Ash Wednesday 2021

Ash Wednesday 2021 February 17, 2021 I’ve lost count of the number of funerals I have done in my 16+ years as a priest. But I will never forget my first funeral which was also the very first time I celebrated the Eucharist as a newly ordained priest. As I prayed the beautiful and comforting words of our burial liturgy, I remember being woefully unprepared emotionally as I proclaimed the words at a certain point in the liturgy. As the years have passed, this part of the service no longer catches me unaware or by surprise, but it still fills me with a complex mix of feelings of hope coupled with the stark confession that one day I am going to die. It’s not unlike what rolls around every year on this day, Ash Wednesday, when I feel the grit of ash on my forehead and hear the words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The difference is that those words are coming from outside me; one could even say that their awareness is being inflicted upon me—this call to remember. Whereas in the burial liturgy, when I speak these words on behalf of the gathered community, I am embracing their starkness, their truth, their hope on behalf of myself and on behalf of all the faithful: “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” This is the call to remembrance that we hear on Ash Wednesday every year. It is the invitation that is offered to us during the season of Lent that is often lost in the face of the call to repentance, to take something new on or to give something old up. At its very heart, Ash Wednesday calls us to remember that we are creatures, created by God, made of the dust of the earth and filled with the breath of God; created to be finite rather than infinite. And that when God created us in this finite state, God called us “good.” We are called to remember that there is both a starkness and a beauty in the brevity of our lives. And we are called to be mindful of all the ways and the times that we spend our lives denying this truth in our lives; exploiting each other and creation in our denial of our death; seeking to consume to fill the void; keeping on running and running to avoid what is at the heart of our very natures, which is our mortality. The former bishop of Atlanta who is also a liturgics professor, Neil Alexander, has written a brief paper on the history of ashes for Ash Wednesday in an attempt to help bishops, clergy, and the church think about how to mark this day in the midst of a pandemic. And Bishop Alexander writes about how before the liturgy used the practice of making a cross of ash on peoples’ foreheads, the church had an older practice on Ash Wednesday—that is to sprinkle ash on someone’s head. This practice, he says, harkens back to the sprinkling of dirt onto a grave during the committal in a burial service. This is something this church knows better than others, as our members did the graves for one another and as we often pass the shovel around during the committal service to share the burden of sprinkling soil on top of one whom we have loved. Today, more than ever, we are called to remember not just our status as creatures of God, made with the dust of the earth and filled with the breath of God, created to be finite rather than infinite. We are called to remember the gift of the resurrection, when, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, God proves once and for all that God’s love transcends the limits put on us in our creation, that God’s love breaks the power of death to make us a part of God’s new creation through the resurrection so that death is not the end but a change. We are called to remember the gift of new life that can come even through death. The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister writes, “Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” This Lent, I invite you into practices that will help you to remember that you are God’s creation, made to be finite and named by God as good, and invited into new life by God through Jesus’s resurrection. I invite you to embrace your creatureliness, recognizing the limits and boundaries of our existence as opposed to rushing to ignore or deny them. I invite you to discover practices that allow you to be grateful for the darkness that, like a rich soil, invite growth, and I invite you to use this time as a season to live into practices that support new life and growth in your spiritual life much like new life will sprout out of the moist, dark earth as the season moves forward into spring. In that way, this season can be a gift for us all as we look, once again, toward Easter. “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”