February 13, 2002
Ash Wednesday
Year A
Why Ash Wednesday? Why do we gather every year at this time to do
this thing, this odd act of receiving the black ashes of last year’s burnt
palm branches on our foreheads? Many of us have never asked that
question because this whole Ash Wednesday thing was never part of the
tradition we grew up in, and we’re not quite sure what we’re doing here.
Last Sunday, when I was trying to describe this moment to my
congregation, when I was trying to offer words to describe the power of
this time together, this act of mourning, this slow movement towards the
shadows, this call to a time of regret and repentance, when I was trying
to utter the words to tell someone what this might mean, the words, the
words failed me. I don’t know if Ash Wednesday is meant to be
described, really, I think it’s an experience without words because it
uniquely an individual experience in the midst of a community. It is the
one time of the year we are asked to mourn, to regret, to repent, to seek
the shadows, to look at the reasons why Easter MUST happen.
Maybe that is the question we should be asking—why Easter, rather than
why Ash Wednesday. Easter is life, is hope, is spring, is joy—it is the
moment when we and all of creation shout the words, “He is not in the
grave, he is alive, he is alive!” Ash Wednesday is to remind us that
Easter rescues us from shadows, from the regret, from the mourning,
from the grief and repentance. In fact, Ash Wednesday, the day that
begins Lent, is simply a reminder that Easter will happen, that we are
destined for Easter, that some forty odd days from now, we will celebrate
the fact that death cannot hold, that life, not death is the end of our
story, that Jesus has been pulled from grave so that we could know the
truth about God’s passionate love for us. Maybe Ash Wednesday
answers the question of Easter, maybe without the two together we’ll
never understand either one, Easter or Lent—without each other,
neither one makes sense. We can’t know the power, the joy, the hope of
Easter without knowing of our deep need to be rescued, our deep need
for the grave to be emptied on that day some two thousand years ago so
that we too can be emptied of our regret and loss, our sin and pride, our
hopelessness and our all of our deep shadows. We can’t know life, if we
don’t know death, we can’t know hope without being reminded of our
moments of our hopelessness.
When those ashes are smudged on our foreheads in the sign of the
cross, we are reminded that we are dust, that we were shaped out of the
dust of the universe, and that dust, that dust that has been animated
with God’s own breath, that dust is where the dust of our bodies will one
day return. Without knowing that truth, without knowing how fragile life
really is, as we are living it right now, then we’re never going to see what
an incredible gift every moment, every God given breath, really is. That
doesn’t mean that life doesn’t meet us on the other side of that moment
when our bodies return to their home—it just means that this life, this life
of dust and clay, this life must be attended to, this life must be taken care
of, this life must be looked at. We are called to regret because there are
some things to regret in our lives, we are called to repent because there
are some things to repent of in our lives—we are called to this moment to
remember the truth about ourselves, that life as we know it will one day
end, and that there are seasons in our lives where must we struggle with
that truth, about ourselves and our sin, about how human we really are,
and how fragile, how breakable we really are.
The good news, however, is that Lent is a short season in the Christian
calendar, quite literally a tenth of the year for us Christians. Its not a
long season because this is not the center of our faith—sin is not the
center of our heart, regret is not the crucible of our lives, repentance is
not the heart of who we are as Christians, the reality of our fragility, our
breakability, is not the core of who we are—the core, the heart of who we
are happens on Easter Sunday in an empty grave and we live in the light
of the moment. Still, like I said last Sunday, you can’t have light without
the possibility of shadows, and so we are asked to look at the shadows,
to attend to repentance, to offer our regret to God. And we are asked to
look into the deep shadows within ourselves and within the world, so that
we know that light, that light, it surrounds us, that that light is here, and
that joy and goodness meet us on Easter Sunday, when all regret, when
all repentance, when all the shadows that haunt will melt away in the light
that is the Christ, the savior of the world. Amen.
