Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday Year C
March 6, 2019

    Yet even now, says the Lord,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the Lord, your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.

Many people approach Ash Wednesday with a sense of dread… and when some of us walk around with a cross of ashes on our forehead, there are many around us who don’t understand what we are doing.  I have to admit, when I was a kid, I didn’t really get it; my family didn’t go to church, but I had friends who did, and when they came to school with a smudge of ashes on their heads, I was concerned.  

    As I have come to celebrate Ash Wednesday for a few years now, I am no longer afraid of what we do this day, and I have come to look forward to it, in its own way.  I think Ash Wednesday is important and even necessary for us. It has a way of cleansing us from the falsehoods that we engage in as we live in society. Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent that follows it, helps us to turn ourselves back towards God and to our true selves.  We know that none of us gets out alive, and today that reality is made clear as ashes are placed on our foreheads… remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return…” But I think that this marking is much more that that; in a way, it is a cleansing; today, and through this season of repentance, we are asked to come clean, to shed those parts of ourselves that are untrue; it is a time for us to become rigorously honest about who we are - for God already knows who we really are; we however, sometimes forget.  We indulge in desires and adopt practices that take us far from God and from each other; in an effort to belong in a society that will one day pass away, we sometimes forget to whom we really belong. Perhaps in our fear, when we have gone too far astray, we become afraid to turn back to God, afraid of punishment, afraid of being left alone; yet God has promised us over and over again, that we shall not be alone; that God in Jesus shall always be with us in the gift of God’s Holy Spirit.

    This day is a day of realizing that we are human, and being human is messy on the best days.  God knows that; God loved us so much that God entered into the messiness of human life to experience our joy as well as our sorrow.  What that means for us is that we do not have to hide who we are; God already knows; God has already been there so that we wouldn’t be there by ourselves.  We shall indeed return to the dust, but I hope that today reminds us that what comes between our creation and our death is important; God cares for each of us and for the lives that we live; our fragile selves are perhaps our truest selves, and I pray that each of us can come to know our own weakness, so that we might know the depth of our dependence upon God.  That, beloved, is our true self; that is what it means for us to be real; to not be hiding behind the false self that others would have us be…

    Today, may we begin a path to living as our true selves, remembering that even in our weakest and darkest moments, God brings strength and light.  May we remember that God loves us enough to allow the joy of Easter to be present even today. As we are anointed with the messiness of ashes, may we embrace our real selves as Jesus embraces us, remembering that even in our weakness, we are made strong in him.  Today, may we turn back toward God, and may the actions we embrace this holy season help us to remember it is God whom we need above all else.