Quick Summary:

“Each of us should have two pockets,” the rabbis teach. “In one should be the message, ‘I am dust and ashes,’ and in the other we should have written, ‘For me the universe was made.’”

The invitation, of course, is to live our lives in that place of paradoxical tension between these two realities. Tonight we put on ASHES. Yet even as we do so, we keep the other pocket, and its message, close at hand. Brokenness – goodness; dependence – greatness; fragility – grandeur. Two pockets; the warp and weft of life, and the primeval dance that is set before us in our reading from Creation's garden.

Theologies as complex, interwoven, and dense as any root ball have grown up beside the Garden.

The Tree of the Knowledge gets much of the focus in these verses, but there’s another tree in Eden’s garden: the TREE OF LIFE. And our purpose in this series of Wednesday services this Lent is to keep our eyes on THAT Tree as it appears here and there in God’s unfurling salvation story, to see how, ultimately, it becomes the symbol of the healing and mending of all creation.