Ash Wednesday: How Will You Use Your Short Span of Days?

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Ash Wednesday

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector 

It’s easy in our fast-paced, information-saturated, consumer-driven culture of getting and spending to just get swept along from one thing to the next, to lurch from one crisis to the next, to limp from one tweet to the next. There’s a powerful momentum to our contemporary life that mitigates against self-reflection, the inward turn, the sacred pause of being present to the presence, and the risk is that we just skate across the surface of our lives without pausing to ask why we’re here, what the purpose of the short span of days we have allotted to us might be, what it means to be a truly human human being. 

Our readings for today are filled with admittedly rather stark reminders of the fleeting nature of existence. Moths and rust. Dust. Withered grasses. Faded flowers the wind blows away leaving not a single trace. The sign of the cross made on our foreheads is made of ground up ashes from the very same palm leaves we waved in procession last Palm Sunday. A congregation’s worth of once green fronds that danced to a chorus of Hosannas reduced to a humble bowlful of cinders. In a culture obsessed with health and youth, in a culture that denies the reality of death and desperately seeks to hide it away from consciousness, this acknowledgement of the fact of our contingency, this acknowledgment of the fact of our fleetingness, is a radically countercultural. It’s all going away our liturgy says. How will you spend the moments you have left? 

Ash Wednesday is one of those precious opportunities to stop, to pause, to take stock, to ask ourselves whether we are conducting our lives is in accord with the calling to be the unique, unrepeatable human being God has created us to be. We misunderstand Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent if we think of it as a grim time. As funny as the Church quip is, “Have a miserable Lent!” rather misses the thrust of what’s being pointed to. We hear language like lamenting our sins, acknowledging our wretchedness, and obtaining forgiveness and it’s quite easy to think that Lent is a time when we are to spend our time castigating ourselves, whipping ourselves into a frenzy of self-blame, and hating ourselves in the name of loving God. Lent in this picture is journey from where peace, joy, contentment aren’t to where they are. We are separate from God and if we just make ourselves miserable enough, tell ourselves we are wretched enough times, God will deign to forgive us and we’ll finally be happy. 

Now the only problem with that picture is that it isn’t true, and that it’s based on the false assumption that God is absent. Yes, Lent is certainly a journey, but it’s a journey to where we already are, to the ground of being, to the love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. There is nowhere to go on this journey and nothing to do, except disabuse ourselves of the notion that there’s somewhere to go and something to do. 

That’s not entirely true. There is something to “do” if you want to use those terms. We have to let ourselves be loved, to accept our acceptance, to “learn to bear the beams of love,” as William Blake writes. We have to make the effort to drop all our efforts so that in the stillness, the silence, and the deep rest of stopping and letting be, we can discover out that only our belovedness is real. It’s not that we don’t become kinder, gentler, or more faithful, but that this is not the result of our work, but God’s work in us. Those fruits appear of their own accord in God’s own time, not according to our mercilessly scheduled Program for Holiness Timeline where we’re suddenly saints (and ten pounds lighter) by Easter. 

So does that mean we just throw out all those nasty bits of the tradition—sin, wretchedness, lamentation? Of course not. But we understand them in a decidedly new way. Sin is simply what happens when we look for the happiness for which we are made in some place other than through union and communion with God. Part of the human condition is to think that the completeness for which we yearn, the rest for our restless hearts will be found “out there” in a better job, better health, a better house, a better relationship, a better church, a better government. And as long as we are under that false impression all we will know is some measure of dust which the wind blows away. Sin is nothing more than looking in the wrong place for the wholeness and completeness for which we are made. Sin is just missing the mark— hamartia—thinking that joy and peace are to be found in what is fleeting instead of in what is eternal and unchanging. God. 

And what of wretchedness? Wretchedness is a hyperbolic way of pointing out that becoming beautiful, becoming love for others, isn’t something we do under our own steam. It’s a way of pointing to the source of our beauty—Christ the Beautiful One who makes us beautiful. The spiritual life is not a treadmill of endless, exhausting, self-improvement but a wholehearted surrender to the beauty, goodness, and truth of God who fashions palms from ashes, draws new life out of the dead end of self-effort, and makes a way out of no way. Can we let ourselves be loved? Can we accept our acceptance? Can we let ourselves be made beautiful by the Beautiful One who loves us just as we are? 

Ash Wednesday is really a call to see, to experience in our bones, the error of looking “out there” for the happiness for which we are made. It’s a call to come home, a call to return to the place we’ve never left and live from that boundless ground of love—unearned, unmerited, undeserved. And when we do make that journey to where we already are and discover that it’s not God who is absent, but we who have been lost in the outward search for the one who has always already made His home in us, it’s natural that we might find lamentation rising up within us. Or perhaps it’s more like a Three Stooges forehead slap, or a Homer Simpson, “Doh!” Perhaps it’s a rueful knowing chuckle at having looked high and low for the pair of glasses that were perched on our forehead all along. “How late have I loved thee!” as Augustine exclaimed after his own exhaustive outward search.

Which brings us to fasting. There are certainly folks who give up things for Lent— chocolate, booze, television, social media. All good things if you ask me. But why do we fast? This is what drives Isiah so crazy—the fast has become an end in itself, something that exists separate from the rest of the people’s lives so that they can fast and not pay their workers’ wages, they fast and still quarrel, they fast and hide themselves away from their kin rather than engage in the practice of forgiveness and reconciliation. The purpose of fasting is really to make a little space in our lives for God to get at us. Fasting is learning to become that open, receptive place where God can act in and through us. Sometimes fasting includes food, but it can also include fasting from the distractions that pull away from the sacrament of the present moment which is the only place God ever is. It might include fasting from gossip, fasting from overwork, noticing naming and fasting from the crippling stories about self, other, and God that bang around in our heads and in our hearts 24 hours a day. 

So as we enter into Lent, please remember that this is not to be a grim affair. It’s deadly serious, yes, but it doesn’t have to be grim. Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent are really about reminding us where true happiness is to be found and developing holy habits to help us dwell with the Beautiful One whose deepest desire is to pour Himself out on us. That’s what daily prayer, dwelling on God’s word as revealed in Holy Scripture, weekly worship in community, and serving others is meant to facilitate in us. A deep, total, reckless surrender to God that we might be places where God happens, that we might be rebuilders, repairers, restorers, that His Kingdom might come. Moths. Rust. Dust and faded flowers. It’s all going away. Where will you turn? How will you spend the moments you have left? Ponder that in your heart these forty days and let your life be the answer.