Ash Wednesday 2018
What a strange day this day is, so full of contradiction.
Let’s start with the fact that this Ash Wednesday is also Valentine’s Day. So, right
off the bat, the contradiction leads to a choice: do we wear hearts or crosses
of ash today, or both?
The hearts, of course, are a lot more fun to
wear, as a symbol of love, they abound on this secular holiday that celebrates
love and passion. The ashes? Well, the crosses of ash we will each be wearing
shortly will lead us in solemn procession into Lent, but the thing is, they
also attest to love – and to passion; for it is for the deep, passionate,
consuming love of humankind that the cross bore our sins on the person of Jesus
Christ.
Valentine’s Day lasts for one day, so
fleeting a holiday is it. Lent comprises a whole season in the liturgical year;
we will journey through Lent for the next forty days, not including the Sundays.
Valentine’s Day focuses on loving
relationships, whether they be friend to friend, or lover to lover. Christians
around the world participate in heightened practices of devotion during Lent; we
think about our relationship with God, and consider how to make that
relationship more central to our lives.
While Valentine’s Day isn’t nearly as
significant, for our faith, as Ash Wednesday, it can, nonetheless, shed a new
light on this important day that welcomes us into the season of Lent.
We largely know Valentine’s Day by its modern
accoutrements:
Chocolate. Flowers. Hallmark.
But the history of the holiday—at least what
is known of it—is quite different.
Valentine’s Day is the feast day for three different saints recognized
by the Catholic church, all with the name of Valentine. All three were
martyred—killed because of their faith.
One of these saints,
and probably the best known of the three, was a priest who served during the
third century in Rome. When the Emperor decided that single men made better
soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young
men. The priest, whose name was Valentine, seeing injustice in the decree, defied
the Emperor and continued to perform marriages for young couples in secret. When
his actions were discovered, the Emperor ordered that he be put to death.
Another Valentine was purportedly killed for
attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were
beaten and tortured. And a third man by that name is believed to have healed the
blindness of the daughter of his own jailer, but when the authorities heard of
it, they sentenced him to death.
So, the holiday that Hallmark has made all
about love and flowers and chocolate and gifts really started with death. Three
deaths, actually; each came on the heels of sacrificial lives, deaths that were
caused by a Valentine’s commitment to living out his faith for the sake of the
other, and for the sake of Christ. So, maybe Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday
have more in common than it seems at first glance.
For Ash Wednesday, too, has its roots in
death.
Remember you are dust, and to
dust you shall return are
the words spoken to each of us as the cross is imposed in ashes on our
forehead.
As Ash Wednesday leads our entry into Lent
we, in the church, face the tomb, Jesus’ and our own, aware of our own
mortality and sin…
…seeking forgiveness, and the promise of light on the other side.
The shape of the cross that is traced on our
brows today is itself a symbol of death—and yet, the ashes we bear today are more than just a symbol. They
are a reminder that one day, sooner or later, whatever riches we’ve built up,
whatever accomplishments we’ve amassed, whatever memories we’ve created,
however many hearts we’ve broken or mended, we will all meet the same end. Death,
they say, is the great equalizer.
Like these left-over remnants of last year’s
Palm Sunday, burned away to ash, we, too, will be smudges on the earth. So,
there we are – ashes to ashes, beginning and end, stuff of creation and remnant
of decay, even the ashes after which we name this day represent a contradiction
– they speak of both life and death.
Our reality is that dirt and death, loss and
sin and sorrow, are an integral part of our lives. Ash Wednesday names this
truth through ritual that reminds us that we are made from earth and will one
day return to earth; reminds us that our span of life on this planet is so
very, very short.
This ritual, and these truths, help us ask
important questions:
Am I really making the most of this limited time I have? Am I using the
gifts I’ve been given to live in a meaningful way? Or am I frittering life away
in shallow pursuits of temporal pleasures?
And yet, the saving
grace of this day is that the ashes with which we are marked aren’t only a sign of death.
Because our God is a God who creates LIFE out
of dust. Indeed, God created the first human by breathing God’s breath into the
dirt. And while these ashes are marked in the shape of the cross, an instrument
of death, by the grace of our God, it is also a profound symbol of new life, for
Christ has conquered death, sin, and the devil, once and for all time.
The ashen mark made on our brow is the same
mark made, with oil, in baptism when we are blessed with the words “You are
marked with the cross of Christ, and sealed with the Holy Spirit forever.”
By the cross, through the cross, with the
cross, God’s promises and grace carry us from death to life, time and time
again, as we daily die to sin, and are raised again to new life in Christ.
The disciplines of Lent are not, therefore
for show. Rather, they invite us into a death of sorts—a death to self, a death
to all our selfish desires and inclinations—that we may be raised to the kind
of life God intends for each of us; the kind of life that truly is life:
loosing the bonds of
injustice,
letting
the oppressed go free,
sharing
bread with the hungry,
and
caring for the homeless poor.
The kind of life Lent invites us to, is life is life lived in imitation
of Christ—
Who loved the world so much that He died on the cross for you and me
and all of creation.
On Ash Wednesday, we
take time to acknowledge our mortality and our sin, to admit and confess all
the ways we fall short of the glory of God, and to repent, and change our ways.
We bless these ashes, and wear them on our brow, to remind us that we, too, are
part of the cycle of life begun by God.
God, who does not
leave us in the ashes, but renews us continually with creative, redeeming
power, that we might more and more become the people God created us to be, that
we might experience more and more of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Remember that you are dust, And
to dust you shall return.
You are beloved dust that has been marked with the cross of
Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit forever, And thus is given new life,
Today, and everyday.
Let us pray.
In thy word, Lord, is my trust,
To thy mercies fast I fly;
Though I am but clay and dust,
Yet thy grace can lift me high – Thomas Campion, 1567-1620
Amen.
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