"On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him."
- Luke 9:37
In the name of God . . .

This week, everyone seems to be talking about snow. It has been all over the local and national news, it was the subject of Loree's+ mid-week newsletter, it was even the subject of my friend Heidi's blog - and she's from Chicago, so snow is no novelty to her. Being a signs and portents man myself, I figured this must be a sign, of sorts, and that I should perhaps add my two cents on issues of snow, before our own private winter wonderland gives way to true nature of Mid-Atlantic winter - partly cloudy and 45 degrees.

But rather than musing on the wonders of snow, its beauty, its danger or its powers to help remind us of the important things in life, I would like to take a few minutes, this morning, to think about life after snow. Yes, this morning I would like to talk about something that is very much on my mind since the middle of the week: slush.

Now slush may not be something that you have given much thought to, given the fact that the overall mild winters and modest snowfalls here in Maryland don't give us much in the way of good, quality slush. But in my three years in Chicago, I became something of an aficionado of this grey bane of the urban winter landscape. Scientifically speaking, slush occurs when chemically melted snow mixes with road grime and other agents in the absence of heat. It is thick, grainy and slippery, always melting but never melted, constantly churned up by passing tires and feet, ever clinging to pants legs and finding around even the most cleverly devised barriers. The accumulation of slush begins almost immediately after snowfall commences and the offending masses of grey yuck do not begin to dissipate until temperatures rise and storm sewer inlets are finally cleared - which, in Chicago is rarely before Memorial Day. Slush is the somewhat less-lustrous record of snowfalls past and contrary to popular myth and Hallmark-card depiction, it is status quo of winter - at least more than pristine white snow is. And so it stands to reason that if we can so easily find meaning in the snowfall, then we ought to at least look for it in the slush, too.

Now, my musings this week have not been confined strictly to the meteorological. The challenge to make sense of the return to normalcy that invariably follows every epiphanic high is seemingly all around me these days. Erica and I are genuinely "settled into our new digs," chores and errands have just about finally replaced the joy of novelty and exploration. Academy life has returned to normal after the excitement of the holidays and exams. And, while the theology of the church suggests - and many of you have witnessed to the fact that - my ordination has changed me, it has done little to change the routines of my daily life: the students still pass notes in class, and my papers still do not grade themselves. Even our readings for this week, after weeks of steadfastly recounting the miraculous revelations of Jesus as the son of God, seem to want to focus on the morning after, rather than allowing us to stay, with Peter building booths and remaining indefinitely in the night before. It is as if my entire world is waking up from the bliss of a snow-day to the reality of weeks of trudging through the slush to get to class. But what des it all mean?

To me, the problem of slush is a problem of perception. Because the slush in our lives seems to hang around much longer than the snow, we fall into the trap of thinking that the slush is both its own cause and its own effect. We forget that the slush is somehow related to the snow and begin to figure that the dirty grey stuff is the essence of reality and that pristine white drifts are only an anomaly. Or, for those of us with less of an analogical imagination, we start believing that the status quo of our lives is all the reality that we're ever going to get. Godly revelations are for bible stories and special occasions in our lives, but the rest of the time we are left pretty much on our own.

But this type of thinking is not only somewhat depressing, but it is also somewhat shortsighted. The church teaches that God's intimate relationship to each and every one of us is permanent and indelible. It is first revealed to us in our baptism and is brought into particular focus at certain points in our lives. Like the snow that inevitably precedes the slush, it never really goes away. The God we see clearly in the high points of our life is also there in the valleys inbetween.

None of this is to say, however, that the lows that we feel are all in our mind. The stauts quo in between the theophanic highs of our lives are very real indeed; we just need to be careful not to mistake it, that is the status quo for reality itself. Just as road grime, dust and salt combine to change the appearance of the snow, sin, evil and the pressures of brokenness combine to change the outward appearance of God's continued graceful action I our lives. But God is still there.

This week, we will celebrate Ash Wednesday and begin our Lenten pilgrimage. The key facet of this particular celebration is not the Ashes - per se - but the words that go with them: "Remember that you are Dust and to Dust you shall return." Now, I can't claim that this traditional formula was developed with my sermon in mind, but the metaphor seems consistent. In the slush of our day-to-day life, it is humanity's presence, not God's absence that is the cause of the flatness, the grey-ness. God's abounding love is the snow. We are the dust. When we get too caught-up I our own lives, our own understandings and our own perceptions, we loose track of the goodness of God that is all around us. Far from being 40 more days trapped in the slush, Lent provides us with a program to begin seeing the status quo for what it really is, a veil of our own creation that hides the brilliant light of God. By denying ourselves, for a season, and resisting the world's temptations, the continued presence of God with us should become clearer and we, like Moses will find ourselves standing, once again, face to face with our creator.

My brothers and sisters there is a ton of slush out there. But it not meant to weigh us down. It was born of an immeasurable amount of God's grace that falls like snow into our lives. Our task is but to see it, to look past the grime of our own fallen-nature and to actively seek the work of God in our every-day lives. We have the witness of past generations and our own, personal revelations to be our guides. Furthermore we have the commitment of Christ to bear with us along the way in spite of our momentary lapses in faith. What more do we need?

AMEN