Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Wisdom Wednesday: Reaching Out, Serving All, Extending God's Table

Grace and peace to you, I’m Rev. Joe Cailles, the pastor of Peakland United Methodist Church in Lynchburg Virginia. Today is Wednesday, February 14, 2024. Today is both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, a curious combination of love and mortality. The original St. Valentine’s Day was an ancient church feast day to celebrate the life of a man named Valentine. Church tradition said that Valentine lived and died in the Roman Empire during the third century. Valentine is said to have cared for persecuted Christians and performed weddings for Christian soldiers who were forbidden to marry. He was jailed and martyred for his faith and his devotion to others. Through the centuries Valentine’s Day became more and more associated with romantic love and chocolates and flowers. By a quirk of the calendar, today is also Ash Wednesday and the start of the season of Lent. Ash Wednesdays is the day that we remember that we are mortal. We will die. During the Ash Wednesday worship service, we each receive a mark of ashes on our foreheads and hear the words, remember thou art dust and to dust thou will return. Repent and believe the Gospel. We remember our mortality on this day at the start of Lent so that at the end of Lent, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Day, we also celebrate our new lives with Christ. We celebrate that though we will die, we will also be resurrected, and we will be with God. Possibly there will also be chocolates and flowers! I look forward to Lent each year; it’s a time of self-examination and a time for me and for all of us to shore up the spiritual disciplines that we have been neglecting. Many of us associate Lent with a season of giving something up. Sweets, alcohol, meat on Friday. The intent is that we also take up a spiritual discipline to replace what we give up. We give up a meal and we take up a spiritual fast. We give up some screen time and we take up a time of prayer and contemplation. We give up recreational activities and we take up some volunteer time and charitable works. Ideally, we keep up the good works and the good practice beyond Lent. We keep up the things that draw us closer to God and closer to each other. We at Peakland are offering a variety of ways to strengthen our faith during the Lenten Season. Tonight at 7:00 p.m., we’ll have a brief Ash Wednesday worship. We’ll gather in person, and we will be livestreaming the worship service on YouTube and Facebook. As I said on Sunday, if you are looking for a special way to celebrate Valentine’s Day tonight, come to worship! If you are here in person, you’ll receive a cross of ashes on your forehead. If you are worshipping online, get a bit of garden dirt or fireplace ash, and you can mark yourself during the imposition of the ashes. Next Sunday in worship we begin an examination of the Psalms with this book, Pause written by Elizabeth Caudwell. Each Sunday in Lent, we’ll focus on a different Psalm and then discuss the psalm of the week at our in-person book studies on Monday nights at the church and Tuesday mornings at IHOP. Peakland has two prayer walls which we have put up for the season of Lent. You’ll find one in the narthex and one in the fellowship hall. Any time you are in the church building, you can write your prayer concern or your joy on a slip of paper and put it in the prayer slot. You can sign your name or keep your prayers anonymous. Each Tuesday, before our weekly church staff meeting, Kim Ness, our church administrator, will compile the prayers and the church staff will lift these joys and concerns in our prayer time together. We’ll do that throughout Lent. During Lent Peakland will be reaching out, serving all and extending God’s Table with the helping agencies of our communities. Miriam’s House has their annual Coldest Night of the Year walk and run fundraiser. Park View Mission Community will be handing out Teal Bags for us to fill up with food for their Food for Thought program which provides weekend food supplies for students in our community. I hope today is a blessed one for you. I hope that in remembering your mortality, you will seize every opportunity to love God and to love and serve those around you. If you’d like to learn more about our ministry here, and your place among us, then reach out to me at PeaklandPastor@gmail.com Thanks be to God.