The Most Honest Day of the Year

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.