Our Ashes, God's Breath

 

Psalm 51:1-12, 17

The ashes we use on Ash Wednesday come from burned palms - palms waved with Hosannas and high hopes at Jesus’s coming, then discarded in confusion and disgust when what came next was death instead of victory and triumph.  

There is an honesty and familiarity in the ashes. They’re personal. They represent the incineration of our lost hopes and ruined plans, our decimated dreams and broken relationships. They come from “the debris of good intentions, the residue of our mistakes and failures.” (R.A.)

From ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

 One commentator says, “The[se] words do not refer to some universal concept of inanimate matter nor is the dust from an outside source. No, the ashes are us. The dust is the actualities of our lives. Our physical bodies. Our passions, limitations, mistakes and memories. Our families and friends. Our streets and neighbourhoods. The world in which we live. Our embodied journeys in time and place.”  (Rodney Aist - Wild Goose)

These are the ashes of the burned stores and restaurants in Minneapolis as our city and country cried out in anguish and anger, and this is the dust of the ripped out walls in our church basement to open up space for new life. This is the dirt in which we’ve buried those we love and lost this year, and the dirt from which we grew tomatoes and zucchini to share with our neighbors through the summer. These are the ashes of our bonfires on the church lawn, sitting 10 feet apart when we could not gather side by side indoors. They're the dirt on the boots that trampled through our nation’s capital sounding out loud the chasm of division and pain in the heart of our nation. And these are the spent embers of our energy and enthusiasm for more of this pandemic kind of life after months and months of isolation and distance. 

But “from the cinders of the cross come the soil of resurrection.” (R.A.) From our death, our brokenness and impossibility, God moves to bring new life.  God breathes life into dust to create the Adam, the creature of the earth, Adamah.  We are made from dust, and we bring to God the dust of our lives knowing "what God can do with dust." (as Jan Richardson says.) 
 
Each year at Lent we return to these ashes, as the emptiness, nothingness, from which our God creates. This is the soil we offer to God to grow new life – in us, and in the world. 

It is a relief to gather this way. To see visibly our mortality on the faces of those looking back at us across a screen. We are a community of honesty, and it is here that God meets us.
 
Now we wait. 

We cultivate a spirit of waiting. Waiting for God to do what only God can do. For God to do what God does. 

Lent is a gift. We rest in the honesty and the waiting. 

We hold up our ashes to God and watch for what God will do with them.
May you be blessed in your Lenten wait.


PRAYER PRACTICE
Our Lenten prayer journals are a way for us to pause and process as we receive each week and set intentions for the following week. 

This week:What do these ashes on your own face represent to you? What are the ashes you bring to God, seeking resurrection and life?

Why Ashes?

When I told my kids we would be going to church to have the sign of the cross put on our heads, they told me they already had the sign of the cross on their heads. They meant the sign of their baptism; they meant that they belong to God.

Then we had to talk about how this sign we will be making tonight is one they can see, at least for a short time. How we are making this mark to remember that even though we belong to God, we still die and death still has a hold on us. 

That creeped them out a little, why do we need to remember that we die? They asked.

Ash Wednesday begins our Lenten journey to Easter with the sign of the ashes made on us. This ancient sign speaks of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marks our penitence.  

Ashes is a sign of grief and a recollection of death that awaits us all.

We will mark the cross on our foreheads in ashes, visible, smudgy, dark and dusty.  Death.  Mortality.  Frailty. But we will trace the mark of our humanity over top of the unseen but permanent mark of our baptism.

The words spoken at baptism begin:

“In baptism God claims us,

And seals us to show that we belong to God.

God frees us from sin and death,

Uniting us with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection.

Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

One of the most powerful experiences of Ash Wednesday I have ever had was when my son was 5 months old.  Just in front of me as we came forward for our ashes, was a woman who was a beloved pillar of the church, Alice Satterfield; she was 84 years old.

She made her way slowly forward, her body bent over her cane and feet shuffling, and I watched the pastor trace the cross on her forehead in ashes and say to her, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” 

Tears sprang to my eyes when I heard those words spoken over Mrs. Satterfield, not knowing how much longer she would be with us, and realizing how painful it would be when she was gone. 

Then I stepped forward to receive the ashes myself.  The pastor leaned towards me, and with a black-smudged thumb reached out and traced the cross on the forehead of my gurgling baby boy on my hip, and said, “from dust you came and to dust you shall return.”  I gasped and felt as though I had been hit in the stomach. 

It was true, I realized.

What was true for Mrs. Satterfield was true for Owen as well. It is true for everyone.  Even fresh arrivals in this world will go out of it eventually. Nobody escapes death.  Everyone one of us is in need of life.

Why do we need to remember that we die? 

Because it’s true. 

And because remembering that reminds us that we are not God.  That we need salvation. 

And so by receiving this sign of the cross tonight we hold these truths together – that we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, no matter what, we belong to Christ, in whom there is life everlasting. 

But even though the power of death has been broken in Christ, and we will celebrate the resurrection at Easter, we still die.  And we still participate in sin and death in this life.

We are badly in need of the Resurrection. 

Beloved of God, says the water and anointing first, chosen and claimed. Destined for eternity with the creator, empowered by the Spirit for a life of faithfulness and love. 
And dying. Weak, says the ashes on top. Vulnerable, human, broken. 

Tonight you are invited to come forward and welcome the honesty the ashes offer.  To bring your brokenness, your places of sorrow and loss, your places of weakness and failure, the places you forget you belong to life and live instead like you belong to death. 

Let the ashes be your prayer.

Let the ashes invite you to meet God in those places of sin and death, as we journey towards the cross and the hope of the resurrection.

Prayer:

Almighty God,

You have created us out of the dust of the earth.

May these ashes be for us

a sign of our mortality and penitence,

and a reminder that only by your gracious gift

are we given everlasting life;

through Jesus Christ our Savior.

Amen

Remember that you are dust,

And to dust you shall return.