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Ash Wednesday

In my first years of experiencing Ash Wednesday, I fell in love with it. There was something deeply authentic about it – the call to strip away all that didn’t matter, the opportunity to bare my soul and connect to what matters in life. It was a day that we gathered to express a deep truth, and that was somehow comforting to me.

I looked forward to celebrating Ash Wednesday as a priest, but when the time came, it was very different than I expected. I learned I was celebrating shortly before the service, so I did not have much time to really reflect on the liturgy before I was in the midst of it. When I stood over the ashes and began to say the words of blessing, I was caught up short. Just over a year before, my dad had been killed in a car accident, and one of my most powerful memories of that time was unpacking his charred things that were salvaged from his exploded car.

As I stood over those ashes, I was all too aware that someone full of life could become as lifeless as those ashes in only a split second. I suddenly wondered why on earth we were doing such a thing. Why were we blessing these lifeless ashes that all of us, so alive now, will one day become? Why do we come together around something so, frankly, depressing?

Ash Wednesday has never been the same again. On this day, I am all too aware of those who have returned to the dust, those who were so recently among us and are gone too soon. Marking ashes from babies in their parents arms to people closer to death than I am ready to accept and saying “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” to people I’ve come to love, now including my husband, is harder than I ever imagined.

And yet, year after year, I return, we return to this place. Sometime we return because we need hope that there is more than those ashes which we recently saw loved ones return to, and sometimes we return because we have allowed other things to consume our attention and passion and love and need to be reminded to reflect again, as Mary Oliver says, ‘what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.’

The journey we embark on today is about life, and sometimes we need to be reminded that we are fragile and frail beings whose time is limited in this one wild, precious life. We often focus on practices for Lent, these forty days of reflection and repentance in preparation for Easter, but those practices are entirely for the purpose of changing our lives, making us live more and more in line with the way God intends.

Our Scripture passages today give us guidance on this journey, offering ancient, timeless truth that seems incredibly relevant today.

Our Gospel passage begins. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them…” This word that is translated ‘piety’ is used a lot throughout the teachings of Jesus, especially in Matthew. Unfortunately, the word piety has come to be associated with personal spirituality, but the word means ‘justice,’ ‘righteousness,’ or ‘fair and equitable dealing.’ These words come in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, just after his instructions to do justice, to be merciful, to be salt and light in the world, to see men and women with dignity instead of looking at them in lust, to have integrity and be true to your word, to resist evil creatively and without violence, and to love our enemies.

So after all of that, Jesus says “Beware of practicing your justice before others in order to be seen by them…” Notice Jesus is not instructing us here to do justice. He is not doing that because it is assumed. He has just described how we are to care for others and the world around us, what we do to make the world more or less like the world God intends. If we are Christ-followers, this is the way we are to live. Doing justice, loving mercy, seeking peace and the dignity of all people – it is assumed that we are to live this way. Jesus is giving instructions about why we do these things, instructing us to examine our motives.

Are we doing what we are called to do because it draws us closer to God, or are we doing things for our own gain? Are we doing them because we love and care for others as God does, or are we doing them to be seen as kind and good? These are the questions we are to be asking in this season.

I struggle with this every day – I long to draw closer to God but no matter how much I wish it were not true, I care how others see me. I can analyze the reasons all day – from growing up as a female in the South with the expectations to be a sweet, caring lady to being a priest with its traditional expectations to be compassionate, knowledgeable with fatherly gravitas. These expectations swim in my head and certainly affect what I do – even, especially, things that are right and good to do.

Our passage from Isaiah gives me hope, though. I am not alone in my struggle – I am not the first, and I certainly will not be the last. In this passage, the people of God were diligently following their spiritual practices, just like we come to church, share in the Eucharist, spend time in prayer, give up things for Lent.

And the people feel that God is not listening, not noticing their seeking. But God points out that while they fast, they oppress those who work for them. They fight amongst themselves. Even just humbling themselves is not enough.

And that is important for us today, as we gather around our own ashes. It is true that we are mortal – frail and fragile beings who have come from dust and will one day return to it. But sometimes we limit Ash Wednesday to this recognition, and that is not what God desires – then or now.

It is important to remember who we are, children created by God. God does not desire us to come here today to grovel or sit in shame or think that we are worthless. We come here to remember who we are as children of God because we are not God ourselves, and that is good news – we are not alone at the center of our own created universe. God calls us to remember who we are because God has work for us to do, because God made us to be co-creators in the world of justice and peace and love that God is bringing among us.

The problem is not the practice in question, fasting in this instance.The problem is that the practice is not actually changing their life, not actually drawing them further into the life of God. But God’s words, for the people of Israel then and for us today, are not to shame them or make them wallow in their guilt. There is nothing we can do to make God stop wanting a relationship with us.

God tells them, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

And if the people will do this, if they will change their lives and return to God’s ways, then God says, “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly… Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”

No matter what the people have done, no matter how empty their prayers and fasting has been, no matter how they have perverted justice and ignored the needs of those around them, God has not given up on them.

And God has not given up on us either.

God actually believes we are capable of change, of growth, of turning our life around, which is what repentance means. I think this is sometimes easier to believe about others than ourselves. I know how many times I have longed to change and failed, and it is hard to find the energy to believe and hope again. But the God who created us knows us better than we know ourselves, and God believes that we can change, and our call in this season is to turn our hearts towards God and take time to intentionally begin the process of becoming more of the people God made us to be.

But we miss something important here if we only focus on individual change and repentance. God’s words in Isaiah are directed to a whole people, and for us today as well – as a church, as a community, as a nation. The people of Israel, like us so often, liked to think of the past as a day when things were better, when life seemed easier and simpler, when they did not question if God was among them. But now the things they used to do, which they thought brought them closer to God, still cannot return to the glory of the past. And God is telling them that those practices alone were never what God wanted from them. God wanted them to create a community, a society that reflected the world God created them for – a world where bread and wine is shared among everyone, where all have their needs met, and all are treated with dignity and love.

As beautiful as these words are, they must have been crazy to people then – and they are incredibly hard to believe now. Out of a people who are fighting each other, unable to be honest with their family, and ignoring the needs of afflicted, God sees the potential for the kingdom of God. God looks at a people who are fighting each other, who are unable to be honest with their family and sees the the repairer of the breach. God looks at a community where the unmet needs of people leaves them dying in the streets and sees the possibility of a community known as the restorer of streets to live in. God looks at ruins and sees the possibility of a kingdom.

God looks at dust and ashes and God sees life.

And we should not be surprised, for this has been our story from the beginning, has it not?In the beginning, we are told that God took the dust of the ground and formed it into a human, and into that dust God breathed the breath of life. Out of dust, God creates life. Life created in the very image of God, made of dust breathed into life by the Spirit of the very Being of Life and Light itself.

We remember that we are dust because it was dust that God breathed into life. And our story goes on… Our God entered our world with a body formed of dust, and when the worst of our own sin and brokenness tortured the life right out of that body, evil tried to make the dust and ashes the end of the story. But it could not succeed. The life that was breathed into the dust could not be contained, could not be destroyed.

We remember that to dust we shall return because we know that it is out of death that God brings new life. We remember that we are dust because it is from dust that God creates life. And we remember that to dust we shall return because we know that no matter what pain and brokenness we face in this life, no matter what finally returns us to ashes, it cannot destroy the life that God has breathed into us. We remember that to dust we shall return because there are parts of us that are dead and dying, there are parts of our community and nation and world where we have all but given up hope, and today we remember that those are the exact places that God always has and always will bring new life.

In the words of a poet,

“So let us be marked not for sorrow.
And let us be marked not for shame.
Let us be marked not for false humility
or for thinking we are less than we are

but for claiming what God can do within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff of which the world is made
and the stars that blaze in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.”

In this season, may we all seek to find what God can do within the dust.

We know where this Lenten journey will lead us, just as we know where this life will lead us. We have come from God, and we will spend forever in that eternal fellowship that is the very being of God. We are held together by God, and there is nothing that will ever separate us from the Love of God, nothing that will ever overcome the Light of God, nothing that will ever take away the Life of God that has been breathed into this sacred dust from which we come and to which we return.

And today let us gather again to proclaim that good news – that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

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