Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Video Sermon for Ash Wednesday

My pastor asked me if I wanted to do the meditation for Ash Wednesday, and I jumped at the chance.  I knew it would be pre-recorded, and I knew that I've been enjoying my approach of recording segments and seeing how to stitch them together.  I like that the process pulls on my poetry brain.  I like trying to think of ways to make the message new.

This year offers additional challenges.  There's the standard challenge of having heard the message already:  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  Some of us might say, "We hear this every year.  Blah, blah, blah, dust, ash, rust, smash."

But this year, with Ash Wednesday coming after a year of these reminders of our mortality, how do we make the message new?  This year, after a year of watching all we've built implode, explode, decay, and disappear, how do we create a message that touches on these themes but doesn't leave us clinically depressed?

Here's one of the video segments that tries to do all of that:



I confess that I don't know if I've been successful.  The video sermon is too big to put in this blog post, but you can go here to see it.

When I went to my YouTube channel to get the link to the sermon to post,  I was surprised to find that the video had 53 views, far more views than any other video I've posted to the channel.  How did people find it?  What Google searches brought them to my little video sermon on Ash Wednesday?


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