Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
February 21, 2007
Ash Wednesday
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell

     In the name of God, the holy and undivided Trinity, Amen.

     Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return….remember….remember.

     These are words that we shall shortly hear as ashes are marked on our foreheads in the sign of the Cross.  It’s always a very profound moment for me, either to receive ashes, or perhaps especially to give them to others.  It’s as if the moment pierces through our denial, our belief that somehow we shall live forever, and we wonder how we can bear this awareness of our mortality.

     Part of what’s so moving for me is that I reflect on each person who comes and receives the ashes.  I spent the morning giving ashes to soup kitchen guests over in the chapel there; sometimes they come without a particular awareness of what the rite is about, although sometimes with a lot of awareness, but with a very clear sense of how vulnerable they are on the street – a desire for blessing, a longing for change.  One that I gave ashes to this morning said to me after I had said the words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” “Tell me about it!”

     He knew.

     Sometimes it’s children who come, and they seem too new in the world to have to be reminded of their deaths.  Sometimes people come who are struggling with illness, and who have recently come to a new awareness of how fragile their lives are.  We have lately had memorial services for people who were a longtime part of this parish, and I am aware of saying the words, “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,” as we laid them to rest.

     Somehow, in all these moments, I am reminded that I and everyone and everything that I love are mortal and precious and fragile.  It becomes a meditation for me on what to do with the time that I have – how am I to live?

     That leads on Ash Wednesday to the question for all of us of how we have lived.  We are marked with ashes that have burned from the palms of Palm Sunday last.  They are the sign of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which is followed in such short order in that liturgy and in the story by the crowd crying, “Crucify him!  Crucify!”

     The palms, the ashes, are the debris of our passions and plans and projects, all gone terribly wrong- our addictions, our lack of awareness that brings such destruction.  The ashes are the wreckage of what sin has wrought.  They speak to us not only of the wrongs that we have done, but the wrongs that have been done in our name – the wrongs that we participate in willy-nilly by virtue of our common humanity, the web of life in which we participate, in which we impact all and each.  They speak of the wrongs we have witnessed and the wrongs that are done to us as well.  Yesterday, it seemed to me that Lent came early, as I read the front page of the New York Times about how the primates of the Anglican Communion have rebuked our church and called on our bishops to forbid same-sex blessings.  I sat in my house in anger and deep anxiety, literally saying, “Lord, have mercy, have mercy.”

     The ashes are a sign of our cry for mercy, our lament at the shame of the church in its refusal of gifts, its refusal of the lives of God’s precious gay and lesbian people.  Ashes are a potent symbol of mourning in a very deeply personal way.  We mourn for our disappointments, our betrayals, our losses, our griefs, our failures, our sins.  Ashes are also a sign of corporate mourning, not only for the church, but for the nation, for the whole human family.

     Ashes are a sign, perhaps especially here in New York after that day in September, five and half years ago, and after all that has followed – the bombings on the other side of the world, the three thousand plus dead of our own military, the nameless and countless others, combatants and civilians- ashes are a symbol of the destruction that we bring on each other by our fear and our greed and our hatred, by our callous indifference to other human suffering.  And ashes are also a symbol of life that can no longer be lived as it has been lived, of the change that comes upon us, willy-nilly, unprepared and unexpected.  They are a sign, also, of what we no longer need and can no longer support.

     We use ashes on this day, and the symbol is powerful and ancient, but the words we say are, “Remember that you are dust.”  One commentator suggests that we might better say, “Remember that you are earth,” which echoes even more richly with the Genesis creation narrative, and reminds us that the fate of humans and the fate of the earth are linked, even by the Hebrew words which call Adam the earth creature, “h’adam.”  The creation story tells that our first parents sinned by seeking to be like God, in the sense of ignoring the limits of their creatureliness.  Their sin was the sin of hubris, of superiority over and separation from the rest of the creation.

     We see in our own day the terrible consequences of forgetting that we are of the earth – global warming, pollution, an extinction crisis for countless of our fellow species– and Ash Wednesday invites us to remember, to remember with humility.  We are called to remember that we are humus, to earth consciousness, to find, as the poet says, “our place in the family of things.”  Remember, remember, remember…

     Remembering begins with recognizing the dismemberment, the brokenness in the world, begins with grief and lament for all the suffering, all the sin, others as well as our own.  Things done and left undone, what we do and what is done to us.  I believe we carry this knowledge in our bones and in our cells, but most of the time we don’t let ourselves take it in.

     Ash Wednesday is like feeling coming back into a limb that has fallen asleep.  That painful aliveness brings the possibility of change – a sign of remembering what we are meant for, remembering our creatureliness, remembering that we are members of one another and of the creation, and that we are made in love and by love by the God of love, even though so often we have gone terribly wrong.  Remember, remember, remember; let in the grief, and let in the hope as well.

     The invitation of Ash Wednesday is that we enter on a Lenten journey towards Jesus’ death and resurrection - our own coming back to life, if we are willing to turn- turn, which is what repent literally means, if we are willing to change, and even more, to be changed - to be, as Paul says, to be reconciled to God and to one another.  If we are willing to take up the ministry of reconciliation, which is not a cheap uniformity or an appeasement, but based always in justice and truth-telling and radical inclusion and courage and love.

     The traditional practices of Lent that we heard about in the gospel for this evening, practices of prayer and fasting and alms giving, are ways that we act on that intention.  They are ways of living in hope; they are ways of taking up our part of the great work of reconciliation.  Discipline, after all, is to be a disciple.  We might also speak of Lenten devotion, a way of giving our hearts.  They are valuable precisely as practice, but as Jesus makes very clear in the Gospel, what is key is our motivation.

     We don’t enter into Lenten discipline to prove something or impress anyone; we don’t do it as a kind of spiritual heroics or achievement, but, rather, as a way of opening and making space for God, as a way of expressing the hopeful faith that we can change and be changed and perhaps also, even change the world.  Lenten disciplines are not meant to be rote or imposed, but chosen.  As I see it, these practices are all intertwined, and as I mused about them, I thought of prayer as both corporate – what we do in community- and individual – spontaneous, and also using the traditional words of the Prayer Book and other books.

     We might ask ourselves in seeking a discipline of prayer, what nourishes my soul?  What makes me aware of God’s presence and love?  What helps me remember my place in the family of things?  It might be listening in quiet, or journaling, or reading, or singing, or walking in the woods, or praying with beads, learning a psalm or a poem by heart, or writing a psalm or a poem.  It might be meditation or dancing; it might be intercession in which we hold our concern for others in our hearts, or in which we pray for our enemies, and find that God’s heart holds us all.  It might simply be resting in God’s loving arms.

     And fasting – fasting is the practice of letting go, of emptying out.  It is abstinence in the service of something larger than our own egos.  It is becoming aware of the needs of our body for balance, for care, and in that, depending on God, and knowing our interdependence with one another for all that sustains our lives.  People might choose to fast from types of food, from alcohol, from meat, from sugar, and notice how their bodies change and how God is at work in that change.

     We might think of fasting from other kinds of consuming as well, from shopping, or the images we put in our minds and hearts.  One woman told me that her Lenten practice this year will be fasting from angst.  We might fast from gossip or from lying or from hiding.  I think of seeking and offering forgiveness as a kind of fasting.  However we do it, it slows us down and makes us available – available to God, available to others.  When we fast, we simplify for our own good, for the good of the poor with the fast that God chooses in the words of Isaiah- the fast that shares one’s bread with the hungry- and we fast also for the good of the planet.

     This leads, organically, to the discipline of alms giving, which I think of as a practice of generosity…giving money for those in need, giving time, care, creativity.  Such a practice might include connecting with family or friends, or someone who’s lonely and in need, that we otherwise have no time for.  It might involve attending to our relationship with money, or even making a will.  It might involve attending to our relationship with others, by standing up and being counted and taking political action.  But always, I think it is grounded in gratitude, in willingness to risk, and in confidence in God.

     Remember, remember, remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

     This is the beginning, not the end of our Lenten journey.  We are aware of our mortality and of our sin and our creatureliness.  We cry out to God, and we are met with possibility.  This Lent, what if we believed and behaved as if we could change, and what’s more could be changed by the love and grace of God?  What if we believed and behaved as if we believed God’s grace could bring healing and reconciliation, not only to us, but to our anguished world?  What if we believed that each of us has a part to play by the mystery of that grace?

     By that mystery of grace, let us go forward into Lent, in these amazing and painful and demanding days.  Let us go with courage, with humility, and most of all, with trust in Jesus, who walks this pilgrim way with us – who loves us, each and all, and who will never leave us alone.

     Amen.