Please join us on Wednesday, February 17th  for  Ash Wednesday Service at 7:30pm.

Understanding Ash Wednesday.

 Ash Wednesday has increasingly become very important in the Church calendar as it emphasizes repentance, confession, and pardon. Presbyterians and others have begun to recover Ash Wednesday in recent years, discovering in it powerful symbols that have helped lead us into the spiritual disciplines of Lent.  Traditionally the palms that we waved on Palm Sunday are burned to ashes and brought out for use on Ash Wednesday.  On this day, we receive the mark of the cross on our foreheads or hand hearing, “From the earth you were made, to the earth you will return,” from Gen. 3:19.  The ashes remind us of our mortality, the brevity of life, and our need for confession and pardon.  At the same time, because the sign on our foreheads is cross-shaped, it’s meant to remind us of Christ’s death and our being sealed in Christ by our baptism.  We who have died to Christ will be raised with him.  So the ultimate point of Ash Wednesday is to face up to some hard realities, buoyed by our confident hope in the One who raised Jesus from the dead and who will have the last word over our lives, too.