Words on Ash Wednesday
Holy Spirit, giving life to all life, moving all creatures, root of all things, washing them clean, wiping out their mistakes, healing their wounds, you are our true life, luminous, wonderful, awakening the heart from its ancient sleep. Amen (Hildegard von Bingen)
Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: It’s a time for opening our eyes to what we had, perhaps, not seen before. Lent is given to us as season of light-- to help us see what is true. And so We begin this morning – in this dim daybreak. On this Ash Wednesday. Let us dare to see.
Psalm 51 opens with the words, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.”
The liturgy of Ash Wednesday is focused not on the sinfulness of the penitent But on the mercy of God. Yes, this is a day for sinners. The just do not need a savior. The reminder of sinfulness is raised to remind us that this is a day of mercy. . It's difficult to experience the mercy of God. It's hard to feel forgiven. And other Christians don’t help much with this. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Life Together, in the church "we are not allowed to be sinners": He says,
The pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community. We are not allowed to be sinners. Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner were suddenly to turn up among the pious. So we remain alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners.
The poet Joyce Rupp sees with us the pain of hiding our sin, The hiding, even as we long for God.. She writes this “Prayer of One Who Feels Lost”:
Dear God, why do I keep fighting you off? One part of me wants you desperately, another part of me unknowingly pushes you back and runs away. What is there in me that so contradicts my desire for you? These transition days, these passage ways, are calling me to let go of old securities, to give myself over into your hands. Like Jesus who struggled with the pain I, too, fight the “let it all be done.” Loneliness, lostness, non-belonging, all these hurts strike out at me, leaving me pained with this present goodbye. I want to be more but I fight the growing. I want to be new but I hang onto the old. I want to live but I won’t face the dying. I want to be whole but cannot bear to gather up the pieces into one. Is it that I refuse to be out of control, to let the tears take their humbling journey, to allow my spirit to feel its depression, to stay with the insecurity of “no home”? Now is the time. You call to me, begging me to let you have my life, inviting me to taste the darkness so I can be filled with the light, allowing me to lose my direction so that I will find my way home to you.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, too, helps us to see that even in our conflict, under the merciful gaze of God you and I are allowed to be sinners. Bonhoeffer writes:
The grace of the gospel, which is so hard for the pious to comprehend, confronts us with the truth. It says to us, you are a sinner, a great, unholy sinner. Now come, as the sinner that you are, to your God who loves you. For God wants you as you are, not desiring anything from you – a sacrifice, a good deed – but rather desiring you alone. God has come to you to make the sinner blessed. Rejoice! This message is liberation through truth. You cannot hide from God. The mask you wear in the presence of other people won’t get you anywhere in the presence of God. God wants to see you as you are, wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and to other Christians as if you were without sin. You are allowed to be a sinner...
The prophet Joel invites us too, saying:
But now, now, it is Yahweh who speaks: Come back to me with all your heart Fasting, weeping and mourning Let your hearts be broken, not your garments torn Turn to Yahweh again For Yahweh is all tenderness and compassion Slow to anger Rich in graciousness And ready to relent. (Joel 2:12-13)
Jessica Powers gives us an image of this kind of returning in her poem, “The Garments of God”:
God sits on a chair of darkness in my soul. He is God alone, supreme in His majesty. I sit at his feet, a child in the dark beside Him; my joy is aware of His glance and my sorrow is tempted to nest on the thought that His face is turned from me. He is clothed in the robes of His mercy, voluminous garments not velvet or silk and affable to the touch, but fabric strong for a frantic hand to clutch, and I hold to it fast with the fingers of my will. Here is my cry of faith, my deep avowal to the Divinity that I am dust. Advertisement Here is the loud profession of my trust. I will not go abroad to the hills of speech or the hinterlands of music for a crier to walk in my soul where all is still. I have this potent prayer through good or ill: here in the dark I clutch the garments of God.
We hear again echoes of the Psalmist: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.”
Today we are invited to begin to see anew. our sinfulness, yes, but blazing forth, the light of the mercy of God. Today you and I are asked to rend our hearts.
Hear Jan Richardson’s “Blessing for Ash Wednesday”:
To receive this blessing, all you have to do is let your heart break. Let it crack open. Let it fall apart so that you can see its secret chambers, the hidden spaces where you have hesitated to go. Your entire life is here, inscribed whole upon your heart’s walls: every path taken or left behind, every face you turned toward or turned away, every word spoken in love or in rage, every line of your life you would prefer to leave in shadow, every story that shimmers with treasures known and those you have yet to find. It could take you days to wander these rooms. Forty, at least. And so let this be a season for wandering, for trusting the breaking, for tracing the rupture that will return you to the One who waits, who watches, who works within the rending to make your heart whole.