Ash Wednesday Homily

Today is a day that the church sets aside and encourages us to remember our sinfulness and to remember that we are frail, fragile creatures. We take time to remember our own sinfulness and our absolute dependence on God. The ashes which we will use later in this service remind us even more so of this sinful nature. The ash which we use is palm ash. And this is not just the ash of any palm, it is the ash of the palms from Palm Sunday. From the day that we celebrated Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The palms which were once waved with shouts of Hosanna have been burned and have become the ash which we now use as a sign of our own penitence. How quickly our praise of God fades and is replaced with sinful, self-serving thoughts, words, and deeds. This past year has given us more chances than we care for to remember how fragile our bodies are and just how fleeting this life can be. What’s more, our bodies will not last forever.

Yet in the midst of this remembrance of our frailty, we retrace an enduring mark. As a part of the order for baptism the pastor traces the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized and says, “Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Today, I will trace the sign of the cross in the very same place, but this time, with ashes and with the words, “Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Today we begin our journey toward Easter. The church calls this journey Lent. We enter this season, immersed in a culture that runs from recognizing its own neediness, its inability to be self-sufficient,----- its mortality. We try to hide from the fact that we need God and that we need each other. We long for security, for safety from terrorism and violence, to love and to be loved.

We live in a world of broken relationships, where families fight, friends fall away, and where for some, loneliness is the only companion. The newspapers are filled with news of lives lost in Iraq, violence in the Holy Land, and stories of violence in our own back yards. Our world is more shattered and broken than we would like to admit. We are no longer able to hide our heads in the sand and hope that danger will pass us by. We have death as our daily companion.

It's into that neediness that we hear the call of Lent, the call to return to the Lord our God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. We hear the call from the Holy One who entered our human longings and limitations, who lived them all the way to the cross, and beyond it to the resurrection to new life. We hear that call as ones baptized into that cross, a cross that is the deep sign of mortality not only marked on our foreheads but etched on our hearts. The cross marked on your forehead will have faded by morning, but the mark of God on your life endures forever.

And so: we will walk out of this place wearing on our foreheads a sign of our fragility and our brokenness. And yet, we leave with something more than that. We leave with an enduring promise: the promise that God stands ready to hear our prayers and forgive the sin of all who turn to Him. Thanks be to God. Amen.