Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 1, 2006 Ash Wednesday worship service.

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Coming to Ourselves

In one of the manses of my childhood, there was a fireplace that didn’t draw too well and wasn’t really built to be used on a regular basis, but was sure nice to have around on one of those rare instances when the electricity went off in the winter and one of the deacons in the church was kind enough to bring by a load of wood for the pastor and his family.

Now, there wasn’t much danger that any of us would suffer much, even though it might get a little chilly in our house, for in upland South Carolina, cold weather was never that extreme. Nonetheless, I always looked forward to whatever unusual circumstances might occur that would cause my Dad to agree to light a fire in the fireplace . . . the occasional power outage or, better yet, the annual Christmas Eve ritual of sitting around the fire and waiting for Christmas to come.

Since none of us were Boy Scouts, our skills in lighting fires, I must confess, were never that good. And so, there were always opportunities to relight the fire, which meant a chance to legally play with matches and the chance to stir and blow on the partially burned pieces of wood to try and re-ignite them or to set a larger piece of wood ablaze. I particularly remember taking the wrought iron poker and playing in the ashes, trying to find something combustible that I could somehow flip and get close to an ember so that it would suddenly blaze up. I could spend hours doing that, playing in the ashes, trying to see what the possibilities might be.

I suppose that playing in them was about as good a use as anything else. I understand serious gardeners know how to use ashes to help grow plants. But gardening was never a forte in my family. Truth is, it would be hard to convince me that those ashes were good anything, except making a mess. You can’t hardly make ashes look pretty nor can you make them smell good. Ashes look and smell like, well, like ashes. They are, on the whole, pretty worthless.

So, why do we bother smearing our foreheads with them tonight? To the uninitiated, it surely must seem like a strange ritual, indeed. As I think I’ve said before, on another Ash Wednesday occasion,tonight is by far the most counter-cultural thing we Christians do – there is absolutely no chance that the Hallmark Greeting Card company will ever want to commercialize Ash Wednesday, for who would want to purchase a reminder of one’s mortality, the gritty grime of being marked with the symbol that says, “you are dust, and to the dust you shall return.”

But, like it or not, we are of one substance with the ash – that which is left over when all the heat and light has been drawn out. Ashes remind us, first that we are tied to the earth and that nothing in us is immortal unless God gives it to us as a gift. The middle name of each and everyone of us is “Adam,” which in the Hebrew, of course, from the story of those first tillers of that first garden, means earth, or in its Hebraic synonyms, can mean “soil”, “dirt,” “dust” or even “ash.” In Genesis 3:19, after forming Adam from a handful of dirt in one of the great anthromorphic images of God, Yahweh pronounces the original curse upon Adam and his progeny after sin has reared its ugly head: “With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil, as you were taken from it, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Once you turn the corner and get past the age of 40, try taking a good, hard look in the mirror without being reminded that you are a son or a daughter of Adam.

Ashes, scattered about by wind, virtually impossible to grab and keep a handful, remind us that sin in all of our relationships is, something hard to contain, hard to control. Ash and dust, co-mingled, poured upon the head or smeared upon skin and clothes, was a way that people of ancient cultures, like the Hebrew people, displayed and practiced humility. Since the days of Lot and Abraham, ashes have spoken a silent message of penitence, the need to accept whatever was the good or the bad God sent your way, even if it didn’t make any sense at all.

And so, Job sat on the ash heap and scratched his sores with a potsherd after he had been scorched by the permission God gave Satan to torture Job until he cried uncle. Job didn’t give in, of course, but he sure suffered and about all he could say at the end of his ordeal was “I despise myself; and repent in dust and ashes (Job 42:6).

When Jonah delivered his message of repentance and judgment to King Ninevah, the King could do nothing but put on sackcloth and sit in the ashes as a sign of his ultimate helplessness. No one, not even a king, is immortal, and everyone, kings and prophets included, need reminders that life doesn’t go on forever, that true penitence might be the surest way to avoid a fate worse than death.

And even in the temple cult of ancient Israel, all those priestly sacrificial rituals that probably seem very strange to us, ashes got sprinkled in with the blood of goats and bulls in rites of purification, a way to balance the life in the blood with the fleeting reality of life itself, the dust, as it were, to which all flesh eventually returns. Jesus, we Christians believe, at least according to the New Testament book of Hebrews, became the way for us to be sprinkled clean without having to be sanctified by the blood of an animal mixed with ash -- Jesus himself being the unblemished lamb who cleanses our consciences and makes us fit to come before the judgment seat of God.

Ashes, though seemingly not good for much, have, in fact, many spiritual uses, at least according to scripture.

For me, most of all, the ashes tell me to take time to reflect on the life I am now living. When we can purposely remind ourselves of our mortality, of our need for repentance, of our need to be cleansed, it will help us to become better stewards of that little portion of life that each of us now is.

The ashes tonight are not meant to be counted among those outward signs of piety that Jesus condemned. Rather, the ashes call us to come to ourselves, to come to a deep awareness of who we truly are as sons and daughters of God. As in the ancient Hebrew culture, ashes announce our sorrow at the person we have become. They signify our appeal to God to forgive us and to reconcile us to God and to each other.

The sign of the cross we wear on our foreheads is not there only one day a year. In our baptism, we have been marked as God’s own and claimed for a new way of life. When we feel the ashes, we know that resurrection is in our future. We will return to dust, but God is not finished with us.