Thank you to everyone who came out to feast together on Tuesday and then pray together and receive ashes on Wednesday. It is a poignant opportunity to remember some heavy and beautiful things, and better to do it together than alone. The following is the reflection I shared during our three Ash Wednesday services.

Thanks be to God!

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Ash Wednesday is deeply countercultural.

To take ashes and place them on our forehead is an admission of our mortality – we are dust and to dust we shall return.

We live in a death-denying culture, and so it is refreshing, liberating, even, to admit to our finitude, that we are limited…that all our time, striving, effort and work are not enough on their own. We do not need to carry that weight. What a relief!

Ashes are also an ancient symbol of repentance – an admission that we have sinned.

It is another, but different, counter-cultural confession of our finitude and limitedness.

This confession can also be deeply uncomfortable. It is a strange part of human nature that we so often do not want to admit when we are wrong, when we have done wrong. But it is good and healthy, even to do.

To admit that we are sinful, that we do things that hurt ourselves, that hurt others, that hurt the earth, that hurt God… it is important.

This admission is not a heavy load meant to weigh us down and crush us; it is not a big stick to beat ourselves up with – it is the truth. Everybody, everybody here has done what we should not have done, and not done what we should have done.

There is this idea that God is angry and vengeful, especially in the Old Testament. This is true and untrue, and not what Ash Wednesday is about. There is, both in the New and Old Testaments, an understanding that there are consequences to our actions. Consequences are important, especially to those who are the oppressed and victims of wrong and abuse. But as we heard today from Joel, the point, the most important point, and what Ash Wednesday is about, is that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.

Today, we rend our hearts and not our clothes, so that our shame, our limitations, our sin, may not control and have power over us. We rend our hearts and not our clothes because it is the first step of exposing these dark places of our hearts, our lives and our world, with fear and trembling, to the love and forgiveness of God. Naming that we are finite, that we sin, that we are in need of grace and mercy is the truth that will set us free.  And once free, by the grace of God, transformation is possible – it is from here that we might just be given the strength, the courage to make it right.

As ashes are imposed today, let us feel the weight of them – the weight of our mortality and sin. But also know that the ashes are mixed with oil, and that the sign of the cross on our foreheads echoes the cross made upon our foreheads in baptism, sealing us as Christ’s own forever. Remember this Ash Wednesday that deeper than what is wrong, and there is so much that is wrong, is God’s love, which is deeper still. Amen.