Scattered Ashes, Scattered Lives

 Ash Wednesday

  Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the
  earth: Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our
  mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is
  only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life;
  through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

Isaiah 58:1-12
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Psalm 103

Nothing scatters quite like ashes. You’ve seen them billow out of your fireplace and onto the hearth like fine mist. You’ve seen them mix into the dirt around an old campfire, fine and smooth like silk. You might not know that Lenny Baltra burns, grinds down, and sifts last year’s old Palm Sunday palms to make the ashes that we use today: You should see them fly swiftly away like black talcum powder to coat everything on the counter in the sacristy when we try to transfer them from one jar to another in preparation for this service. And then there are our human ashes. They scatter, too. A colleague tells the story of the time that he tried to bury a parishioner’s ashes in the church memorial garden on a windy day. Most of the ashes never made it into the ground. In the blink of an eye, and before anyone could stop them, they were swept up and away like gray fog, briefly coating the hair and face of the priest and then vanishing into the wind. You just can’t hold on to ashes. If you hold them tight, they smudge and flake away. If you hold them loosely, they sift through your fingers and escape into the world.

Nothing scatters quite like our lives, either. With each breath, seconds flee as smoothly as the sand in the chambers of a timer. Minutes and hours seep through our clenched fists, too, as we jog through each day, rushing from one activity to the next. Years are over in the blink of an eye: babies grown, parents gone, youth slipping away like that cloud of ash into the wind. Our attention is pulled from one thing to the next, from the beeping messages on our phones, to the multiple tasks at work, to the needs of the people around us, to the emails on the computer screen … and as we pour our attention from one rigid container to the next, our lives spill out like fine dust, and the wholeness of our being scatters into the wind. Nothing scatters quite like our lives.

On Ash Wednesday we take our ashes-to-go out into the Kroger parking lot. There, in the land of to-do lists and boring errands, I mark a stranger’s forehead with the sign of an instrument of death. Why does that stranger get tears in his eyes and thank me? Why does he look at me as if I had just handed him a winning lottery ticket? Why do mothers bring their wide-eyed children up to the altar so that I can tell them that their beloved babies will die? Why would a woman with a terminal disease want to come to church on Ash Wednesday to be reminded that her body will soon return to the soil?

We come to receive our ashes with tears of thanksgiving, because we are starving for words of truth, for the outright acknowledgment that our lives are as out of our own control as ashes on a windy day. I can see that hunger for truth in the eyes of every person who holds her head up bravely to meet my gaze. “I dare you to say it,” the eyes gleam.

“I dare you to tell me the truth.” For you see, we are not fools. We know that nothing scatters like ashes, that nothing scatters and breaks like our lives. We long to hear the truth and to give up the exhausting facade that we can hold our ashes and our lives firmly in our own two hands.

          The world won’t tell us the truth. Our media tells us that certain products will make us forever young, that certain supplements will make us thin and beautiful. Our consumer culture tells us what we need to buy and what we need to have in order to be happy. Even our churches don’t always tell us the truth. They might lure us in the doors with fancy words or even with free guns (!). They tell us that if we come every Sunday and make a pledge and serve on enough committees and give up chocolate for Lent that we won’t feel so scattered. But we do.  The truth is that we are human beings—human beings whose well-meaning fasting, almsgiving, and praying can quickly scatter into hypocrisy, like that of the religious men whom Jesus criticizes in our Gospel lesson today. The truth is that, without God’s life-giving Spirit, we are like the dry soil in our gardens, still crumbly and thirsty for the water of Life.

          The good news today is that God comes to us in Jesus Christ. God comes into our churches. God comes over to the Comfy Cow. God comes into the snow-covered Kroger parking lot. God comes to us as a man who knows what it means for his bones to break and his mouth to turn dry like a potsherd. God comes to us as a God who empties himself out in love so that death and emptiness are no longer the last word.

Nothing scatters like ashes and lives. Nothing restores like the Truth of God's Love.

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