ASH WEDNESDAY
February 9, 2005
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
2 Corinthian 5:20b-
6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
(Year A)
Grocho Marx once
told a story about standing on a street corner when a priest who was passing
him recognized him and said, “Mr. Marx, I want to thank you for bringing so
much joy into the world.” At which point Marx’s giant eyebrows arched and he
replied, “And I want to thank you Father, for taking so much joy out of it.”
I’m afraid that’s
how many people view Ash Wednesday. The partying, the Marti Gras celebrations,
run fast and furious because it’s built upon the understanding that you have to
get in all the fun and frolic you possibly can before the curtain of Lent drops
down and you enter that solemn time of Lenten misery. But I wonder if we might be missing the mark in this common
understanding about our Lenten journey.
I have always been
fascinated by the fact that the scientists tell us we are essentially made up
of stardust. It seems a wondrous thing; a holy and heavenly thing. Yet, when we
contemplate ashes as the residue of our bodies, of physical life, it seems to
lose that heavenly luster somehow. It seems even a depressing thing to
contemplate that we are ashes and to dust we shall return. Sometimes ashes seem
an easier way to confront death, but death is still death no matter how you cut
it.
But I’ve been
thinking that we’re missing something in the definitive way we usually separate
the ashes of death from the stardust of our creation. If God is in the mix of
it all, does it not somehow blend together into the whole of whatever it is
about us that God declares precious? Does our creation from the stardust lose
its luster when we remember that “we are dust and to dust we shall return?” I
think it all depends upon how we think of ourselves and of how God thinks of
us.
The truth is we are
made of perishable stuff; that is part of what we are called to name on Ash
Wednesday. We have a multiplicity of ways of ignoring that; of avoiding it,
from reincarnation to theologies that include all kinds of spiritual musings
that say there is nothing sacred about the body at all. In times past the
church called this by various names, but Gnosticism was the overriding name by
which this thinking was known and it was known as a great heresy, because the
first and primary thing that we are shown in the Incarnation of Jesus is the
fact that God, in creating human flesh and blood and in entering it in Jesus,
names it as the precious stuff that it is.
Part of what Ash
Wednesday calls us to do is to face the mirror and to ask ourselves if we are
honoring God in the flesh and blood person that we are. We are called upon, not
just to own the sin in which we find ourselves awash in this world, but to own
the fact that we do not do always honor the gift we have been given. As the
Eucharistic Prayer in Rite I declares,
“And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves our souls and
bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee”. How can
we hear those words and not take responsibility for the health of our bodies as
much as the health of our souls? How can we hear those words and ignore the
fact that scripture tells us we are an amalgam of mind, body, and spirit? How
we honor – or do not honor – our bodies affects the state of our soul as well,
because God made us that way.
This means that part
of what we are called to do today is not to receive the ashes of Ash Wednesday
as some sort of curse, but to receive them as the promise that God owns them as
precious; that they indeed contain the luster from the stardust from which we
came. In this way the ashes that we are and the ashes that we shall become must
not come to us as curses but blessings. I know you’re thinking there must be a
catch here – and there is. The catch is that when we name this truth we must
then confront two things; that caring for our soul and not caring for our
bodies, or vice versa, is a sin against God’s creation of us. And secondly,
that God wills for us to come near enough to his presence so that God might
hallow all that we are and all that we shall become; even the ashes that we
shall become.
Ash Wednesday begins
with a longing call to “Return to me, with all your heart”. The response to
this plaintive call of God is more like an archeological dig, except the
purpose is to uncover and understand not only the past, but more importantly to
discover the gems that God created us to be; out of the dust, covered up by so
much sediment, defenses, habits and attitudes, and to take those gems and offer
them to God, seeking healing and renewal; asking God to breathe new life in
them.
G. K.Chesterton
said, “Let your religion be less a theory and more of a love affair”.
Chesterton reminds us that true religion is a passion for God. At stake in this is the fact that the things we are
called to do in Lent are not meant to change the world; they are first meant to
change us.
How then shall we
begin Lent; perhaps less thinking about the need to give up something and more
about the need to pull together the unity of mind, body, and spirit; toward the
Creator who gifted us with that unity in the first place. How do we honor the
whole of it? What are the ways we dishonor the whole of it and what does that
mean for us in terms of our behavior? Part of the work to which Lent calls us
is the work of coming to name the fact that we have our priorities askew in
life. That we willfully separate the holiness of our bodies from the holiness
of our mind and soul is not easy to wrestle with, but we are called to wrestle
with it in Lent all the same.
How shall we observe
Lent? Shall it be in fasting, in prayer, in good works? Find what works best
for you but first of all with the admonition to do it “in secret”, for this is
not the season of the spiritual Olympics. This is the season of diligence and
small steps. We’re not to parade in the streets, but to what may be even more
difficult, to go deep within. Because when all is said and done penitence is
about the resurrection of character. “Return to me with your whole heart; rend
your heart not your garments”. This can be a painful process, but out of that
process comes God’s own gift of healing. Only then can Lent become something
glorious as opposed to just going through the motions of Lenten traditions.
Only in becoming aware of what we have done and left undone do we come to that
place where we cry out for God to heal us; for the power of God to mold us
anew. This is the opportunity of spiritual rebirth that is the gift often left
untouched in Lent.
We might begin by
picturing that dark earth into which the bulbs of spring lie dormant now; or at
least seem dormant now. For the truth is that in the dark fertile earth God’s
own creative hand is at work. We shall see it very soon, in the blooms of
Easter morning, up from the earth they shall rise, the lilies and the blossoms
of God’s own creativeness. That is the promise we are given today, but until
then we are reminded that we are made both of perishable stuff, but also
heavenly stuff, and that only God has the power to make it into everlasting
stuff.
Karl Rahner captured
the truth of it when he said, “When on Ash Wednesday we hear the words,
‘Remember that you are dust’, we are also told that we are brothers and sisters
of the incarnate Lord. In these words we are told everything that we are:
nothingness that is filled with eternity; death that teems with life; futility
that redeems dust that is God’s life forever”. *
God made us as whole
beings and what we are called to do is to seek to conform them together in a
holy amalgam of unity. Only then can we come before the Creator who has made us
and seek forgiveness and healing. Only then can we come before the One who
formed us out of the stardust and say, “Make me whole again”. Only then can we
receive the ashes of our mortality as the promise of blessing that they are,
and own the hope that God will make them holy, not just now but in the Easter
morning that awaits all God’s creation.
AMEN
*Rahner, Karl, The
Eternal Year, p. 62.
The Rev. Virginia L.
Bennett, D.Min.
St. Andrew’s
Episcopal Church
Edwardsville,
Illinois