Ash Wednesday

A Meditation for Ash Wednesday Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Joel 2:1-2,12-17; Psalm 103; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

The Reverend Canon Tyler B. Doherty

Yesterday’s Palms, Today’s Ashes

            One of the most powerful indicators of the thrust of the Ash Wednesday service comes from the ashes themselves—last year’s Palm Sunday palms are chopped up, burnt, and ground to dust ready to be imposed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” to mark the beginning of our Lenten journey as a community of faith. The very palms we waved in victory celebrating the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem are now worn on our foreheads as a reminder of the fleetingness of all human victories, and the hollowness of all substitute forms of human happiness other than God in Godself. Yesterday’s palms, today’s ashes.

            Our readings for Ash Wednesday are full of unflinching reminders of where to seek and find true and lasting happiness, the peace that passes all understanding, and true freedom. We are reminded of the fleetingness of all the different self-centered ways we try to secure our identity and find happiness—through power, control, accumulating wealth, through pursuing the affection and esteem of others, or making idols of safety and security. None of these victory palms, these vain pursuits of happiness, ultimately satisfy. Of course, there is nothing wrong with any these in measured doses (we all need a measure of safety and security to flourish as individuals, for example) but when invested with what Paul Tillich calls “ultimate concern,” when these pursuits become the altar at which we worship, they disappoint (but only 100% of the time).

In the verses immediately after our selection from Joel, it reads, “Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field; When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.” When we kneel to have the ashes imposed our foreheads, we are acknowledging the ultimate hollowness of these pursuits, and saying that peace and happiness are found not in what is fleeting and ephemeral, but in what is lasting and unchanging—God in Godself. Yesterday’s palms, today’s ashes—“even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart.”

            We sometimes mistakenly think that Lent is about giving up watching Law and Order, skipping dessert, or foregoing that glass of wine with dinner. Of course, there is nothing wrong giving up those things that seem to be taking us away from time spent with God and making more room for prayer, the study of scripture, and acts of mercy. But we miss the point of Ash Wednesday and of the season of Lent if we think of it as a period of grinding misery and punishing self-discipline whose point is to remind us how sinful we are. Lent is really about reorienting ourselves on God—returning again and again to the fountain of life and source of all goodness, truth, and beauty for renewal and replenishment. Lent shows us the confines of the claustrophobic prison we have created for ourselves by pursuing happiness and peace in all the wrong places, and encourages us to step into freedom—the perfect freedom of salvation in Christ. Lent shows us the path to true joy—what it looks like to live unshakably rooted in the love of God no matter what the outward conditions of our life might be.

            In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, he ends his passage with the lines, “having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Paul reminds us that the path of discipleship, the way to put on the mind of Christ, and towards union and communion with God is not about accumulating and acquiring. It’s not about gaining more knowledge, having the right set of beliefs between our ears, or a maintaining a perfect Sunday attendance record. It’s about letting go, releasing, and surrender to God. It is the way of dispossession. The way down, as Fr. Richard Rohr is fond of saying, is the way up. The funny thing about any possession is that if we invest it with “ultimate concern” it will actually rust us out from the inside. Our possessions end up possessing us and in the process we are eaten away by moths. Our carefully laid plans and strategies, pursued with such single-minded fervor and sure-footed purpose, end up like an old garment full of holes. We trade our birthright—union and communion with God—for what fades away. Yesterday’s palms, today’s ashes.

            In Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, we hear a powerful echo of the ephemeral nature of all human forms of substitute happiness. He writes,

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. (3: 7-9)

Whatever gains we might accrue, Paul says, are ultimately to be counted as loss, as rubbish (the Greek is actually closer to something I can’t say from the pulpit!), when compared to knowing Christ Jesus as Lord. Paul knows that it is only in walking the way of releasing, giving oneself away, and surrender that we know the unsurpassable treasure in heaven that no one can take from us and that will never fade away. Money comes and goes. Empires get relegated to the dustbin of history. Health is fragile. Good looks fade. Relationships dissolve. And our carefully cultivated reputation changes more quickly than the weather. Ash Wednesday is a call to us to ponder deeply in our hearts what victory palms of our own making need to be recognized as the ashes they truly are. What are we holding on to that prevents us from living from and into the ultimate freedom of life in Christ?

            This coming Lent we might think of ourselves imposing ashes on those things in our lives that block us from full participation in what Paul calls the “day of salvation.” Where in our lives have we over-invested what is fleeting with “ultimate concern?” Do we have the trust, faith, and courage to see through these idols and let them crumble to dust? Notice that for Paul salvation is not figured as a far-off place in the distant future, but the fruit, experienced here and now in this very life, of surrendering fully, completely, and joyfully to God. Now is the day of salvation. When we finally recognize as ashes what we previously took to be victory palms the result is not misery or dejection, but a newfound freedom—the freedom born of living our lives from the only place that makes us fully and joyfully alive—God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

            This Lenten season, the only thing we have to lose are those habits of the heart that keep us chained in painful, isolating self-enclosure. Are we willing to see yesterday’s palms as today’s ashes and step into this bracing freedom? Today, not tomorrow, not next week, not ten years from now, is the day of salvation… Now is the acceptable time.  Will we heed the call?