Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Sermon audio from  Linda+

[SERMON TEXT]

I don’t remember the imposition of ashes at the church where I grew up. If they did it, it was not something my family participated in. But I suspect that our parish was simply very liturgically low church and didn’t find the ashes necessary to the beginning of Lenten observance. And indeed the ashes are optional; as it says in the rubrics, “If ashes are to be imposed…”

So my first experience with ashes was not until college, and it was deeply meaningful. For those whose Lenten discipline has traditionally begun with that now familiar gritty pressure of ash on their forehead; with feeling the solemn solidarity with others who mirror that mark of the cross through the day as a reminder that we share the mortality and need for repentance that the ashes represent—for those of us whose embodied nature needs that visceral evidence of the annual journey on which we embark, the lack of ashes this year is just one more loss in this seemingly endless season of losses.

We are coming up on a year since we entered this COVID wilderness, and while thanks to the vaccine we can see the border and the EXIT sign above the gate, we are still here in this slog for the time being. But while we face, yes, a second Lenten season marked by COVID, this one may feel different from last. Last year there was a feeling of panic, urgency and fear of what we didn’t know. This year, we’re tired. We’re sad. We’re done with it.

And to top it off, we have no in-person worship and no ashes on Ash Wednesday. The fasting from the ashes is a sign of where we are now.  The empty space on our foreheads paradoxically reminds us more than ever that this year we feel more fragile, flawed, mortal, and in need of grace than we have in a long time. As Bishop Knisely said a few days ago, this may just be the Lentiest Lent ever Lented.

We are where we need to be, but that’s not necessarily comforting. How will we make meaning from this empty space on our foreheads?

Perhaps, as we let it symbolize the gaps and the losses of the past year, we can begin to understand that our identity as creatures of God lies in how we let go–how we negotiate the emptied spaces of our lives—learning that, instead of rushing to fill them, we may do better to sit with them long enough to let them teach us. After all, that’s the meaning of a discipline. We can let this Wilderness teach us this Lent, through the spiritual practices of self-denial, prayer, scripture reading, and repentance. And as we deepen our practice each day during this season we can begin to peel away layer after layer of ego, control, self-delusion and fear that have strangely and falsely comforted us, but have actually shielded us from our empty spaces—our vulnerability and nakedness before God. And in this place of vulnerability and nakedness we will find our true identity as both finitely mortal and infinitely precious—as creatures of God, loved into being from the dust of Creation itself.

The journey on which we embark this Lent is not an easy one, and it isn’t supposed to be. It is humbling and often lonely because each of us has different kinds of empty space that confront us–different ways in which we have been wounded and have wounded others as well. But as we do the holy work of a holy Lent—individually and in community—we will discover that we share a basic bond of our common humanity, which is that to be human is to know loss.

But it is also to know love. We are not alone in the journey.

We are called to the holy work of a holy Lent. It will not be perfect—the point of “doing Lent” is not to succeed at it, but to persevere faithfully—to let the empty spaces teach us what they will.

And as we do this we may just discover that the ashes that we have missed on our foreheads this day have actually sustained us as the very ground beneath our feet as we walk the Way of the Cross with Jesus. Let us make a beginning together. Amen.