At Rainbow we will begin the season of Lent with an Ash Wednesday Service, February 26, at 5:45 pm. During this 40 day period (not including Sundays), we start with ash and move toward the living fount of resurrected life.  Join us!

“They are a curious thing, ashes; they are terrible and remarkable by turns,” writes Jan Richardson. “Ashes come as a reminder of the ways that humans across history have been horrible to one another, of how we have, with an awful finesse, reduced to literal ashes one another’s homes, buildings, cities, histories, and very bodies. Ashes can also be a thing of wonder. Ashes—dust, dirt, earth—are the stuff from which we have been made, and to which we will return. Ash Wednesday, and the season it heralds, seeks to ground us, to make us mindful of the humus, the humility, the earthiness of which our bones and flesh are made. And yet, in the midst of this, the season calls us to open ourselves to the God who brings life from ashes, who works wonders amid destruction, who cries out and grieves in the presence of devastation and terror, and who breathes God’s own spirit into the rubble. It is this God who breathes into us, calling our awful and glorious ash-strewn selves to speak words of life and freedom and healing amid violence and pain.”

To take the sign of the cross
means to allow oneself  to be stretched out wide
in solidarity with the Christ and in compassion for all, even at cost,
and to believe against defeat and despair
that hope can rise and life begin again.

-Liturgy of Ashes