As a child, my brother and I each had one set of Sunday clothes.  These clothes were worn only on Sunday (and maybe for school pictures).  Into the closet they went after church, until it was time to go to church again.  The point was to have nice clean clothes in order to look our very best.  Tonight, we do exactly the opposite.  We try and get dirty with the imposition of Ashes.

 

As Pastor Lee Koontz writes,

 

“In Scripture, ashes are a sign of repentance and humility.  The sinful Ninevites responded to Jonah’s call to repent by putting on sackcloth and sitting in ashes.  And some people become self-conscious about a little mark on their forehead!  Can you imagine what you would look like after sitting in ashes?

 

Scripture also tells us that Job, after having endured his trials and tribulations, repents before God with dust and ashes.  And that’s nothing compared to Jeremiah, who calls for Israel’s repentance by putting on sackcloth and rolling in ashes.  Finally, Jesus reproached certain cities for their lack of repentance, and their unwillingness to put on ashes and turn to God.  Since the days of the early church, Christians have adopted this practice as a mark of penitence.”

 

Ashes are burned.  They are spent.  They are black and grey, charred and useless.

 

Ashes are universal; all things, when put into a fire with enough heat, will turn to ashes.

Ashes remind us that all things in our world are temporary (including us).

 

Next to taxes, it’s sais that the only certainty in life is that we will all, one day, become ashes…

 

Dust…

 

Our lives will be spent.

 

In the Book of Genesis, God tells Adam, “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.”  There is no mixed message there. 

 

All human beings are given life, but in the same moment that we take our first breath, we move closer to our last.

 

“Remember….you are dust.  And to dust you will return.”

 

That’s humbling news, isn’t it?

 

In tonight’s Gospel (Matthew 6), Jesus is not condemning the use of ashes.  He condemns using them to conceal our true selves.  Like the Sunday suit did not represent what we wore the other six days of the week, so the ashes of a repentant life did not represent what was going on the rest of the time.

Everyone tries to hide something.

 

There is a deep-seeded fear in us that we cannot let our true selves be known.  Our culture and our society drives us to hide our weaknesses and conceal our faults.

 

Ash Wednesday invites us to show our dirty side.  To hang up our Sunday suit and let the world see who we are.

 

You might ask “well….what good does that do for me?”

 

Remember the hymn we sang Sunday? “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, since I laid my burden down?”

 

It is a burden to carry the faults, the shortcomings, the sinful selves around when they can be laid down.  God already knows these things and loves us despite it all.

 

Lent invites us to let our dirt be seen.

 

In this letting go of pride comes the realization of our own mortality.

 

I like “The Simpsons” because they are the only family on TV that regularly attends church.

 

There’s an episode in which Homer is told by his doctor that he only has a few days to live.  When faced with the reality of his life, and who he really is on the inside, Homer transforms into the Father of the Year!  Don’t worry.  It turns out to all be a mistaken diagnosis, and Homer and the Simpsons revert back to being a dysfunctional family again.  But for that brief period, Homer has nothing to conceal, or hide.  The truth humbles him.  The truth sets him free.

 

Live like your days are numbered.

 

Live like your days are in God’s hands.  What would it look like to take off our Sunday clothes and wear our house slippers (speaking metaphorically of course)?  To get in the dirt of being real to not pretend and not have to hide.

 

Would we be more kind, more forgiving?

 

Would we treat people differently?

 

Would you say “I’m sorry” to the people you’ve hurt?

 

Would you be more mindful of suffering in the world?

 

Would you want to share a little bit more of what you have with those who have nothing?

 

What would you do?

 

How would you live?

 

What kind of things would be on your list?

 

Again, from Pastor Koontz,

 

“Death, sinfulness, repentance…these are the things that these ashes symbolize for us…that we are dust, and to dust we will return.  Life is fleeting.  Time is short.  And the ashes remind us that we are fallen, and we can’t get up on our own.  We need God’s help.  We need God’s forgiveness and God’s grace.  We need God’s love.”

 

And that, brothers and sisters, is the hope that is smeared in ash on our foreheads, that God’s love has reached through our sinfulness, through the grim shadow of death, to the dust and the ashes of human life.  We may be dust, but dust that we are, we are loved.