Ash Wednesday 2011

Ash Wednesday 2011
March 9, 2011

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Solemn words for this solemn, dreary day. The temptation of Ash Wednesday is to bear these words that remind us of our mortality and to carry our sinfulness as burdens upon our hearts. But that is not the truth of Ash Wednesday.

Over the last few years, I have been given a gift of a new way of thinking about Ash Wednesday through two different encounters. In the first, I was sitting with my daughter at the noon service while my husband preached and presided. She was probably only about two, and so I spent some time trying to prepare her about what was going to happen in the service. I told her how we would go to the altar rail, much like we do for communion, but instead of getting communion, we would get the sign of the cross, in ash, on our foreheads. I told her about how this reminded us of the cross that was made on our foreheads at our baptism, how it reminds us that no matter what happens, we belong to Christ. And I told her that she could get this cross, just like everyone else. So when the time came, we went forward to receive our ashes, and my daughter began to get upset because she didn’t receive communion. As we were walking down the main aisle of the church with her protesting that she didn’t get communion, I was trying to quietly remind her that she had gotten ashes, just like everyone else. To which she proclaimed: “Hurray! I love my ashes!”

And then, a couple of years ago, I was regularly visiting an elderly woman who was shut in. She told me that she loved Ash Wednesday, and so I was trying to get to see her to take her communion and ashes, but I was not able to get there on Wednesday. I did see her the next day, and when I offered her ashes, she told me that she already had gotten some. When I asked her how she had done that, she told me that her husband, to whom she had been married many, many years, had come home from our Ash Wednesday service at church, and she had asked him to press his forehead against hers. He did this, and it left the mark of his ash cross as a shadow upon her forehead as well.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I have learned that there is a strange kind of comfort in those words, a strange kind of belonging. They are a reminder that we belong to God, and that we will return to God. They are a reminder that, through our belonging to God, we also belong to each other, and that not even the loneliness of death can destroy that belonging. They are a reminder that we continue to exist, in every moment of every day, because of God.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. These words are an invitation-- an invitation to allow God to transform our hearts this day and throughout this season. They are an invitation to allow God to create within each of us a clean heart, an invitation to come back to God with all of your heart…to let not your hearts be broken…for God is all tenderness and compassion. They are an invitation to admit our wrongs and to receive God’s forgiveness. They are an invitation to conversion, to returning to God through not just repentance but also through amending our lives to more closely follow the way of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are an invitation to go deeper into God, to allow our hearts to be stripped, by God’s spirit, of the layers of hardness that we have built up, to allow our hearts to be lightened of their burdens.

Despite its starkness and austerity, this season of Lent is not a time to be burdened by more stuff or obligations, nor a time to be burdened by the weight of our sins. All of that and more is wiped clean this day, as we are invited on this journey to go deeper into God.

The temptation for us this day, and all through Lent, is to let our religion take precedent over God, to try to fill our deep longing for God with the trappings and practices of the season and whatever we give up or take on. Those things can be ways that we move deeper into God, but they can also be layers that we try to add back onto our new, clean hearts, so that we don’t have to bear to stand before God with our undefended hearts.

So really, this is a good day. It is a day when our hearts can be unburdened of the lies that we tell ourselves and each other about our mortality; it is a day when we can be unburdened of the untruths we create our identities from; it is a day when we can be unburdened of the deadness in our lives; it is a day when we remember that we always belong to God, and that God always calls us back to that belonging.

And it is a day when we begin to move deeper into God with our newly unburdened hearts, that we may be transformed and purified to revel in the resurrection on Easter Day. It is a day when we are invited to listen carefully and hear the echoes of the Palm Sunday Hosannas in the ashes on our foreheads.

(Note: Thanks to my mother for her sharing of the image of the invitation of Lent to go deeper into God, and to the poem Ashes by Ann Weems for the image of the
echoes of the Hosannas of Palm Sunday in the ashes.)