Todd Bruce
March 5, 2014
Joel 2:1-2,12-17 | Psalm 103
“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart.”
Nowadays, there are relatively few occasions in our lives when we come face to face with our mortality and are forced to look at it, not allowed to turn away. Funerals, perhaps, but strangely, even with a corpse in front of us, or an urn full of ash, we still use euphemisms for death to soften the blow. The Ash Wednesday liturgy does not mince words. The psalm appointed for today, Psalm One Hundred and Three, tells us that “our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field; when the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.” And at the imposition of ashes, we are reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. How small we are, like a speck of dust in the vastness of this universe, our lives so inconsequential in the big scheme of things, the striking of a match that burns hot and bright for a few seconds before disintegrating into smoke and ash. Reflecting thus on our own mortality, we are rightly sobered and somber. As have gone those before us, so we too will go, willingly or not, it is no matter.
But before we fall too deeply into darkness and despair, remember that Ash Wednesday is only the opening sentence of the story, not the final word. Yes, we begin our march towards the tomb today, but the final word is not spoken until the stone is rolled away from the tomb, because it could not possibly contain the love God has for us. No matter how far we go from him by our sin, even unto death, he seeks us out and calls us back to him, and he welcomes our return, not dealing with us according to our sins, but, as the Psalmist says, crowning us “with mercy and loving-kindness.” This is reflected in the wonderful rhythm of the Ash Wednesday liturgy. We confront our sinfulness and acknowledge our need to repent and seek forgiveness, and we come forward for the marking of our bodies with ash as a reminder that the wages of sin is death, that we shall return to the dust from which we were formed. But then we come forward again, and are welcomed at the altar on which God becomes flesh for us, lives and dies for us, and we are redeemed. And that’s when we know that the final word is not death, but love.
Brothers and sisters, we invite you to the observance of a Holy Lent. Return to God with all your heart; be a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God. The true repentance God wishes to see from us is not saying I’m sorry in order to get into heaven, but a reordering of our lives to do the will of God instead of our own will, and a reorientation of our hearts to love God and our neighbor before our own selves. This is true penance, rejecting the sin that separates us from God, and choosing to live instead the way God lives, creating a world in which justice and righteousness reign, in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which the hungry are fed, the sick healed, and the brokenhearted filled with hope and made whole. We invite you to use these days until Easter to draw closer to God who created you out of the dust, and remember that though you may return to it, God will not leave you there forever, but will lift you out of the dust again and again and again. Amen.
