God in Ashes

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iturgy is acting out what we believe.  Any of us can attest that it is almost impossible to go through an entire liturgy, even one that we’re familiar with, and not find something that is at odds with what we truly believe.  On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that any one of us could consistently go through a liturgy day after day, week in and week out, that was totally at odds with what we consciously believed.  It would be odious in the extreme. 

I suspect that the Ash Wednesday Liturgy is a mixed bag for many who attend it. I remember a little girl years ago drawing back in horror as I went down the altar rail imposing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful.  In a stage whisper she said to her dad, “That Father Dunn’s not going to dirty up my pretty face!”  That might have been what I was unconsciously remembering many years later when I was faced with holding chapel for about fifty kids in a parish preschool on Ash Wednesday. How do you honestly impose ashes on the foreheads of three and four year old children saying the traditional words?  It isn’t that kids can’t understand mortality. Nor need we project adult fears of death onto the very young.  But how does Ash Wednesday—I asked myself—square with the overarching gospel of love that we’re trying to articulate for children all the rest of the year?  I think that if the gospel can’t be understood by a three- or four-year-old then it probably isn’t the real gospel.  So I told them how we made ashes out of palm branches and how we used them to mark the beginning of Lent, which ends in Easter.  I talked about how we all get dirty from time to time, sometimes from play, sometimes from work, sometimes by accident.  And I spoke about how ashes are really messy, and always result from something being destroyed by fire, either on purpose or by accident.  And then I said, “No matter how dirty we ever get, or what we do, or what we say, God will always love us.  And that’s what I’m thinking about when I make the sign of Jesus’ love on my forehead”—I then put ashes on myself—“Remember no matter what you do, God will always love you.” Almost every one of the children stood in line to receive ashes.  I’d like to think that somewhere deep down some of them are remembering today, nearly twenty years later, that message as their foreheads are being smudged with ash.

"Remember no matter what you do, God will always love you."

Ashes have a very specific value on Ash Wednesday:  they symbolize our mortality and penitence. Let’s take those referents one at a time. 

First, our mortality.  It is easy enough not to miss the connection between ashes and mortality because the words with which ashes are given to us recall the words at the grave, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.  Is that scary? Perhaps so, because nearly everything and every system we know conspire to shield us from the reality of death, starting with the medical profession. But we are mortal and designedly so.  We might use euphemisms such as “passed away” or “expired” to speak of death, but they do not take away the fact of death. Everything in all creation is subject to destruction, from stars that die to the rocks of the earth’s crust that are forever being broken down into grains of sand.  And everything broken down potentially becomes a part of the opposite process of construction.  Human beings are no exception. 

But the ashes come onto our foreheads in the form of a cross, and there is a reason for that.  The cross means preeminently one thing: that Jesus embraced his own mortality, not giving in to the temptation to escape his fate either by softening his radical message or by colluding with the powers of this world that pretend invincibility or by falling for the illusion of security. It is precisely the embrace of mortal body makes resurrection of that body possible. The ashen cross witnesses to the truth that when we follow Jesus, becoming obedient to death, we are raised to real life.  As we will say in the Litany of Penitence on Ash Wednesday, “By the cross and passion of [Jesus], [we come to] the joy of his resurrection.  That resurrection he shares with us in these mortal bodies.

So mortality is a gift, not a curse.  And so is penitence, believe it or not.  But in order to see, let alone believe, that penitence is a gift, it’s necessary to reimagine it.   Instead of penitence as breast-beating, it is turning around and facing a new direction.  Instead of weeping and wailing for our sins and transgressions, penitence is seeing that there is indeed no mistake that does not provide a lesson to be learned, no sin that is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  Ashes on our foreheads remind us rightly of our brokenness, the utter failure of our attempts to be perfect, the myriad ways we mar our own beauty with hatred, bitterness, and self-contempt.  And, wonder of wonders, God reveals God’s very self in our weariness with the frustrations of living.  God is not an escape from reality, but the supreme Reality alive in everything, including both physical ashes and all that ashes symbolize.   If penitence is anything at all, it is reminding ourselves of the abiding love of God, or as those kids once heard on Ash Wednesday, “No matter what you do, God will always love you.”

God shows up in such unlikely places—a manager, a cross, a tomb, in bread and wine, and in ashes.  Most of the time, it is, as Moses once saw, the backside of God that we see—the hind part visible only when the moment has come and gone, sometimes gone for a long, long time.  Yet occasionally, once we have practiced and practiced seeing eternal things through the mortal mind’s eye, we can glance down at our hands and know that they and whatever they handle is full of God, or at our feet and know that they and wherever they go and on whatever they stand is full of God.  And sometimes when we’re least expecting it, we can taste something like bread or wine and think, as for the first time ever, “My God!  You really do live in me, don’t you?  And you’re fine with making your home in me, aren’t you?”

Sermon for Ash Wednesday 2019

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019