country between here and the Red River was completely engulfed in a fire storm that closed the highway to Dallas for hours. The day after it was under control, I drove to Dallas for a meeting, and I have not forgotten what it smelled like and looked like as I drove through those hills. It was devastation. The cedar trees were like dark shadows. The earth was black. The scrub oak was nothing but black skeletons. It had all the look of death like a moonscape. A few month later, in the spring, I made the trip again, and as I approached those hills, there was the most beautiful shade of green covering everything. Rains had washed the ash from those rocks, and new grass was sprouting everywhere. While the blackened dead trees and shrubs still stood, there was no mistaking what was happening all around. To drive through there now, only those of us who remember that fire storm would ever suspect the mess that was left a few years ago. I think of that today because it is what we are all about: ashes. Yet the ashes we use are not going to be a sign of destruction and death for us. We are people of faith who know that these ashes are like the ashes on a southern Oklahoma hillside. They are passing, and come spring, come Easter, new life will spring from this death, and no matter how much we might look like all is destroyed, it is never so with our God. The fact of the matter is, as we know very well with our grasses in Oklahoma, when you burn off the dead tops, the living green comes all the faster able to grow through the ashes easier than through the dead thatch that lays on top. After fire, the landscape is not the same. but life has conquered death. That is the promise of Lent. The life of Jesus can conquer our sinfulness, our apathy, our resistance. If we let the ashes of our sins become the fertilizer of new growth, we, too, will rise again from ashes. An wise old writer from the 900s named Symeon wrote long ago that“everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in [Christ] transformed.” With Christ on Easter morning we can be “whole and lovely and radiant...as he awakens in us as the Beloved in every last part of our body.” We can rise again from ashes. The Sunday readings of this Lenten season will explore with us the ways we rise from the ashes. Like the disciples on the mount of Transfiguration, like the woman at the well, like the man born blind, and like Lazarus, Jesus wants us to be transformed. Living water, light, eternal life are available to us during this season. The day of Salvation is at hand. John’s Gospel today is the Gospel of encounter, the Gospel of conversation. We shall hear again this season of a Jesus willing to talk with people at watering holes, to those blinded and begging by the side of the road, even those crying in front of tombs. The power of today’s Gospel is in the very clear direction that Jesus gives us for life and Lent. Pray, fast, give alms. Talk with God, give God room in your body, share with those in need. We can rise from ashes. As I said two weeks ago, “Just a little more is killing us” in this life. Perhaps “just a little less” will give us live. We can rise from ashes.
