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SERMONS

Ash Wednesday
February 6, 2008

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (BCP 265)

In a few moments, as these words are spoken by the priest, you are marked with the sign of the cross in ashes. It is one of the most brutally honest moments in our corporate worship life together, because with these words we acknowledge before God and before one another our mortality. And our mortality is not the only thing we acknowledge on Ash Wednesday. We are also honest with God, with ourselves and with one another about our sinfulness and our brokenness -- about all the ways we have failed God and failed one another. (Mayne 3)

In a few minutes we will say together the litany of penitence – our corporate confession of our brokenness; and we will recite together the great penitential psalm, Psalm 51:

...I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. (Ps. 51:3-4)

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offenses.” (Ps. 51:1)

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean [says the King James Bible]; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. (51:6-7)

Ash Wednesday is the day when we bare our souls to God, in all our brokenness and failure, and we tell God the truth about who we are. We take a long, hard look at what’s in our hearts, and we bring that brokenness to God.

On Ash Wednesday and throughout the season of Lent, we look deeply, each of us, into our own hearts, and we search the very depth of our being for answers to questions like these: When have I treated someone else cruelly? When have I “seen the light, and turned away from it…,?” When have I “reached for forbidden fruit”? When have I “pushed away loving arms”? (Taylor 5) When have I turned away from someone who needed me because I didn’t have the time, or I wasn’t in the mood? When have I hurt someone “on purpose” just because I could, because I had that power? (5)

These questions get at those experiences that, for ages and ages, we have called sin. Sin -- “deadly alienation from the sources of all life.” Sin -- the “willful turning away from God.” To be in sin is to be “cut off from air, light,...community, hope, meaning...,” and, as most of us already know, “[t]here are a thousand ways to turn away from the light,....” (5)

I know the topic of sin is pretty unfashionable these days. We are much more comfortable with words borrowed from doctors and psychiatrists – we’d rather speak of sickness and health, than sin and repentance, because, let’s face it, words like sickness and health “place no blame, impute no fault, [and] expect no change except the change from feeling bad to feeling better.” (Taylor 4)

But the problem is, as Paul Tillich reminded us over thirty years ago, that the great words of our religious tradition cannot be replaced. There are no adequate substitutes for them. So every generation has to rediscover for itself the meaning of shopworn words like “sin and salvation, penance and repentance.” (4-5) And that’s what we do on Ash Wednesday. We bring before God’s altar our brokenness and our failures. And we throw ourselves open to the mercy of God. (Brueggemann 182) We cast ourselves on God’s abundant and life-giving grace, acknowledging Jesus as our Savior and struggling to repent from our evil ways. (182)

On this day, of all days, we remember “that apart from the grace of God we are absolutely incapable of dealing with … human evil. It is not until we recognize our own finitude and corruption before God (v. 17) that we” are able to be redeemed and forgiven by God. (Brueggemann 186) Psalm 51 is insistent -- “to be forgiven… is to be changed. It is to slough off the old and put in the new -- to exchange the heart of despair for a heart of service of God.” (186)

There’s a story about “a king who had a son who had gone astray from his father”. The king’s estranged son moved to a place 100 days’ journey away. Friends of the son said to him, “Return to your father.” The son replied, “I cannot.” Then the father sent a message to his son that said: “Return as far as you can, and I will come to you the rest of the way.” (Pesikta Rabbati) And so God says to each of us, Return as far as you can, and I will come to you the rest of the way. Amen.

Works Cited

Brueggemann, Walter, et al. Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on NRSV - Year B. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.

Mayne, Michael. Pray, Love Remember (1998) excerpted in Resources for Preaching and Worship, Year B. Comps. Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. 84.

Pesikta Rabbati. Excerpted in Resources for Preaching and Worship. 84.

Taylor, Barbara Brown. “Preaching Repentance at the Start of a New Millennium.” Journal for Preachers: Lent 2000. 3-8.