Ash Wednesday 2024

It's Valentine's Day, so I feel like I should be saying something about love. Or at least something about romance.

But it's also Ash Wednesday. So I feel like I should be saying something about sin.

Do you all have a preference?

Love or sin?

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On the one hand, we love to talk about love. What could be more Christian than talking about love?

True, the kind of love we usually hear preached in chapels and church pulpits probably isnt the same kind of love as the greeting card companies and chocolate manufacturers are thinking about when they try to get us to buy any number of things covered in hearts and roses, but it's probably related, yeah?

This could be a great opportunity to reflect on how Ash Wednesday is kind of a downer and that what we should really be focussing on is love for one another, love for our neighbors, love for the stranger.

I could even tell you how romantic love is a model and icon for God's love for her creation, the way that the self-offering and passionate desire for relationship with us is mirrored in our own love for girlfriends or boyfriends, spouses or partners, or even those unrequited loves that seem to frustrate more than bring joy.

I could talk about all this love and more.

Or, I could talk about sin.

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For generations, Ash Wednesday was used as a kind of stick to whack us over the head: as the beginning of the season of Lent, Ash Wednesday could be a day on which to make us oh so aware of all our sins, all our shortcomings, all those things that we have let come between us and God.

Historically, the Church has been good at telling us everything that it thinks is wrong with us.

On the face of it, Ash Wednesday seems like the perfect day to feel gloomy about ourselves. What else could be meant by putting ashes on our head and come together to, in the old language of the church, "bewail our manifold sins and wickedness".

I don't know about you, but maybe I could do with some bewailing.

But not today.

As strange a juxtaposition as Valentine's day may be with Ash Wednesday, the day on which, of all days, we are told that we are dust, that one day we will die, I cannot think of a better union of sentiments than this.

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Ash Wednesday is the day of the year in which, more than any other, we place ourselves before God's judgment.

But unlike the judgment we face in our everyday lives, this is a judgment without shame. The judgment of Ash Wednesday, the Judgment of the whole season of Lent, the Judgment indeed of God announced in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus which we will celebrate six and a half weeks from today is folded into God's love for us her children; this judgment is nothing more or less than God telling us the truth about ourselves.

And hearing the truth can hurt.

There's a reason we don't like the idea of judgment. There's a reason we don't like the idea of repentence.

But the hurt is not the meaning of the truth.

The meaning of the truth is love.

Love, romantic love, family love, love between friends or love between God and creation: none of this can be without honesty. None of this can be apart from the truth.

The love of God that we contemplate in the forty days of Lent and that we begin today is love that begins in truth.

To be truly known and to be loved for who we truly are. And to be unafraid, to be vulnerable in the face of the beloved.

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"Remember you are but dust, and to dust you shall return."

Lent is the season in which, every year, we turn back towards God, back again towards ourselves as God sees us, back again towards the world as it exists in God's dream for creation.

We turn with our eyes and our hands open, unburdening ourselves of needless things. This is the meaning of repentence.

And we begin that unburdening with these words: "Remember you are but dust, and to dust you shall return."

These words are not joined with punishment, but instead come with a gentle touch on the forehead.

In a gesture that has no analogy in our everyday lives, we allow a kind stranger to touch our faces.

And so the pronouncement of an uncomfortable truth is accompanied by tenderness, accompanied by a reminder that God's judgment is itself enfolded in God's love.

We do not hear the truth in order to suffer. We hear the truth in order to be free.

The ashes we will bear from this chapel are not the marks of a special holiness. They will not get us any praises or social advantage when we go from this place.

Instead, they are tokens for us, which we may still feel for hours into the night, that we will carry into the darkness, of God's love, a reminder of a love that is great enough to tell us the truth and that is so insistent that it wills nothing else than to be the way from that truth into light and life.