2.14.24 - Isaiah 6:5-7
What blessings, what liberation can you imagine flowing from our individual finitude? How can you connect your limited time and gifts to a greater whole, in small ways with great love?
I said, “Mourn for me; I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!”
Then one of the winged creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that ze had taken from the altar with tongs. Ze touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.”
Did the glowing coal leave a mark? A smear of dark? A bright burn?
Reading this text on Ash Wednesday, I can’t help but connect Isaiah’s coal and our ashy crosses:
Isaiah confesses himself unclean — admits his limits, where he and his people have failed.
We profess ourselves dust — acknowledge our limits, our finite time here and now.
In the confession, we open ourselves to blessing. Accepting our limits, we fall into God’s limitless love.
Why these physical rituals — coal to the lips, ashes to the brow — to mark these limits and the blessings they yield?
God knows, respects, loves our existence as embodied spirits, inspirited bodies. She pairs spiritual gifts with tangible signs to help us experience Her truths with our whole selves.
A glowing coal — dead plants packed deep, transformed over eons, unburied at last and set alight — touches truth-telling lips to set them free.
Ashes of palm branches once waved in worship, burned down to begin the cycle anew, mark us as individually finite, but gathered into an infinite love.
What blessings, what liberation can you imagine flowing from our individual finitude? How can you connect your limited time and gifts to a greater whole, in small ways with great love?
— Avery Arden