February 21, 2007
(Ash Wednesday)

Tension in the Rite; Tension in the Text

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

Joel 2:1-2,12-17  •  Psalm 103 or 103:8-14  •  2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10  •  Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
(From The Lectionary Page)

There is a decidedly nervous tension between the principle sacramental action of today’s liturgy –- the imposition of ashes -- and the scripture readings appointed for the Fast. They appear to be so obviously at odds with one another. The texts for Ash Wednesday--and it's the same set every year, so the tension has an annual rhythm I can't escape--talk about approaching God in prayer with an inward, private and spiritual posture, not with outward, public and visible signs of piety.

The piece from Joel, for example, quite clearly states that when you return weeping to the Lord, you do so with fasting and with mourning--that part's okay--but you're meant to rend the heart, not the garments. Likewise, says Matthew: "Beware of practicing your piety in public in order to be seen... But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen in public but by your Father who is in secret."

And having read that admonition, we then move to the rail, where our heads are not anointed, and our faces are not washed, but our foreheads are disfigured with the sooty tailings of last year's palm fronds. How can this possibly make sense? Aren't we in fact at serious risk for indulging the very false piety that's just been indicted? Aren't we actually promoting the very religious hypocrisy that the scriptures warn against? So a word or two about the tension.

First off, there's nothing in Anglican Lenten tradition--there's nothing in anybody's tradition, for that matter--which says that you have to move about in the world with the ashy sign of your Savior on display. Wherever the rest of your day may take you, when you get there, feel free to wash your face, anoint your head, and say your prayers in private.

The Cross of Ashes is neither a sign to the world of your faithfulness, nor a marketing tool for evangelism. Neither is it a sign of your sin and your fallen-ness; Lent is not an invitation to be slain in your pride by a legislator God whose edicts have been violated. The God of Ash Wednesday is also the God of Easter Day. He is not an offended majesty; and Lent is not about self-subjugation.

What the ashes are about however is primitive stuff, fundamental, unadorned reality. They're earthy stuff, and gritty. To receive them is to be reminded of the fundamental stuff of being human. They are a sign of being merely who you are.

And Lent, it seems to me, is an invitation to live more fully into that fundamental humanity. Lent is the period of time set aside by the Church for re-discovering that which we already possess--the image of God reflected in our most authentic selves. We’re not called to be extra good or more reverent. We’re called just to be more human. And to recognize that humanity in others as well.

A story to illustrate my point. I ran across this, written by an Episcopal priest from Kentucky, in a recent issue of the Christian Century, under the title The Stranger in the Aisle:

On Ash Wednesday one year, my wife was delayed in getting to church. The imposition of ashes had been done. I was waiting in a back pew when she arrived. As if we had planned it, she turned to me, and I took the ashes from my forehead and made the sign of the cross on hers, saying, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

In that moment I saw my wife in a way I cannot describe, except to say it was a deeper kind of recognition, a discovery, a knowing beyond my experience of her through all the years of our life together.

If that were a sermon in search of a text, that would be it. Or better, if we could select a set of Propers for today that better connect with the ashes imposed, I think it would be Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed man of the dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

I have this image of God kneeling on the ground; scooping a small pile of dirt into his hands, maybe spitting on it to give it some shape, molding it; and then blowing on the little clay figure to give...Adam. And that’s a curious word which bears some attention. Adam is a pun on the Hebrew word ha-adama, which means “earth creature,” “a thing of the dirt.” It is, by the way, only later that God creates from ha-adama male (ish, in the Hebrew) and female (isha). So, in the beginning we all start out the same.  Even before gender and sexuality, we are made of the same, uniform stuff. And that is what the ashes are meant to recall. The ashes are meant to remind us that when our gaze falls on another we can recognize our common humanity as “a thing of the dirt.”

Recognizing people for who they really are can be a tricky business. After the resurrection, Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for the gardener. The travelers on the Emmaus Road didn’t recognize him until he had come into supper and broken their bread. The disciples, fishing in the early light of Easter, couldn’t identify the man on the beach until Peter said, “It is the Lord.” And that Kentucky priest in the Christian Century -- for all his years of marriage -- didn’t fully or deeply recognize his own wife until he’d moved the ashes from his forehead to hers.

I have one of those stories too about failing to recognize, one of those stories from adolescence that we carry through life and which, decades later, continues to occasion embarrassment and shame in memory. We’ve all got them.

Once, in high school, in the hallway between classes -- and in a fairly loud, offended voice -- I gave what-for to a classmate who was trying to move in on my then girl friend. When I had delivered myself of the Summary Statement for the Prosecution, I stalked off in a self-righteous huff, leaving my adversary standing alone and speechless. No wonder. Wrong boy.

There are, after all, only so many faces to be shared among 6 billion people. So the mistake was honest. But what if we could see others without that lens of obscuring vision, the lens that distorts not only their likeness to God, but ours as well! We live now in a time when a new kind of recognition of common humanity is not only theologically correct, but politically urgent. We are all connected because we are all of the same stuff. We are, said Teilhard de Chardin, “dust contemplating itself,” -- out-croppings of earth destined by God to become immortal spirit.

How differently we might treat each other if we could always recognize every person in that way. How humbling to be aware of our common origin in ha-adama and our dependence on God for life. And how outrageously wonderful to see that God can do such things with a little dust -- that he can and did and does and will.

So remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Cherish the ashes imposed because they are a mark of all that makes us one with our world and our fellow “earth things.”