Ash Wednesday – February 18, 2015

Norridgewock Congregational Church

Ash Wednesday…What’s It All About?

1.     Ash Wednesday…What’s it all about?  Why this special day?…Why at the beginning of Lent?...What part does it play in my faith in Jesus…my experience of my spiritual life?

My own experiences with Ash Wednesday have been very interesting, especially for one who comes from a Presbyterian/Baptist/non liturgical tradition. 

Growing up in Philadelphia I was always intrigued by my Catholic friends showing up on the playground with a black smudge on their foreheads.  “It’s Ash Wednesday, they would say, as if that was enough explanation.”

I don’t believe I had much more exposure to the day until I began working at Seton and Thayer with Father Ned Hogan.  “Ash Wednesday, he told me, we will have to have ashes for the staff and any patients who want to be blessed.”

So at this point I started making associations with the day and practice of receiving the ashes on your forehead.

It was the beginning of lent…looking ahead to Easter.

The ashes were the blessed burned palms from the previous Easter…

And receiving the ashes was something that many people of faith really looked forward to…I found that out when we no longer had a priest as chaplain and people were really upset when we didn’t provide ashes.

I soon found ways to make them available to them.

2.     This experience made me look deeper at the meaning of Ash Wednesday and the mark of the ashes on a forehead.

This is where my Calvinist/Baptist heritage kicked in.

I had to find the deeper meaning of the external symbol.

I could see it in people’s faces…not just the black cross on their temple but something deeper, something in their eyes as they received the ashes and the blessing and as they shared what it meant to be able to receive this blessing and then go about their work day.

3. This is What I Discovered:

First it was a connection with their faith…it was an outward and visible sign of their inner commitment to their faith.

That connected with me…the Baptist.  We are all about outward and visible signs…that represent deep inner conviction.  The Bible we carry…The Church Community we Worship in…The initiation rite of Baptism…The freedom to worship true to conscience as God leads us to worship.

Faith isn’t just about what we say and proclaim…it is about what we do. 

Three of the great and familiar readings for today reflect this concept of faith…The prophet Joel exhorts his people in their time of fasting and prayer…”to rend their hearts and not just their garments”…The prophet Isaiah asks his people to dig deep in their religious observance…Is not this the fasting I have chosen…God tells his people…”to lose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke”…

Jesus words to his disciples about the meaning of real piety also reflect that worship and spirituality is a thing of the heart not something we do for show.

“When you do your acts of righteousness, don’t do them to be seen.”

“When you give to the needy don’t announce it with trumpets.”

“When you pray don’t be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen.”

We are called to make our faith real in quiet actions of love and service.

Ash Wednesday represents something we do that does have a real connection with our faith.

Second  I learned as I watched those who participate in Ash Wednesday experience was…that…it was  something that connected them with others who shared this faith, even though they might not all express their faith in the same way.

There was lot of good friendly connection going on as people gathered to receive the ashes.

It was something that brought people together…around a powerful symbol.

The symbol was the symbol of the ashes…

Ashes are an ancient symbol of sadness and mourning.  In Old Testament times those who mourned put on sack clothes and dusted themselves with ashes to reflect the pain of loss in their lives. 

They sat in sadness and they shared their sadness with others and others came and ministered to them in their grief and need.

For hospital people/for all people that is a really important reminder.  We are a generation of people who have lost the deep need for mourning and grief…we have important work to do…no time for expressing feelings…there is just too much pain around us to allow us the time to mourn or be sad…

Yet one of God’s great gifts to us is the gift of grief and the healing an open expression of grief…not just for the death of one we love but our grief over our  sin and separation in life from self, others, and God…

Our Jewish ancestors practiced what the ashes of Ash Wednesday represent…The Psalms are filled with lament…and honest sharing of our pain…with the expectation that God hears our pain and cares for us…and heals us and helps us and forgives us.

David’s psalm of lament…Psalm 51…reminds us that…the sacrifice God wants is a broken spirit…broken open and available for healing…”A broken and a contrite heart O God you will not despise.”

Third, receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday,  was a very powerful reminder to the people I worked with of something really important for those who work with the sick.  It was a reminder that while we may mourn the pain and suffering of those we serve…we also on many occasions …when we have made a commitment of ourselves to the health and healing of others…we experience the great gift of blessing and healing and renewal that send people home well and whole and able to continue their lives.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday lead us into the journey of lent.

In Lent we walk with Jesus…into the pain of the cross…but then we also walk with him out onto the other side of that pain into the light of the resurrection and the new life Jesus offers us all.

This is the great paradox of our faith.  We are people who gladly accept the ashes of pain…and enter the dark places of suffering…because we know that doing so opens up to us the incredible opportunity to learn new and wonderful ways that God uses all of our experience to bring us closer to Him.

People who struggle with addiction often surprise us when they tell us…I am Bill…I am an alcoholic.  We want them to get over their addiction and just be Bill.  But what Bill has learned is that he is only free when he is honest about his addiction.

We are only really free when we face the darkness in ourselves and the world we live in and bring to it the light of Christ.

“Therefore Paul says…if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old has gone the new has come.”

We are made new…born again…by accepting the ashes of pain and loss and suffering and fear and anxious worry and then putting our hand in the hand of the man from Galilee who walks with us through our difficulty out into the light of God’s new day!

4.I hope that for each of us here tonight…we will find our own experience of this ash Wednesday as a time to:

Renew our faith in the God who walks with us in both light and darkness…

To recommit ourselves to making our faith real as the Gospel reading reminds us…not an outward display but a deep inner commitment to God  and to His Son Jesus.

And finally to continuing to find for ourselves those places, those communities where we can join with others to experience the love of God in a fellowship of others who struggle just as we do.

May this be a day of blessing for us all.

Prayer:

Dear God we thank you that you have called us together tonight.  You always shine your light on the dark places in our lives…but you don’t ever just leave us there alone…standing…waiting…You come to us powerfully offering us the gifts of your Holy Spirit…gifts of health and healing and grace and mercy and peace.  We thank you for these gifts and we ask that we will become powerful witnesses to others of your loving and healing ways…In Jesus name…Amen.