Ash Wednesday

 
For he knoweth whereof we are made : he remembereth that we are but dust.
(Psalm 103, 14)
 
        
Ash Wednesday inaugurates the season in which we are invited to come to our spiritual senses. Our tradition of smearing ashes on our foreheads commences a time in which we remember who and what we are and how God in Jesus Christ responds to it. The ashes of Ash Wednesday remind us whence we came. In one account, from the Second Book of Genesis, we come from clay, the earth, and are thus reminded that we are but dust. The other account is a theological conclusion drawn from the First Book of Genesis indicating that we all are made out of nothing, ex nihilo in the Latin. Our second summary is no more promising than the first. It turns out that we are but dust that has come from nothing. What it means is that before God began to create all things, and man in particular, since he can think about it, mankind didn’t exist. God alone is I Am, forever and eternally Himself. All else was nothing until God commenced the creation.
        
The thought of coming from nothing and being qualitatively no more than dust or ashes is a real challenge. It runs against the grain of our self-worth and self-integrity. We like to think that we have some meaningful substance and that our bodies and souls comprise an entity that is of some worth. But Mother Church would have it otherwise. We begin Lent with the thought of where we came from and that we might never have been, never have existed, but for God’s desire to create and make us.
        
The thought turns us then to God. Why did he make us in the beginning? Nothing forces God to do anything. So, we conclude that it was His desire and love to make and create all things with meaning and substance. As freely as our Heavenly Father wills to think, likewise He wills to put His thinking into a tangible reality other than Himself. We conclude that God loves to express Himself in creativity, the creativity of His creation.
        
Having said this, we do well to remember that while we are reminded of coming from dust and ashes once a year, God remembers or knows it always. This is part and parcel of who we are in the mind of God. And coming from dust and ashes reinforces our tendency to be moved and defined by nothingness. Within our natures, because we are created out of nothing, we have a propensity to move towards it. All men, made out of nothing, sin. Sin is nothing or has no meaning or substance to God. But for us, having contracted Original Sin, we are subject to its pull, the pull towards nothingness in relation to God.
              
Our ashes are made out of the dead and burnt palm fronds from last year’s Palm Sunday. Once they were something beautiful and good. Now they are a stark reminder of death, spiritual death, and our sin as spiritual death to God. The burnt palms, now ash, remind us of our eventual death to this world. They should remind us also of our need for an ongoing spiritual death as we come alive to the reality of our sin, the pull towards nothingness, which might well be rewarded in Hell, a place reserved for those who preferred their own dust and ashes, their own nothingness, to all the potential reserved in God’s will for our lives in Heaven.
              
Claiming, confessing, repenting, finding sorrow, and purposing amendment of life cannot come without the humility that remembers that we are but dust, created out of nothing. We have not made ourselves. We cannot save ourselves. Christians believe that without the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, our destiny will be Hell, a real nothingness in comparison to what we could find in God’s Heaven.
              
Lent is a wakeup call for all Christians. In today’s Epistle the prophet Joel writes,
turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning:
and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God:
for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.
                                                               (Joel, ii, 12, 13)
 
Lent is all about acknowledging that we are but dust and ashes, who have come from nothing, and all too often have returned to it in sin. We are encouraged to be honest with ourselves and from where we came. Weeping and mourning over our sins is an honest and adult approach to God. We are encouraged not to tear up our garments, but to break or tear open our hearts as we come to our Lord. The cause of our serving sin, in dust and ashes, making ourselves into nothing of any spiritual value or worth, comes from our inward man, from the heart, from our free will choosing to serve ourselves rather than God in Jesus Christ. God, for His part, is always the same, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. God knows what the pull of dust and ashes into nothingness has done for us. He welcomes our return always.
              
The importance of Lent as an inward and spiritual exercise is emphasized by Jesus in today’s Gospel. He insists, When ye fast, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast. (St. Matthew vi. 16) Returning to God is not an occasion for public pride and arrogance. Our fasting and abstinence in Lent is between us and God. We are dust and ashes and, thus, not worthy to boast of any good works or pious endeavors. We came from nothing and should be quiet and humble as we undertake a serious and holy Lent. Jesus tells us to anoint our heads. The head is the seat of our knowledge and free will. Our souls must be anointed to do the Lord’s work. We are to wash our faces; the seat of the human personality and character must be cleansed for our Lenten fast. We need not appear unto men to fast. Our Lenten discipline is not for show, not for the stage of human applause and approval. Our fasting needs to be known only to God, for from Him alone can our dust and ashes, our nothingness be made into something beautiful, true, and good. If we do this, God who seeth the soul in secret will reward us openly. (St. Matthew vi. 17, 18)
              
The most common question asked in Lent is what are you giving up? It really is nobody’s business but mine and God’s. Our dust and ashes cannot emerge from the nothingness of sin unless we engage in a serious spiritual work with God and His Grace. We have much to do in Lent. Again, with Joel, we must pray, spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to reproach that the heathen should rule over them. (ibid, 17) The heathen are content to be as dust and ashes enslaved to the nothingness of sin. If we are private and conscientious in our working out of sin and the working in of righteousness, the heathen will have no reason to say, where is now thy God but might actually see that He has been making us into something substantial and meaningful for His Kingdom.
Amen.
©wjsmartin