Ash is on our windowsills, our furniture, our walls. It’s embedded in our insulation and floats in the air that we breathe. And oh, outdoors! --the piles of it that still line the sidewalks and gutters and linger in porch corners! Not to mention the entire charred neighborhoods of ash. Our local ashes look just like the burned palms that we bless today—fine and gray, soft to the touch, delicate. But they’re not really the same, are they? They say that the ash that fills our community is toxic, not holy. Don’t touch it, they say. It will give you cancer. Don’t breathe it. Don’t scatter it around. This is the ash of burned homes, burned dreams, environmental disaster, and of lives turned inside out.
What we need to remember today, though, is the strange, hard-to-grasp truth that God is in this ash, as well. Today is the beginning of Lent, the forty days in which we enter once again the stories of Jesus’ trials and real suffering that lead up to his crucifixion. In the wilderness, in constant rejection and seeming failure, in reaching out to the lost, the broken, and the lonely, in Gethsemane, at Golgotha, God in Jesus Christ joins us in the toxic ash of life in this world. As Nadia Bolz Weber preached last Sunday at the Cathedral in Denver, “You need no longer climb up to, strive for or achieve holiness - for it is too busy already reaching into the troubled dirt of your humanity.”[1] God is too busy reaching into the toxic ash of our common life and dwelling with us here, raising us, with Christ, into new life, transforming us with love. Today, as we receive ashes on our foreheads, we are free to admit our pain, our imperfection, our sorrow. Poet Jan Richardson writes, today “is the day / we freely say/ we are scorched./ This is the hour/ we are marked/ by what has made it / through the burning.[2]
One of the Covid-safe options for distributing ashes this year is to return to the ancient Jewish practice of sprinkling ash over our heads. That way, I wouldn’t take the risk of spreading any virus by touching foreheads. I thought that might be a good idea, since pouring ash over the head was indeed what Jesus and the prophets would have done to repent of their sins. I thought about it but finally decided to stick with making the cross on our foreheads. We need to continue to receive our ashes in the form of a cross, a cross right in that place of blessing, in that place where we are marked as Christ’s own forever in baptism. With a cross of ash on our foreheads, we can bear the grace of Jesus’ vulnerable, self-giving love in our communities. We can remember, and share, the love of the God who made us, who walks with us through the flames and the ashes, and who lifts us up into new life.
Jesus probably would have stood in front of Moxie today, even if people scorned and reviled him. Like he holds out bread and wine to feed us with his body and blood, he might have scooped up a handful of dirt and ashes at his feet and said, like we will pray at 7 pm today: God created you out of the dust of the earth, and you are God’s people. Let these ashes be a sign that you belong to God, and because God loves you, God has made you forever God’s, on earth and in heaven. Amen.
[1] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Transfiguration sermon found at https://thecorners.substack.com/p/good-for-you-but-what-about-the-rest?s=r
[2] Jan Richardson, “A Blessing for Ash Wednesday,” found at Blessing the Dust - A Blessing for Ash Wednesday (Jan Richardson) (billjohnsononline.com).
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