Ash Wednesday 2024
Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 51
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I joked on Sunday that I couldn’t think of anything more romantic on this Valentine’s Day than having ash smudged in your face and being reminded of your mortality. Obviously, I was being funny (or trying to be!), but the truth is, while not romantic, per se, I wasn’t kidding about today being all about love – that is, Ash Wednesday, and the season that follows, is all about preparing our hearts and making space to notice and receive God’s immense love for us.
Allow me to explain. We often think of Lent as being kind of a downer. I mean, it starts with a Kyrie, “Lord, have mercy,” and an extensive time of confession, and then receiving an ashen cross and being told you will, like all things, return to the dust. Lent continues with six weeks of penitence, and deprivation (Lenten fasts), and so many minor key hymns. And it ends with the most somber days of the Church year, as we follow Jesus to the cross, ending Good Friday in complete darkness…. I mean, really – whose idea was it to dwell on sin and sorrow for six and a half long weeks?? Who wants to do that?
Well, let me answer that by asking you another question: we’ve all dealt with problems, struggles, pain, and fear in our lives. Have any of them ever gotten better when you’ve just ignored them? Does simply hoping a problem will disappear make it so?
In my experience as a human, not usually. Generally, we have to face them in some way. Naming things out loud is the first important step in moving past the point of just letting that thing sit heavy in your heart. Sure, naming it can hurt at the time. It can be terrifying to face those hard truths with vulnerability, and sometimes, like a rough chemotherapy treatment, the initial backlash or reaction to this treatment feels worse than the disease itself. “It was better,” we think, “when I was ignoring it! Why did I have to go and stir all this up?” And yet, also like a cancer, letting something just sit there may go all right at first, but eventually it will overtake you.
Ash Wednesday is about naming the thing out loud – in particular, naming the thing or things that are keeping us from living joyfully in God’s promises. I have heard Ash Wednesday called the most honest day of the Church year, when we join together in faithful community, and admit that our relationship with God is not yet where it should or could be. We face head-on the reality that while we long for positive change, we also resist it… but that in the end, a resurrection and rebirth cannot happen unless something first dies. We know that resurrection comes in an exciting way on Easter, and we are given this season of Lent, these 40 days, to discern what needs to be faced head on, and what needs to be cleared away, if we are to make way for that resurrection to happen also in us.
A couple days ago, Monday, my alarm went off as usual at 6:45am. I stumbled, half-awake, into the bathroom. As I was washing my hands, I noticed, for the thousandth time, that our sink was not draining as it should be. For weeks, the water has reluctantly drained out of this, our primary bathroom sink, leaving things like spit out toothpaste and soap lather to dry along the bowl of the sink. And so, with that Monday morning motivation, I got to it. I pulled out the stopper and you can imagine, it was thick with gunk, a layer of dark grossness made up of… I shudder to think. And then of course there was the hair and gunk inside the drain. Isn’t this just how everyone wants to start the week? But I was in it now. I was committed! I dug in, not thinking about what germs I was getting my hands on, and began slowly but surely pulling weeks (or months!) worth of yuck out of that little drain. Blech.
But then you know what happened? I replaced the stopper, squirted some soap into my hands, lathered, rinsed them off… and the water went right down that nice clean drain. I smiled, feeling suddenly lighter. It was not a pretty job, my friends, not by a longshot, and even now I want to gag a little. But having faced what was blocking the flow, and dealt with it, now everything was flowing freely.
“Wash me through and through from my wickedness,” David writes, after being confronted with one of the worst strings of sinfulness of any character in the Bible. The prophet Nathan has named David’s sin for him (covetousness, adultery, and murder, to name a few) and David has owned this for himself – the first step in restoring his relationship with God. “Cleanse me from my sin,” he prays. “For I know my offenses.” His words are so real, so true to life – this Psalm, which we always read on Ash Wednesday, gives us the words to face our own sin, our own patterns and ways that block our relationship with God, and inhibit our flow.
And, that inhibit our ability to experience joy. That is our theme this Lenten season: “A Seed of Joy.” It seems an unlikely theme for Lent; isn’t joy for Easter? Lent is for all the sadness and sorrow. And yet, if Lent is the season in which we make way for that Easter joy, who is to say that joy can’t show up in glimpses along the way? As God is “creating in us clean hearts,” and “renewing right spirits within us,” we may very well find ourselves “restored to the joy of God’s salvation,” even before we get to the big Easter celebration at the end.
You see, I told you today is all about love! It is about a God who loves us so much that he won’t let us continue along a joyless path, but instead offers us a space to take those first steps of naming our sin and our ways of mortality, even as we trust that God will receive those things, and restore us to the joy of salvation. Who needs a box of chocolates, when we’ve got a promise like that?
So this is my question for you this Lent – and I am actually going to make you think about it right now, and write it down on the index card in your bulletin, so listen carefully. Here’s the question: What must die, or pass away, in order for you to feel truly joyful? What gunk is blocking your flow? What tangle of hair is keeping you stuck? What needs to be removed, to pass away, in order for you to feel truly joyful? Write it down on your index card, with as much vagueness or specificity as is helpful to you. You can sign your name, or not. I’ve asked Jon to play a longer introduction to the hymn to give you time to reflect. Then, as you come forward in a moment to receive ashes, to remember God’s promises to you in life and in death, place your stated gunk, whatever it is, in the font – not in the water itself, but in the spaces along the bowl. My promise to you, if you’ll entrust me with this, is that I will hold those things in prayer for you during this season – that God would wash you through and through, and restore you to the joy of his salvation, so that when Easter comes, we truly will be able to rejoice in the new life promised to us.
Let us pray… Restoring God, there is so much that gets in the way of us feeling the joy of your salvation. Help us to see it, and to name it, so that with your help, we can also be washed clean of it, and step into the joy of your presence. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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