Ash
Wednesday Reflection—February 26, 2020
LSS of ND
Program Center, Fargo
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Today is perhaps the most honest of all the days on
the Christian calendar.
Today is the day when we face one another and ‘fess
up to three scary things about
ourselves---first, that we are sinners so adept at sinning that we can’t stop
sinning; second, that we live on a dangerous playing field; and third that we’re
all going to die some day.
364 days of the year we carefully skirt around those
awful facts of our lives, but on Ash Wednesday we blurt them out to one another: remember that you are dust and to dust you
shall return.
And it’s not just that we hear these hard
words but that we feel them, we experience these words ground into our
flesh, with a sooty mark right on our foreheads, for all the world to see.
Let’s be honest:
on most days this is the last thing we’d ever say about ourselves. We explain away our sin as weakness; we take
up arms to defend ourselves against all dangers; and we mask our mortality with
a host of euphemisms like “she passed away” or “he shuffled off” after a
courageous battle with whatever killed him.
Most days we wouldn’t be caught dead (!) doing what
we will shortly do as we receive a sooty mark on our foreheads and hear those
solemn words, spoken in the Garden to our first parents after they rebelled: remember that you are dust and to dust you
shall return.
So, why do we hear and speak these words so bluntly
today?
Are we simply “whistling in the dark?” Is this merely a defiant act of spiritual
bravado? Or is something else going on?
I think it is the latter. For the ashes today are engraved upon
us---not in the form of an “S” for sinner, nor in the shape of an “F” for
failure.
No, this sooty mark has a very definite, paradoxical
shape to it. It’s a cross—a cross that
says we are as good as dead, and we can live with that because we are not the
only ones who remember that.
There is Someone Else who remembers our dire straits
today—Someone who knows us better than we know ourselves. This One, our Lord, also remembers today and
every day. God, according to Psalm
103:14, “knows how we were made; [God] remembers that we are dust.”
Decades ago when I was a newly-ordained pastor, one
of my best teachers said something I’ve never forgotten—namely that in the
Bible whenever God remembers, things happen.
When our merciful God remembers that we are but dust,
God doesn’t turn away from us…but rather, God becomes one of us, God takes on
our dust, tackles evil, defeats sin, and defangs death when God dies—on a Cross
of our making.
When God remembers that we are but dust, God acts to
save us, God carries a Cross for us, God lies in a grave for us, God in Christ
Jesus rises again for us, and God promises the same for us and for all whom God
loves.
Because you see, God always plays for keeps…or
in the words of author Anne Lamott, grace always bats last.
Remember that, too, my friends…today….and
every day.
In the name of Jesus. Amen.