March 5, 2025 – Ash Wednesday
The Rev. Claire Keene
Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”) and Ash Wednesday: What an interesting pair they are— first a day of indulging in food that’s rich in fat and sugar, to eat up our most indulgent treats before we begin on Ash Wednesday this spare season of Lent, that reminds us of the dust and ashes that our earthborn lives will become. So we begin to walk once again with Jesus as his life and circumstance get more and more complicated, day by day as pushed toward Jerusalem, a city rife with religious power struggles, political danger, and— eventually—Jesus’ undeserved, cruel death.
Life and death—weighing in the balance: on the one hand we hear so much popular adulation for Jesus and on the other, a powerful rejection grows in those who fear he might upset the balance of power on which they rest.
On what a pendulum swing life seems to carry us!
Christians have been riding that spiritual pendulum between rejoicing and penitence for centuries.
As I first came into the Episcopal Church many decades ago, it took me a while to adjust to Ash Wednesday, with its bold mark of penitence on our foreheads and the expectation that the faithful would fast, having indulged on pancakes, syrup, bacon or other rich foods the prior evening.
As a former Southern Baptist, I was coming into the Episcopal Church with virtually no experience of the Christian calendar, except for Christmas and Easter Sunday.
I was also seeking to reshape my life and my relationship with God after divorce.
Penitence was something I certainly sought out, but so was freedom from conformity to expectations that others might have of who and how I ought to be, especially in my spiritual life.
I had planned to fast, that first Ash Wednesday, but by the time I left the noonday service, I was hungry.
My noontime plan had been just to head back to work at UT after the service, to finish out my workday there.
But by the time I left church, I was starting to feel hungry and then a bit resentful of one more “rule” to which I felt I might be obliged to conform.
What I had first thought of as an act of freedom and dedication– –showing up for Ash Wednesday noon service–had become, in my heart, one more “ought to,” one more “should.”
I remember thinking to myself, “God’s surely not going to love me more or less because I do or don’t eat a hamburger for lunch today! Forget it, I’m going to pick up a burger on my way back to the office! After all, I’ll need to be able to focus on my work this afternoon, I’ll need to then pick up my seven-year-old son from day care, fix his dinner, check on his homework, make sure he gets his bath, etc. And I‘ll do all of that better if my stomach isn’t growling and my blood sugar hasn’t dropped to the grouchy level.”
When I told my spiritual director a week later about my giving up my fast with a hamburger at the end of the Ash Wednesday service, he said, “Well, that’s as good a way to break a fast as any other.”I’m so glad he didn’t condemn for choosing that hamburger!
As I look on that memory now, it seems that the energizing issue underneath the “do-I-eat-lunch-or-not-on-Ash-Wednesday?” question was really an exploration of guilt vs. virtue, shame vs. praise in the new life I was hoping for with God.
It was a day like today— when we wear an announcement of our human frailty on our foreheads, and we sometimes are triggered to absorb Ash Wednesday as if it were a day of shame, a day when we admit to the world and to God that we are nothing but sinners whose lives end in dust!
That shame vs. praise predicament reminds me of all my old school report card days.
Doing well in school was my particular yardstick for measuring my worth. School was something I could do fairly well. And education mattered a lot to my parents, who grew up on small subsistence farms, survived the Great Depression, and worked their way through college over several years. Making sure that the five of us siblings had an education was one of their major goals for parenting.
So, good grades were a sign to me that I was holding up my piece of our family’s expectations.
The last thing I wanted to do was to bring home a questionable report card. In my psyche, a report card that brought shame instead of honor wouldn’t be just an indicator of school work, it would be a sign of my being less than they hoped for— a measure of “sinning against my parents’ expectations.” That pendulum between pride and shame swung heavy over my heart on Report Card Day.
So I want to reassure all of us, here for Ash Wednesday’s service, that we are not here to set up that kind of dichotomy in our souls.
Yes, we are sinners and we are mortal.
Sin and death are both givens of our human life.
What really matters today is that God sees us as Beloved Sinners, Beloved Mortals.
Faced with our transgressions, God chooses gracious love over shame, the way a loving parent gathers up a child who has fallen off the playground swing and tends their cuts and scratches till they are healed.
The way a loving parent say might say on a Bad Report Card Day, “Well, let’s together come up with a plan to help you focus on your schoolwork. I’ll help you every way I can.”
So why on this Holy Day do we impose these ashes on our foreheads? Is this our Bad Report Card day? Is the message of Ash Wednesday a proclamation that our humanity inescapably marks us for shame, for rejection, for alienation from God??
NO. Absolutely NOT! “Au contraire, mon frere,” as Simon of the Chipmunks used to say. “Au contraire, mon frere!” Ash Wednesday is our invitation to stop hiding ourselves and our failures from ourselves, from God, and from each other. It’s about telling the truth. We are invited to confess, reminded to confess, so that–like that good parent– God can clean up the cuts and scratches on our souls and heal them. The point is not to feel worse and worse about our persistent human frailty. The point is to be reminded that we are Beloved— cared for in our greatest weaknesses.
Richard Rohr, Roman Catholic priest and prolific writer about the spiritual life, explains why so many of their (and our) services include a confession of sin:
it’s not to shame us about our failures. It is to remind us constantly that we are forgiven— often and always, for all our sins, all our weaknesses.
Then, in communion, we have room for our hunger for God’s unlimited love to be fed.
No wonder we prepare for Lent with feasting and partying of a Mardi Gras!
Last night’s party is just as faithful an experience of God’s love as is the absolution we receive with our confessions of sin on other days.
Feast and fast, failure and forgiveness are all possibilities for recognizing that we are God’s Beloved Dust.
Just as astounding is the reminder that the other folks in this room– this city, this nation, the world– are beloved dust , too.
Whoever betrays us, shames us, irritates us, fails us, misleads us– they are God’s children, too, just as frail and hungry for God’s loving favor as we are, whether they know it or not
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We are all both the blessedly forgiven Prodigal Son and the blessedly forgiven Elder Brother.
We and they are frail in body and soul, destined for the grave; and even there, we and they will make our everlasting song: “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!”
So take heart! Today is not a Bad Report Card Day.
Today is our invitation to stop hiding ourselves and our sins from God, ourselves, and each other and to rejoice in being so endlessly Beloved.
Year C – Ash Wednesday – March 5, 2025 – The Rev. Claire Keene
