And so this meditation begins, with Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the
Mount ringing in our ears, his cautions about practicing our piety, our
goodness before others, his words of warning to us to not practice our
religion as if we were on stage, playing a part, looking for the applause
or even the respect of others. So much of the complaints found within
the Gospels seem to be around the inauthenticity of the religious people
of Jesus’ day—“all show, no substance,” is the common charge against
the Pharisees and Sadducees—“all play, no work.” Jesus seems to be
incredibly concerned that the ancient Israelite rituals of mourning and
grief around sin and the sinner had become hollow and meaningless,
they had somehow come to smack of incredible inauthenticity by those
who practiced them. Things like fasting and the tearing of clothes, or
even the sprinkling of ashes on foreheads, signs of repentance in the
ancient world, had somehow become simply ways for some to show
spiritually brag on themselves—I am so godly that I can even admit that I
am horrible, horrible sinner—and so these first century admonitions are
especially replete in Gospels, especially in Matthew, viewed with
incredible suspicions by the people who told the story of Jesus.
And yet even with this deep suspicion of these symbols of repentance,
the human need, the human hunger, for signs of penitence remained,
and as early as perhaps the 6th century, maybe as late as the 9th
century, the church sought ways of authentically giving expression to our
human need to simply say we are sorry—sorry for the ways we have
failed each other, and in doing so, being also able to admit that we have
failed God and our own best selves. So much of our lives are lived within
the worlds of symbols, and the deep mistrust of inauthentic ritual gave
way to noticing how the ancient Biblical prophets voiced their sorrow for
the sins of Israel in neglecting God and neglecting the poor—the tearing
of clothes, or exchanging of soft clothes for the coarseness of sackcloth,
or, for our purposes here on Ash Wednesday, the act of sprinkling ashes
on their heads or sometimes even the rolling of their whole bodies in
ashes. These old ways became new ways for those in the church to
allow its members to express their hopefully genuine regret for the ways
they had failed God and each others.
Our Protestant forbearers in the faith, ever mistrustful of what might
smack of the Roman church, and ever suspicious of those things that did
not easily and clearly root themselves in some sort of Scriptural
justification, downplayed or did away with Ash Wednesday services, as
many of our forbearers in the United Church of Christ did. And yet within
Protestantism in the past fifty years there has been resurgence of
interest in the ancient rituals of the church, for the signs and symbols of
our ancient faith, and you find a re-birth of ritual in the mainline
churches, especially in the Presbyterian and United Methodist traditions,
and even in a few of our own UCC churches. You even find a rebirth of
ritual and ancient practices in the Reform tradition of Judaism. In the
large, ecumenical church I served before coming here to First
Congregational Church, we would have 900 people at the Ash
Wednesday evening service, which was the second largest evening
worship service we had every year, beyond the Christmas Eve services—
that always amazed me, and you look out into the crowds and most of
them were under 50, and even more surprising, most of them were
former Baptists, for goodness sakes! These weren’t people who were
grew up with traditions like Ash Wednesday—these were people who
embracing these rituals for the first time!
Shawn Gleason and I went to a Conference for youth workers in Seattle
a few months ago and we visited a new church that caters to the under-
30 crowd, and what we found was a hip congregation with all the
computers, the large audio visual screens and all the latest music that
you find in contemporary worship nowadays. Yet this same, cool, hip
crowd will go out into this very night, on this beginning of the Lenten
season, with ashes smudged upon their foreheads. In the midst of all
that is new in Christian worship, the new ways we do worship (for better
or worse, admittedly), there remains a deep desire for something
ancient, for signs and symbols that seem real and authentic, that fit
Jesus’ call for authenticity, but that are somehow rooted in something
more ancient than the latest fad and that embody our needs to have
rituals that mark our lives. Somehow this ancient ritual how escaped the
postmodern mistrust of everything and anything.
And I tell you, there is something powerfully authentic about this service,
this spiritual marker that begins the season of Lent, this time of
reckoning with ourselves, and with God. I always say that I think that Ash
Wednesday is one of the few times that the church will look you in the
eye and tell you the absolute truth—with the marking of the cross on the
forehead come these absolutely true words: Remember that you are
dust, and to dust you will return. From the fragile dust we were created,
from the elements of the universe we were formed, and to those same
elements we will return—dust to dust, ashes to ashes, so goes the
familiar words of so many funeral rituals. That is true—we are more
fragile than we think and we will die one day. It is one of the few
guarantees we get in this life—the other guarantee is that we are born—
and everything in between those two moments is up to us and a little bit
of grace thrown in by God for the journey. That is what the ashes are
meant to remind us of, whether we literally take them upon our foreheads
or we simply take the meaning of the ashes into our hearts or we do
both, for that matter.
To embrace the end, in some odd way, is to embrace the present, I
think. We will not have forever to do what me must be done in our lives—
to forgive that unforgivable sin perpetuated against us, to love more
deeply the ones who need our love, to make right the world, or at least to
make right our corner of this world. As the writer of Joel reminds us, the
day of the Lord is coming, the armies of the enemy are at the gates, we
will not have forever to do what must be done. The ways we prop
ourselves up in the world, the treasures we store up for ourselves in
those places where moth and rust consume, as Jesus says, they will not
protect us from the truth that we only have a limited time to do what we
must do to make our lives right and to make the world right. The
questions before us on this Ash Wednesday, as they have been for over
1400 years—what we shall we do now, how shall we change the world
and how shall we change ourselves so that God can use us to heal all
that is broken in this world, all that is shattered on this side of eternity?
Those are the questions before us. Amen.
