FROM DUST to FIRST-FRUITS

 FEBRUARY 22, 2023

GENESIS 3:19

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I CORINTHIANS 15:20

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.


The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. We sit in this solemn feeling of our own mortality, imperfection, brokenness, and sin. Lent begins in humbleness. In the mindfulness of our own greatest need. It glosses over nothing, Ash Wednesday’s theme results in feeling the burden of a shattered world, overwhelmed by death. Many of us have experienced the weight of this, the Russian-Ukrainian invasion and war, a massive world wide refugee crisis, food and housing insecurity, gun violence, the drug epidemic taking too many young lives, and more recently the Earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. We do not have to look far for images of a shattered world do we?

But the Good News is that LENT doesn’t remain there. As we shall see in the days ahead there is an inescapable movement toward the source of life. Lent prepares our hearts to remember again the wonder of Easter’s resurrection and new life.

And so, over the next forty days we journey toward that bright dawning of our hope, our forgiveness, our restoration, redemption, and renewal, the glorious reversal of sin and death bursting into this world and into our own lives in the glory of the
resurrection; the resurrection of Jesus. In his own resurrection, is the "flowering promise" of our own
bodily resurrections and the hope of eternal life, the hope toward which we, along with all creation, so deeply desire.

Yes, Lent begins in the “disturbing shadow of our mortality,” but do not miss that the season climaxes in the glorious hope of our eternal life in Jesus.

While our culture seldom acknowledges the significance and inescapability of our mortality, scripture encourages us to soberly consider those very things, for the purpose that instead of recklessly chasing after less important things we might instead live our lives investing our days in what is eternal, in love and service to others, and in the advancing of the kingdom of God through good stewardship of the moments, relationships, talents and resources entrusted to us.

LET US PRAY

Now may the Lord and Father of us all, who leads us from death to life, be at work in and through and around you in this time of prayerful consideration and reflection during the season of Lent. Amen.