O gracious light,
pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!

Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of Life,
and to be glorified through all the worlds.

6pm Ash Wednesday Service followed by light meal

From our liturgy tonight
All: Almighty and everlasting God, You breathed into dust the breath of life, creating us for fellowship with You.

You brought about our redemption through Jesus Christ to restore us to fellowship with You. Today we acknowledge You as our Creator and Redeemer.

We acknowledge the frailty of our lives, the pain of our sinfulness, and even the weakness of our faith. Work in us, we pray, a spirit of true humility and fervor; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

“What I value most about Ash Wednesday worship services is the chance for us all to openly acknowledge our frailty and sinfulness. In a world that often expects us to be perfect, Ash Wednesday gives us an opportunity to freely confess our imperfections. We can let down our pretenses and be truly honest with each other about who we are. We all bear the mark of sin, from the youngest babies to the oldest seniors. We all stand guilty before a holy God. We all are mortal and will someday experience bodily death. Thus we all need a Savior.”
-Mark Roberts

Christ Community will hold half-hour services tomorrow at 6am and 6pm. There will be a light meal after the evening service.

David Foster Wallace got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, bestselling postmodern novelist known around the world for his boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. A few years before the end of his life, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College.

I have heard of this speech for a long, long time. Recently I finally read and/or listened to the whole thing. While seeking to encourage the graduates towards others-centered living he said these poignant and true words about our idolatry:

In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they (your surviving family) finally grieve you.  

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. –DFW

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! 

The entire speech as PDF

The entire 22 minute speech audio at youtube