People of God in Southern Ohio,
Last year as a diocese, we worked together to discern the shared mission to which God calls us – from Delaware to Portsmouth, from Oxford to Carthage, and all points in between and beyond. The first part of that mission reflects our common commitment to embody the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I’ve talked a great deal lately about our embodiment of the Gospel, about our incarnate faith as disciples of Jesus Christ. Today as we begin our Lenten journey, we will gather in worship, will hear again that we are dust, that we will return again to being dust. As a physical reminder, we’ll have ashes imposed on our foreheads, will go out into the world and set our faces toward Jerusalem through these 40 days – toward the cross, the tomb, and the promise of resurrection.
Through it all, I pray that we remember again that we worship a God who loves us so much that God chose to be like us, in the person of Jesus Christ, in order to be with us. It matters, that Jesus came into this world as a real person, in real time, in a real place. And it matters, in turn, how we follow Jesus’ invitation to live as the Body of Christ that is the Church, here and now.
Our faith takes tangible form, by what we say and what we do. We are people called to dream dreams, surely; and we are a people called to act. At a time in our common life when so much is fearful and uncertain, I call you to the promises of your baptism as a pattern by which God calls us to live our faith. This is who we are, Beloved, as disciples of Jesus Christ. This is how God calls us to embody the Good News.
As a guide for this season, I commend to you Episcopal Relief and Development’s 2025 Lenten Meditation, A Commonplace Lent, written by Jerusalem Jackson Greer, co-executive director of our own Procter Center. Jerusalem offers the wisdom of scripture and our monastic elders together with stories about the desert, about the earth and its creatures, to encourage each one of us to look for God’s holy presence in our midst in practical and substantive ways, and then to carry the holiness of that encounter into our lives.
With this mission, with this call, with this covenant, with this guide – I invite you, beloved, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.
Let us set our ash-crossed faces toward Jerusalem once more, with gratitude that we do not walk this way alone.
In Christ,
The Rt. Rev. Kristin Uffelman White
Bishop
Diocese of Southern Ohio
