Ash Wednesday and Lenten renewal stories

A congregation was known for its beautiful red geraniums that lined its drive up to the sanctuary from the street. Each fall, one of the members we’ll call Eleanor diligently lifted all of the geraniums and moved them into pots that filled the church throughout the winter. Eleanor watered and tended the potted geraniums all winter long, keeping them alive until it was time to plant them outside again in the spring. She’d been recycling these geraniums for years until the year she was diagnosed with a deadly cancer. A young family who’d recently joined brought the geraniums in in their pots that fall, but since they had infants susceptible to colds and ear infections, their attendance was spotty. The geraniums were watered sporadically by different people, no one wanting to take over Eleanor’s job because they couldn’t accept that she wouldn’t be there to do it ever again. Come February, the geraniums were not faring well. Many of the branches were dying, leaves dropping like the hope of the congregation, for Eleanor, like her geraniums, was a symbol of what was happening to the congregation itself. It felt like it was dying despite the fact that there were some young families joining.

On Ash Wednesday, the pastor placed all the dying geraniums on a table and throughout the sermon pruned the dead branches away as she talked about how Lent was about preparing for God’s new life coming by pruning away what is dead in us. She mentioned that ashes of death were used as fertilizer and that repentance of our sins is like pruning our souls for God’s new Easter life. As she finished the sermon, the bare geraniums, looking pitifully denuded and straggly sat on the table among all the dead leaves and branches. The service went on with a time of personal examination of individual sins that needed pruned away, ending with a time in which those who wished could receive the imposition of ashes.

As Lent progressed, the pastor carefully tended the geraniums, praying that they would indeed live and blossom, as her sermon had proclaimed, for she recognized that they were a potent symbol for the congregation and that if they died, so might they. Over the course of Lent, people peeked into the chapel where the geraniums were exposed to strong light in order to see how they were doing each week, joyful over new leaves and then the clusters of buds arising. Holy Tuesday the geraniums started blooming, and on Easter morning, red geraniums dotted the sea of Easter lilies with the hope of new life. Though Eleanor did indeed die later that year, God provided new people to plant and take up the geraniums that continued to line the drive into the church, and red geraniums filled the sanctuary at Eleanor’s Witness to the Resurrection service.

Another church that had been damaged during a violent storm a few days before Lent took parts of the huge branches that had crushed their building and formed a large ragged and rugged cross on the front lawn on Ash Wednesday where it stood all during Lent with nary a drape on it. Everyone knew the cross was a symbol of the devastating tornado that had left the gaping hole in the church’s sanctuary. At their Easter sunrise service in front of their newly roofed building, the church gathered around the cross, which had been covered with chicken wire the night before. People brought flowers to weave into the chicken wire until the whole cross was a riot of spring. The once bare cross of destruction now bloomed with new life. It had become such a symbol to those suffering the effects of the maelstrom that people in the community kept replacing the dying flowers with fresh ones for weeks. All during the Easter season the cross blossomed with hope.