Ashes and Weeping

Ashes and Weeping

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God who is Creator, Christ, and Comforter.  Amen

         Ash Wednesday is one of those public days in our Christian faith and life.  Besides the rite of baptism, when the newly baptized wear the oily mark of the cross on their foreheads, what other day do Christians have such visible mark on their skin as…Ashes?

         As the ashes are placed on our foreheads, we hear these words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  These powerful words remind us that we are made from the dirt of our planet.  We come from this earth / and we will return to this earth / and it is through the dirt of this planet we are connected to ALL that has ever lived or will live.

On this  Ash Wednesday – as I hear the news and look around me, and if I am truly honest – as I look closely into my own heart – I can’t help but think of ashes.  Ashes in their deadliest reality. 

There are ashes of war and ashes of hunger.  I saw a woman as she stirred the last ashes of the last fire from the last of the food that will be cooked, because there is no food left and there is no fuel for fire.   

I’ve seen ashes of war fought far away from home where men and women from both sides die for their countries.

And, ashes of the funeral pyres as loved ones are laid to rest. 

And, the ashes of homes destroyed as lives turned inside out. 

The ashes of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald, still swirl around our planet.

All of these ashes make me want to weep when I am my best self.  Most of the time…I am numbed to the true affect of what I witness on the nightly news.

It happens without our noticing you know.  We become numbed to suffering,,,habituated to the sly creep of resignation…inured to the ways the powers and principalities exercise their insidious reign.  But, on this day of ashes, {if we are blessed} we may leave numbness behind..for just a moment. 

This makes us uncomfortable, though.  Many of us in the western world are reluctant to lament in public.  To name those things which are the cause our lament – personal and intimate to be sure, but also social, economic, local, regional, political, planetary.  Truth be told, we are not just numb to other people’s grief, but far too often, we are numb to our own.

Or maybe we are just too polite. 

Or we have bad memories of Christians being offensive in their public displays…carrying around signs and wearing sandwich boards condemning one thing or another.  And we do NOT want to be associated with that!

Or, maybe we have fallen prey to the privatizing of religion. 

Here in the US, there is not as much distance between knowing “Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior” and the “feel-good spirituality” of those who have left Christianity behind.  Both ends of this spectrum are deeply personal and deeply private.  The true essence of the Christian faith is that Jesus makes our lives whole, and this IS deeply personal.  When Jesus makes our lives whole, nothing is more personal!  At the same time, we cannot keep this to ourselves!  We are to proclaim that this Jesus who touched us so deeply and so personally is the “Savior of the world.”  He came to make this difference in all of us!  We are to proclaim loudly that God loves all the world in such a public way that all are welcome to experience this amazing, saving, redeeming love!  Personal?  You bet!  Private?  Never!

Jesus, who is the Christ, is the one who makes our actions and our hearts function together.  We have to be about inviting the world to the feast that bears THEIR name; a feast and a fellowship to which they never even knew they belonged!   

Accomplish in us, O God, the work of your salvation.  With the ashes we bear, we lament the state of the earth and its inhabitants, its wounds and cries of despair, and ultimately to the silence of the dust of death. 

We repent of our own complicity in the inflicting of these wounds on our earth and all of its creatures.  We confess that we have distanced ourselves from all of creation, which, coincidentally, is made of this very same dust of the earth that we are…and with whom we will someday share the same dusty end. 

We denounce together the powers that harm the world, which is our own most grievous fault; and in our private practices of the discipline of Lent: self-examination and repentance, prayer and fasting, sacrificial giving and works of love, remind us that we are in communion with God’s love and lament for the earth and all its creatures. 

We will be joining in a collective lament in just a few moments.  Lament is truth-telling.  Lament is witness.  Lament denounces.  Lament offers hope. 

And in our public witness, we begin the church’s forty day preparation for the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, who is the Christ.  We  will continue to practice communion every time we gather here.  And, in this season there are other practices like: the washing of feet, the veneration of the cross, Jesus’ death, the silence of the tomb, and Jesus’ glorious resurrection.

Justice, healing, repentance: so often begins with tears.  Do you think, with all that is happening in our world…and what is happening within us - that God is not weeping with us? 

Ashes…Ashes and weeping. 

Have mercy on us, O God.    Amen