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.
