Blessed Ash Wednesday

For many Christian holidays and observances, we often say Happy this or Merry that! But not so on Ash Wednesday, because Ash Wednesday is about death and mortality and wishing someone a Happy Ash Wednesday feels a bit… off.

One Pastor put it this way, “It’s true – Lent is not meant to be a time of exuberant celebration. It’s a season for quiet introspection – for looking inward to see where we fall short. That’s certainly no fun. Lent is a time for honesty – a time for reality. You know those pictures of yourself that make you wince because “I really don’t look like that, do I?” That’s the soul-picture we get when we take an honest look inward.”

That’s why I have resorted to wishing people a blessed Ash Wednesday because even though I agree we shouldn’t be happy or merry when it comes to the topic of death, we can approach this reality of our lives with a deep sense of blessedness.

Because as paradoxical as it may seem, there is blessedness in honesty about death and sin. As a Lutheran, one of the things I was taught to about Martin Luther is that he spoke of humanity as “rot gut sinners.” That might strike your ear as off putting, and maybe it should, but I also remember when the idea of admitting my sinfulness in that straight up way became a liberating tool in my life of faith. No longer did I have to pretend that I was without sin or that I could successfully avoid it. Instead with an honest confession of sin and a hard look in the mirror, I was invited to experience a truth about myself that set me free. This was true for me when I completed Anti-Racism training and I came away with the ability to honestly reflect on my life and admit that I am a racist for my participation and complicity in a racist system. I no longer had to pretend that I was not racist or never had a moment of internalized racial superiority. I could just finally be honest and actually get to work dismantling systemic racism, rather than living in denial that it exists.

The same is true for death. We might be tempted to believe that death is just something we can deny or successfully avoid by eating the right foods and exercising, but our mortality is the same for everyone. No one gets around it. But on this Ash Wednesday, a day in the church year where we get really real about death, maybe we can discover the blessedness of death that makes life such a fragile miracle.

When we say to one another to “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We are offering an invitation into a honest, blessed life that does not embrace death, rejoice in it, or welcome it, but holds death with a holy reverence and deep ritual. Death in this way does not have to be disregarded, but honestly acknowledged as we hold up the truth that through reality death will we experience the promise of the resurrection. It is with this faithful conviction, that we do not have to fear death.

But fear of death is pervasive in ourselves and in our society. Our cultural way of dealing with this fear is denial. That is part of what makes Ash Wednesday both so offensive and powerful. It offends our sensibilities to be told we will die, that we will return to the dust from which we came, and this offense only comes if we are living in a delusion that being a mortal being is somehow avoidable.

I love the way that Holy Trinity Member and Lutheran School of Theology Professor, Ben Stewart put it in an article for NPR last year. He notes that the scandal of Ash Wednesday isn’t a recent phenomenon when he says. "There were certainly times in the Middle Ages when it was almost like pronouncing a curse or a punishment on people. As if being a mortal creature was like Plan B."

He went on to say that death is not punishment for sin; it is not because of the fall in Eden, and not because of people's own bad choices. Things that are born just die, and they return to dust. And in a strange, paradoxical way, he says, "These words are actually a kind of welcome honesty. That this is Plan A. That we are mortal creatures rightly returning to the earth, and that our culture actually doesn't give us that message often enough." But that’s still a hard message. And so, he says, we ritualize it, in order to face mortality together.

In our death dealing society we might feel familiar with death, but that still doesn’t make it easy to honestly deal with. But maybe that’s how we can understand Ash Wednesday as repairing a breach like it says in Isaiah. We have experienced a dislocation from death and our own mortality, so today Ash Wednesday repairs that breach so we can live honest and blessed lives, free of fear, living even more fully as our reverence for the fragility and preciousness of life is deepened.

Nadia Bolz-Webber paints this image with her words, “If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and us not knowing what the distance is between the two, well then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and then held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet. With these ashes it is as though the water and words from our baptism plus the earth and words from our funerals have come from the future to meet us here today. And in that meeting we are reminded of the promises of God. Promises which outlast our piety, outlast our efforts in self-improvement, outlast our earthly bodies and the limits of time.”

It will never be a happy or merry day when we celebrate Ash Wednesday, but it can be a reverent, blessed day for us when the breach that exists between our baptism and death is repaired, pinched together, where we can meet the reality of our mortality with the promise of resurrection. So I wish you a blessed Ash Wednesday and a holy Lent full of introspection and discovery of God in the wilderness places of your life. And to conclude this sermon, no Grace Place/Holy Trinity Service would be complete without some Jan Richardson, so I leave with you this Blessing for Ash Wednesday that she composed called Rend Your Heart:

To receive this blessing,

all you have to do

is let your heart break.

Let it crack open.

Let it fall apart

so that you can see

its secret chambers,

the hidden spaces

where you have hesitated

to go.

Your entire life

is here, inscribed whole

upon your heart’s walls:

every path taken

or left behind,

every face you turned toward

or turned away,

every word spoken in love

or in rage,

every line of your life

you would prefer to leave

in shadow,

every story that shimmers

with treasures known

and those you have yet

to find.

It could take you days

to wander these rooms.

Forty, at least.

And so let this be

a season for wandering,

for trusting the breaking,

for tracing the rupture

that will return you

to the One who waits,

who watches,

who works within

the rending

to make your heart

whole.

—Jan Richardson