February 17, 2010
Ash Wednesday
- Ruth Moore
Ash Wednesday has historically been a fast day for Christians, as well as a day of mourning for our sin and the sin of all humanity before God. It has also been a time to recognize our own mortality except for the grace of God, and a time to request that the Lord remember us and breathe new life into our burned out, dusty lives once more.
Ash Wednesday is a solemn day. It is a time to repent of our sins, to intercede on behalf of a sinful world, and to seek God’s face in the renewal of our lives and of this world. I have been a part of Ash Wednesday services where there is an extensive time to examine your sins. Here are the categories of some of the sins we examined – sins against our relationship with God, sins against our relationships with each other, and sins against our relationships with those outside the church. And here is a list of personal sins – pride, distrust, disobedience, vanity, arrogance, resentment, rebellion and envy. All of these sins separate us from God and do not put God at the center and objective of our life.
I had no idea there were so many ways to sins! I really don’t like sermons that point out how horrible we are as human beings – I feel like they are lectures and that a parent is up here in the pulpit pointing his/her finger at me and telling me how sinful I am and how I fall short. And of course I do fall short – but I have no problem knowing that – trust me! But a deeper look at sin might help us as we prepare for the season of Lent.
To begin with we need to be honest and admit that our culture reveals two mistakes that get in the way of our understanding of sin. The first is that we delight in the deliciousness of other people’s sins. And when we focus on others that conveniently removes the scrutiny that would naturally come from facing up to our own sin. We all know how easy it is to talk about the horribleness of some other person’s behavior when we actually are just as sinful and unclean as they are.
We also look at sin as primarily external in character. It’s the eating of chocolate during Lent, the cursing of a motorist who doesn’t use a turn signal, or the bad habit of having one drink too many. But according to Scripture, sin is much more internal than external in nature. God calls sin the adultery of the heart. Jesus wants us to think more about what comes out of our mouths than what goes into them. If we think in terms of cause and effect, we might say that sin is the cause and sins are the effect. Here’s another way to look at sin. Take computer software and the invisible way it works with the hardware of the computer. Then think of viruses and the insidious way they can instantly destroy a hard drive. It is what is internal that can destroy.
So are you depressed now? Feel like you are really sinful? Feel like you fall short? Well, we all fall short of living our lives the way God created us to live them. We don’t have to sin and we weren’t created to sin, but sin we do. So what can we do about it? Well we can confess, like we did at the beginning of our worship tonight. We can confess like the Psalmist does or the prophet Daniel. I believe that modern day proverb that “confession is good for the soul.” If we don’t repent and change our course; if we don’t ask for forgiveness and go another direction, how can we have renewal in our lives and in our world?
I think of Lent as the time to do this, - to repent and renew ourselves again - which leads me to the story of a little church in Alabama that was known for its beautiful red geraniums. All during the spring and summer the red flowers lined the drive up to the sanctuary from the street. Each fall, a member named Eleanor diligently lifted all of the geraniums from the ground and planted them into pots that filled the church throughout the winter. Eleanor watered and tended the potted geraniums all winter long and she kept them alive until it was time to plant them outside again in the spring. She’d been recycling these geraniums for years until the year she was diagnosed with a very serious and deadly type of cancer. A young family who’d recently joined the church put the geraniums in their pots in the fall, but since they had little children who had colds and ear infections their attendance was spotty at best. The geraniums were watered sporadically by different people, but no one wanted to take over Eleanor’s job because they just didn’t want to accept that she wouldn’t be there to do it again. By the time February rolled around the geraniums weren’t doing very well. The branches were dying and the leaves were dropping just like the hope of the congregation, for Eleanor, like her geraniums, was a symbol of what was happening to the congregation itself. It sometimes felt like it was dying despite the fact that there were new people joining.
On Ash Wednesday, the pastor placed all the dying geraniums on a table and throughout the sermon she pruned away the dead branches and flowers as she talked about how Lent was about preparing for God’s new life – a new life that is coming by pruning away what is dead inside us. She mentioned that ashes of death were used as fertilizer and that repentance of our sins is like pruning our souls for God’s new Easter life. As she finished the sermon, the bare geranium plants looked pitiful and straggly. The service went on with a time of personal examination of individual sins that needed to be pruned away and ended with the imposition of ashes.
As Lent progressed, the pastor carefully tended the geraniums, praying that they would live and blossom again, because she recognized that they were a potent symbol for the congregation and that if they died, so might they. Over the course of Lent, people peeked into the chapel where the geraniums were exposed to strong light in order to see how they were doing each week. They became excited and joyful when they saw new leaves growing and then the clusters of buds coming out. The geraniums started blooming on Tuesday of Holy Week and on Easter morning in the sanctuary red geraniums dotted the sea of Easter lilies with the hope of new life. Though Eleanor did indeed die later that year, God provided new people to plant and take up the geraniums that continued to line the drive into the church, and red geraniums filled the sanctuary at Eleanor’s funeral service later that spring.
Tonight marks the beginning of Lent, a time in the church calendar where we undergo a discipline that helps us become better disciples. Although sometimes people talk about giving something up for Lent, giving something up for Lent is really just pruning dead branches off a plant so that energy can be directed toward new growth. Lent isn’t about dying – even though we use ashes that remind us of our mortality. It’s about discipline so that new life can emerge, which sometimes means dying to what is dead or death-dealing in our lives so that there is room for the vigor of new life. Lent is about laying ourselves naked and bare to God, realizing that we fall short and sin, making changes in our lives and then accepting and receiving mercy and grace – because there is always mercy and grace in the end.
The ashes we will put on your forehead tonight are mixed from last year’s Palm Sunday branches and some olive oil. In the ancient world people used ashes to symbolize their mourning a death and to signify sorrow for their sins. They are an ancient symbol of humility and grief. Olive oil was used to anoint people at death, to help with childbirth, to light lamps and to wash. Notice the double meaning of both the olive oil and the ashes - meanings pertaining to both life and death. Even ashes, which are the residue of death, also contain elements of life in them because ashes are used to make soap and are an ingredient in fertilizer, which promotes new growth.
The ashes will be put on your forehead with the sign of the cross – it is God’s mark of grace upon us so that we might not die even though we are sinners. The cross marks us as God’s own. Through the grace of Christ, we are destined ultimately for renewal and life, not death. Though the words you will hear during the imposition of ashes remind us of our mortality (“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”,) they are uttered simultaneously with the sign of the cross to remind us of our baptism into Christ’s mortal death and life eternal.
Tonight we acknowledge that we sin. Tonight we acknowledge that we are all going to die. But tonight we also acknowledge that we have the season of Lent to examine our lives, to prune away what stops us from being in right relationship with God and with each other. And tonight we acknowledge that mercy and grace exist and that what God wants for us is to live more fully in the abundant life of Christ. May it be so. Amen.
Resources
Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2, Ash Wednesday
www.pcusa.org/theologyandworship/AshWednesday