My old hometown in Montana received over 3 feet of snow from a storm last week. Even for a mountainside town, typically enthusiastic about every inch of new snow during the ski season, this much new snow can create plenty of problems. The ski runs at higher elevations measured 5 feet of snow dropped by the storm, rendering the base facilities inaccessible and the ski lifts inoperable. The best snow of the season, and Red Lodge Mountain couldn’t open for two days.
Here in the metro, we’ve been enjoying a stretch of warming and sunny days. While there is still plenty of snow piled all around, the mounds are disappearing, and the ground underneath is starting to reveal itself. My dog Doug has discovered that, along the sides of the road we walk to and from the park, the retreating snow banks are revealing all kinds of treasures to investigate. These are mostly the the now rotting and stinky refuse discarded out car windows sometime during the past four months. As far as Doug is concerned, the stinky-er, the better.
The snowbank that sits just outside the front door of our church entry has also receded considerably. Just this week, I took note that the first green blades of new growth have poked up through the brown. And, delightfully, the first flowers have appeared, fittingly a bunch of purple crocuses, matching the liturgical color of the concluding days of Lent.
This is story of holy week, played out in real time for us in nature. The weight of what is to come, may render us inaccessible and inoperable. Buried under this weight is death, with all its stink and rot and pain. But the sun will shine, and the green blade will rise. New life will come again.
May God’s hope embrace you this day. -Pastor Peter
Let us pray…
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
love lives again, that with the dead has been;
love is come again like wheat arising green.
Now the Green Blade Rises, ELW 379, © Oxford University Press 1928
Amen.