Worship
Ash Wednesday and Lent
Ash Wednesday and Lent Ash Wednesday arrives February 17th. At 10:00am and 6:30pm people will flock to Saint Francis for the simple act of kneeling and receiving a smudge of ash — the ash of burned palms from the previous Palm Sunday — and the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This is a religious moment that people seek with integrity. In its humble and unselfconscious way, the ashes moment is pure religion. On an ordinary business day the many who come to us on Ash Wednesday have the wisdom to submit to a moment of truth profound and simple. They're going to die. They face up to that truth not because they are morbid and not because they are pure spirits but because, flesh and blood, they are religious. The word 'religion' is based on two Latin roots meaning to bind or connect again. On Ash Wednesday we reconnect not with our mortality. Our mortality is inescapable. We reconnect with the One who has faced our mortality with us and done something about it from the inside. Ash Wednesday and the forty days of Lent boil down to a time to reconnect with what matters. Stop long enough this week to begin that process, here with us or wherever you live or work.
Liturgical Calendar Notes: Ash Wednesday is a smudge on the liturgical calendar, a memento mori ("remember your death") that reminds us as we number our days that there will be an end to them. It is the appointment Christians make on the calendar not with death but with some facing up to it, even as we present our faces to the priest for the imposition of ashes. What we forget is that to observe Lent focusing on one's mortality is to see it through the wrong end of the telescope. Lent is not about the penitent focusing on his fallenness or finitude. It is fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. It's not about the promise we make to give up this or that; it is about the promise made by our Lord Jesus when he said, "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day" (John 6:54). Such was the genesis of Lent. It grew out of the celebration of Resurrection. Sometime before the Council of Nicea (325 AD), a forty-day fast was observed among the faithful, the purpose of which was to prepare candidates for baptism on Easter Day. The point of the fast is the Feast. One of our beloved teachers, Fred Buechner, writes of Lent: In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year's income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year's days. After being baptized by John in the River Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves. If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn't, which side would get your money and why? When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore? If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less? Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember? Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for? If this were your last day of your life, what would you do with it? To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end. — Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized |  | For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is his mercy great upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us. As a father cares for his children, so does the LORD care for those who fear him. For he himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust. — Psalm 139: 11 – 14
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