March 6, 2019 - Ash Wednesday - Beginning the Forty Day Journey of Lent

There was a strange, intense gentleness shared between those who gathered for tonight's service that is hard to put into words. Creator is a congregation both called and formed over many years, and some are faithfully assembled together tonight for another Ash Wednesday service.

The service began with silence as the gathered centered ourselves. Psalm 51 was read collectively and a confession of sins followed. After that we were marked with ash, and heard the Matthew 6 Gospel reading.

Pastor Ray started tonight's message by reading a Jan Richardson poem that highlighted what the service was all about tonight. I will include it as the last part of this post.

This service evoked that gentleness I first mentioned, together with memories of past Ash Wednesday services and the world we share with others. This year, on Valentine's Day, there were remembrances of last year's Parkland shooting and grieving. The tragedy not only fell on Valentine's Day last year but fell on Ash Wednesday as well.

In 2003 the Invasion of Iraq happened just before a Wednesday evening Lent service. I remember Pastor Dayle falling prostrate before the cross that evening, praying and calling out "Lord forgive us, we are doing this again.". My heart was both sank and simultaneously recognized this congregation shared some part of me that I could not express in words. It was a moment of shared history. We all sang Kelly Carlisle's Kyrie that night which reduced many of us to tears with our thoughts on the invasion.

Back to past Ash Wednesdays specifically, in Victoria and South Australia on February 16, 1983; faulty powerlines, arson, and negligence after years of extreme drought caused what came to be called the Ash Wednesday bushfires. These were Australia's worst fire days in a century. In Victoria 47 people died and there were 28 deaths in South Australia.

And on that Ash Wednesday, like every other, we remember and intone, "We are dust and to dust we shall return".

When I was young Ash Wednesdays were scarier. This ancient holy day's service took the form of a mysterious, somewhat morbid service. So much was really hard to understand. Going to church in the middle of the week was outside of my family's Sunday worship routine. For me, that made this worship weird. The vague call that begins the journey of Lent, from penance to penitence to repentance puzzled me. The ash "imposed" on my forehead seemed creepy. This particular way of physically remembering mortality in my mind was merely a passive submission to the death all of us face. I much preferred the Dylan Thomas' defiant admonition, "Do not go gentle into that good night... Rage, rage against the dying of the light". 

For years the Matthew 6 Gospel reading, which is the go to reading for Ash Wednesday services, was also confusing. Why would wearing ash on your forehead (which obviously would be seen by others) not be hypocritical yet "looking dismal" while fasting was both hypocritical and wrong?

Over the years Ash Wednesday and Matthew 6 Gospel became more meaningful. First, I learned that the word hypocrite comes from the Greek word hypokrites, which means “an actor” or “a stage player.” The Greek word is a compound noun from two Greek words that literally translate as “an interpreter from underneath". Actors in ancient Greek theater wore large masks to mark which character they were playing, and so they interpreted the story from underneath their masks.

When thinking of a hypocrite as one who wears a mask, the Gospel's message becomes more evident. The mark of the cross on our forehead is not meant to be a public "mask", merely worn to draw attention to our own individual righteousness. This public mask is the "dismal face" Jesus warned us against showing in the Gospel reading.

Instead this Wednesday ash is intended to be a humble admission of what we all share as followers and members of the body of Christ; past, present and future. It is not about us as individuals or the unique identities we adopt and live out in the world. Rather than a mask, the ash on our foreheads is the mark of our baptism. The cross on our forehead is not a mask but makes visible whose we truly are.

Pastor Ray remarked that Ash Wednesday and Easter stand as the beginning and ending bookmarks for the journey of Lent. Easter is the final word to all our struggles of penance, penitence, repentance that death is not what the Holy One intends for us. To quote the poem we look forward to "...what God can do / within the dust, / within the dirt, within the stuff  / of which the world / is made"

Blessing the Dust 
For Ash Wednesday.

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.