Ash Wednesday
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Object:
Theme For The Day
Ash Wednesday is a time for having a good cry.
Old Testament Lesson
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Who Can Endure The Day Of The Lord?
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. This passage is a prophetic wake-up call -- appropriate indeed for Ash Wednesday, the day when the church traditionally calls its members to repentance. Joel is writing in the context of a terrible plague of locusts (1:4), which he interprets as a sign of God's judgment on a faithless people. In chapter 2, he sounds the alarm, warning of the approaching destruction. The omitted section, verses 3-11, makes it clear that the devastation is that of approaching locusts, although he describes them metaphorically as though they were an invading army. (Locusts, in fact, could be more destructive than any human army, stripping farm fields bare and destroying a nation's livelihood in a single, disastrous day.) Verse 11 ends by saying that the coming day of the Lord will indeed be terrible -- who can endure it? With verse 12, however, the prophet's tone abruptly changes. It is not too late, he says. There is still time to "return to the Lord," who "is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (vv. 12-13). The mention of fasting in verses 12 and 15 fits the church's traditional Lenten practice.
Alternate Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 58:1-12
A Fast Pleasing To God
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. In this passage, the prophet criticizes those who go through the outward motions of worship, particularly fasting, but whose lives reveal a certain hollowness of commitment: "Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" (v. 3). The prophet has observed that many of those who are fasting continue to oppress their hired workers, and spend their days quarreling with one another (vv. 3-4). They are faithful in small things, but unfaithful in the things that really matter. The sort of fast most pleasing to God is one that focuses on giving up not food and drink, but rather unjust and exploitative practices (v. 6). Those who practice such a fast will truly receive God's reward (vv. 8-12).
New Testament Lesson
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
Now Is The Acceptable Time
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. This passage is an appeal to be reconciled to God. Quoting Isaiah 49:8, the author reminds his readers of God's ancient reassurance, "At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you." The "acceptable time" has once again arrived, he says, and is now upon us (6:2). Faith does not depend on the outward circumstances of life; indeed, true faith triumphs over every adversity (vv. 4-10). Adopting practices of spiritual discipline during Lent -- suffering through minor, self-imposed adversities -- is one small way to remind ourselves of the reality of divine grace.
The Gospel
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Beware Of Practicing Your Piety Before Others
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. In this selection from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his listeners against hypocrisy that finds expression in ostentatious displays of religiosity: "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them" (v. 1). Practices such as almsgiving should be done in secret -- so much so that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing (v. 3). Prayer is better done in secret than as a matter of public display (v. 6). An omitted section (vv. 7-15) commends simplicity in prayer, then includes the words of the Lord's Prayer, as an example of the sort of humble prayer that is most pleasing to God. The next section, on fasting, likewise advises that this spiritual practice be pursued, as much as possible, in secret (vv. 16-18). Finally, regarding money and worldly possessions, verses 19-21 are a reminder that the greatest treasure is in heaven, not on earth -- and that preoccupation with earthly treasures can be a distraction from the true goal of communion with God.
Preaching Possibilities
Have you ever heard of a "three-hankie" movie? It's an old term, favored by Hollywood's legendary movie moguls. One hankie, and you leave the movie house with a gleam in your eye. Two hankies, and the rims of your eyes are red. But if the movie's rated "three hankies," you look like a total wreck ... like you've been crying for a week ... and if anyone stops you on the sidewalk and asks how you liked the film, you say, "It was wonderful!" and cry a little more.
You wouldn't think people would pay good money to be reduced to tears ... but then you wouldn't think people would pay to be terrified by horror movies, either. But they do, regularly. Hollywood has come to count on it.
As anyone who cries in movies will tell you -- and yes, it is more common for women than for men -- there's something marvelously cleansing about a good cry. To spend a couple hours in a darkened theater and watch the momentous happenings of someone else's life -- whether those events are happy or sad, or some combination thereof -- somehow bestows a feeling of relaxation and relief.
Many men in our culture don't typically cry in movies. Often, our wives and friends think we ought to cry more often, that we should be more "in touch with our emotions." But it's not easy, for us guys. We've been conditioned, from an early age, not to open up the waterworks.
Yet even so, there is something restorative about a good cry. Maybe that's why the prophet Joel calls the recalcitrant people of Israel to repent and return to God "with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning." This is supposed to be a good thing: "Return to the Lord, your God, [who] is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love...." The tears of heartfelt repentance wash the soul clean.
That's not a message that plays well in our modern society -- but we already know that. We know that, in coming to worship on Ash Wednesday, we're swimming upstream. Whether we choose to make ourselves conspicuous through getting ashes on our forehead or not, the very fact that we're here at all sets us apart as a little odd, in the eyes of many.
We all live in a culture that's eager to "accentuate the positive," as the old movie musical puts it. Negative emotions are seen as universally bad. "Don't worry," croons the bouncing reggae tune, "Be happy."
Yet how can anyone not worry, and be happy, with the prospect of divine judgment looming on the horizon? The Day of the Lord is coming, warns Joel. It will be "a day of darkness and gloom ... of clouds and thick darkness."
Now, many of us would be inclined to put that warning off till the distant future, to view it as a kind of theatrical backdrop to the pageant of faith. Divine judgment is something that may, hypothetically, happen one day, but the thought of it doesn't affect most of our lives very much. Yet think back, to September 11, 2001 -- that "day of darkness and gloom ... of clouds and thick darkness" for lower Manhattan. Think of the ash that was not limited to a little patch on the forehead, but covered cars, sidewalks, firefighters' helmets -- everything. Think of the cry of anguish that went up, on so many television screens around the world, as the first tower fell -- and of the weeping that followed. September 11 punctured our illusions that the wealth and sheer might of our culture are able to fend off most of life's unhappiness.
This is not to say, as some preachers regrettably have, that the Trade Center disaster was the judgment of God. God wept along with those tens of thousands who lost loved ones, and who gnashed their teeth at the massive obscenity of human evil that had caused it. Yet perhaps September 11 taught us all anew of our need for God.
On the Sunday following that day, church pews across America were filled. Those people had not come, for the most part, to repent. They had come to grieve. They had come to try, somehow, to make sense of their torn and conflicted feelings -- and to be with neighbors who were feeling the same things. They had come to have a good cry -- not in the sense of entertainment, as in a movie theater, but rather to give vent to powerful feelings welling up inside.
We need to be reminded, most of us, that life -- despite the advances of modern medicine -- is still short ... that it can be terribly fragile ... that it offers tears as well as laughter. We profit from being reminded that, on some level, despite our successes, we all fail -- that, as in the words of Romans, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
This is why we gather on Ash Wednesday. This is why some of us go through that ancient ritual of having ashes smeared across our foreheads, as we listen to the words, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return."
Prayer For The Day
Lord God,
May the ashes remind us
of what we need to know:
that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
May we remember this truth
not so as to lose ourselves in loathing,
but so as to remember that we are sinners in need of redemption.
And may we remember also that our redeemer lives,
and that his name is Jesus. Amen.
To Illustrate
What blocks forgiveness is not God's reticence ... but ours. God's arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away.
-- Philip Yancey
***
Community requires the confession of brokenness. But how remarkable it is that in our culture brokenness must be "confessed." We think of confession as an act that should be carried out in secret, in the darkness of the confessional, with the guarantee of professional priestly or psychiatric confidentiality. Yet the reality is that every human being is broken and vulnerable. How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others. But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
-- M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum (New York: Touchstone, 1998, Reprint Edition)
***
We are formed of dust -- which suggests, among other things, not only our humble beginnings but our startling potential. For if God can breathe life into soil, what does that say about the latent potential in our lives? Who can tell what God's breath might make of us yet -- of will and mind, of imagination and compassion -- opened to the One whose breath is life?
-- John Indermark, Genesis of Grace (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1997)
***
Over the years I have noticed a university professor who always makes it to Ash Wednesday services every year, even though her Sunday attendance is sporadic. Finally, I asked her, "I see you really make a point of getting to Ash Wednesday. What's the deal?"
"It's the one day of the year," she said, "when we really get it right, when we tell the truth, a truth that's not told at the university. We're a mess. We need help. If it's all up to us, we're doomed."
-- Anthony B. Robinson, senior minister at Plymouth Congregational Church: United Church of Christ in Seattle, in "The Meaning of Ash Wednesday," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 9, 2001
***
There is an episode of The Golden Girls [television show] in which Dorothy has something wrong with her. She goes to a series of doctors who try to diagnose her problem, but it eludes them, and several even suggest that it is psychosomatic. Dorothy visits her neighbor and friend, Dr. Harry Weston, and asks him to look at her chart, the record of all the medical tests she has taken. Harry reads it carefully. Finally Dorothy asks him, "Am I going to die, Harry?" And Dr. Weston answers, "Without a doubt. Sooner or later, you're going to die. But I doubt you will die of whatever this is."
Over the years, when I have visited in the hospital with parishioners, and when I myself have been a patient, I have always realized that the elephant in the room about which we are all reluctant to speak is the persistent question, "Am I going to die?" And like the response Harry gives Dorothy, the answer is, "Without a doubt, sooner or later, you and I are going to die."
It is a reminder none of us likes to hear....
Ash Wednesday reminds us of two things, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. How is it the psalmist puts it? "The days of our years are threescore years and ten ... for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." We fly away.
The ashes remind us that we are fallen and we can't get up on our own. We need God's help. We need God's forgiveness for our sin. And we need God's love, like a mother who gathers her children to her to nurture and protect them.
That is finally the hope that is scratched in the ash on our foreheads, that God's love has reached all the way to earth, to the dust from which we have been made, and made of the dust the peace of heart and spirit that we seek. Made with tender mercy and loving care, just like that dust God took in hand to shape the first creatures, man and woman. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus....
-- Jon Walton, from "Imposition," a sermon delivered at New York's First Presbyterian Church; published in the Journal For Preachers, Lent 2006, pp. 37-39
***
Lent is a time to fast from certain things and to feast on others. It is a season in which we should:
• Fast from judging others; feast on the Christ dwelling in them.
• Fast from emphasis on differences; feast on the unity of all life.
• Fast from thoughts of illness; feast on the healing power of God.
• Fast from words that pollute; feast on phrases that purify.
• Fast from discontent; feast on gratitude.
• Fast from anger; feast on patience.
• Fast from pessimism; feast on optimism.
• Fast from worry; feast on divine order.
• Fast from complaining; feast on appreciation.
• Fast from negatives; feast on affirmatives.
• Fast from bitterness; feast on forgiveness.
• Fast from self-concern; feast on compassion for others.
• Fast from discouragement; feast on hope.
• Fast from suspicion; feast on truth.
• Fast from thoughts that weaken; feast on promises that inspire.
-- Anonymous
***
It's a curious practice, this covering ourselves with a mark that shows who we are. It seems to be a blatant contradiction of today's gospel, which tells us that we are not to parade our good deeds before men, and that we are to wash our face so no one will know we are fasting. On one day of the year, Catholics appear in our increasingly anonymous world, proclaiming their faith. Often enough in doing so we are parading our bad deeds rather than our good, but it still seems strange. Christian sacraments don't leave marks. You can't tell a baptized person from an unbaptized person by looking at them.
Yet it's only by accident that the ash proclaims our being Catholics. In an area where everyone was Catholic, the ash would be saying something else. But what exactly would it be saying?
What it says is quite simply that we are human beings. Far from proclaiming our differences to the world, it proclaims our solidarity with the world. We are dust and ash. We are made of fragile stuff, mortal beings. Long before modern scientific notions of entropy and the heat death of the universe, it was obvious to medieval thinkers that anything that is made up of materials will eventually lose its integrity. What comes together will come apart. We begin our Lent with that most basic of facts. Logically the ashes could be administered to anyone. We could say the words of the service, "Remember, Man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return," to anyone. It doesn't need faith to understand those words. It doesn't need faith to know that they are true. They are true for all the world.
Ash Wednesday is only a beginning. Just as we fast because we are not ready to feast, or to acknowledge that we are not ready, so we begin our Lent by considering death, because we are not ready to live. We are not ready to live the life of Christ, at any rate. On Ash Wednesday, we consider human nature and the great distance between what that nature desires and what that nature is capable of achieving....
We can't see the end then, what we are called to. We can see the beginning, where we are coming from. Perhaps it would be better, going back to Genesis and the creation of Adam, to say, "Remember that you are soil," rather than dust. I think that's a legitimate translation of the Hebrew word. The soil may be where we return but it's where life comes from, too.
-- Euan Marley, O.P., "The Benefits of a Dirty Face," http://torch.op.org/preaching/sermon/1013
Ash Wednesday is a time for having a good cry.
Old Testament Lesson
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Who Can Endure The Day Of The Lord?
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. This passage is a prophetic wake-up call -- appropriate indeed for Ash Wednesday, the day when the church traditionally calls its members to repentance. Joel is writing in the context of a terrible plague of locusts (1:4), which he interprets as a sign of God's judgment on a faithless people. In chapter 2, he sounds the alarm, warning of the approaching destruction. The omitted section, verses 3-11, makes it clear that the devastation is that of approaching locusts, although he describes them metaphorically as though they were an invading army. (Locusts, in fact, could be more destructive than any human army, stripping farm fields bare and destroying a nation's livelihood in a single, disastrous day.) Verse 11 ends by saying that the coming day of the Lord will indeed be terrible -- who can endure it? With verse 12, however, the prophet's tone abruptly changes. It is not too late, he says. There is still time to "return to the Lord," who "is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (vv. 12-13). The mention of fasting in verses 12 and 15 fits the church's traditional Lenten practice.
Alternate Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 58:1-12
A Fast Pleasing To God
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. In this passage, the prophet criticizes those who go through the outward motions of worship, particularly fasting, but whose lives reveal a certain hollowness of commitment: "Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" (v. 3). The prophet has observed that many of those who are fasting continue to oppress their hired workers, and spend their days quarreling with one another (vv. 3-4). They are faithful in small things, but unfaithful in the things that really matter. The sort of fast most pleasing to God is one that focuses on giving up not food and drink, but rather unjust and exploitative practices (v. 6). Those who practice such a fast will truly receive God's reward (vv. 8-12).
New Testament Lesson
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
Now Is The Acceptable Time
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. This passage is an appeal to be reconciled to God. Quoting Isaiah 49:8, the author reminds his readers of God's ancient reassurance, "At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you." The "acceptable time" has once again arrived, he says, and is now upon us (6:2). Faith does not depend on the outward circumstances of life; indeed, true faith triumphs over every adversity (vv. 4-10). Adopting practices of spiritual discipline during Lent -- suffering through minor, self-imposed adversities -- is one small way to remind ourselves of the reality of divine grace.
The Gospel
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Beware Of Practicing Your Piety Before Others
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. In this selection from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his listeners against hypocrisy that finds expression in ostentatious displays of religiosity: "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them" (v. 1). Practices such as almsgiving should be done in secret -- so much so that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing (v. 3). Prayer is better done in secret than as a matter of public display (v. 6). An omitted section (vv. 7-15) commends simplicity in prayer, then includes the words of the Lord's Prayer, as an example of the sort of humble prayer that is most pleasing to God. The next section, on fasting, likewise advises that this spiritual practice be pursued, as much as possible, in secret (vv. 16-18). Finally, regarding money and worldly possessions, verses 19-21 are a reminder that the greatest treasure is in heaven, not on earth -- and that preoccupation with earthly treasures can be a distraction from the true goal of communion with God.
Preaching Possibilities
Have you ever heard of a "three-hankie" movie? It's an old term, favored by Hollywood's legendary movie moguls. One hankie, and you leave the movie house with a gleam in your eye. Two hankies, and the rims of your eyes are red. But if the movie's rated "three hankies," you look like a total wreck ... like you've been crying for a week ... and if anyone stops you on the sidewalk and asks how you liked the film, you say, "It was wonderful!" and cry a little more.
You wouldn't think people would pay good money to be reduced to tears ... but then you wouldn't think people would pay to be terrified by horror movies, either. But they do, regularly. Hollywood has come to count on it.
As anyone who cries in movies will tell you -- and yes, it is more common for women than for men -- there's something marvelously cleansing about a good cry. To spend a couple hours in a darkened theater and watch the momentous happenings of someone else's life -- whether those events are happy or sad, or some combination thereof -- somehow bestows a feeling of relaxation and relief.
Many men in our culture don't typically cry in movies. Often, our wives and friends think we ought to cry more often, that we should be more "in touch with our emotions." But it's not easy, for us guys. We've been conditioned, from an early age, not to open up the waterworks.
Yet even so, there is something restorative about a good cry. Maybe that's why the prophet Joel calls the recalcitrant people of Israel to repent and return to God "with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning." This is supposed to be a good thing: "Return to the Lord, your God, [who] is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love...." The tears of heartfelt repentance wash the soul clean.
That's not a message that plays well in our modern society -- but we already know that. We know that, in coming to worship on Ash Wednesday, we're swimming upstream. Whether we choose to make ourselves conspicuous through getting ashes on our forehead or not, the very fact that we're here at all sets us apart as a little odd, in the eyes of many.
We all live in a culture that's eager to "accentuate the positive," as the old movie musical puts it. Negative emotions are seen as universally bad. "Don't worry," croons the bouncing reggae tune, "Be happy."
Yet how can anyone not worry, and be happy, with the prospect of divine judgment looming on the horizon? The Day of the Lord is coming, warns Joel. It will be "a day of darkness and gloom ... of clouds and thick darkness."
Now, many of us would be inclined to put that warning off till the distant future, to view it as a kind of theatrical backdrop to the pageant of faith. Divine judgment is something that may, hypothetically, happen one day, but the thought of it doesn't affect most of our lives very much. Yet think back, to September 11, 2001 -- that "day of darkness and gloom ... of clouds and thick darkness" for lower Manhattan. Think of the ash that was not limited to a little patch on the forehead, but covered cars, sidewalks, firefighters' helmets -- everything. Think of the cry of anguish that went up, on so many television screens around the world, as the first tower fell -- and of the weeping that followed. September 11 punctured our illusions that the wealth and sheer might of our culture are able to fend off most of life's unhappiness.
This is not to say, as some preachers regrettably have, that the Trade Center disaster was the judgment of God. God wept along with those tens of thousands who lost loved ones, and who gnashed their teeth at the massive obscenity of human evil that had caused it. Yet perhaps September 11 taught us all anew of our need for God.
On the Sunday following that day, church pews across America were filled. Those people had not come, for the most part, to repent. They had come to grieve. They had come to try, somehow, to make sense of their torn and conflicted feelings -- and to be with neighbors who were feeling the same things. They had come to have a good cry -- not in the sense of entertainment, as in a movie theater, but rather to give vent to powerful feelings welling up inside.
We need to be reminded, most of us, that life -- despite the advances of modern medicine -- is still short ... that it can be terribly fragile ... that it offers tears as well as laughter. We profit from being reminded that, on some level, despite our successes, we all fail -- that, as in the words of Romans, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
This is why we gather on Ash Wednesday. This is why some of us go through that ancient ritual of having ashes smeared across our foreheads, as we listen to the words, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return."
Prayer For The Day
Lord God,
May the ashes remind us
of what we need to know:
that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
May we remember this truth
not so as to lose ourselves in loathing,
but so as to remember that we are sinners in need of redemption.
And may we remember also that our redeemer lives,
and that his name is Jesus. Amen.
To Illustrate
What blocks forgiveness is not God's reticence ... but ours. God's arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away.
-- Philip Yancey
***
Community requires the confession of brokenness. But how remarkable it is that in our culture brokenness must be "confessed." We think of confession as an act that should be carried out in secret, in the darkness of the confessional, with the guarantee of professional priestly or psychiatric confidentiality. Yet the reality is that every human being is broken and vulnerable. How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others. But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
-- M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum (New York: Touchstone, 1998, Reprint Edition)
***
We are formed of dust -- which suggests, among other things, not only our humble beginnings but our startling potential. For if God can breathe life into soil, what does that say about the latent potential in our lives? Who can tell what God's breath might make of us yet -- of will and mind, of imagination and compassion -- opened to the One whose breath is life?
-- John Indermark, Genesis of Grace (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1997)
***
Over the years I have noticed a university professor who always makes it to Ash Wednesday services every year, even though her Sunday attendance is sporadic. Finally, I asked her, "I see you really make a point of getting to Ash Wednesday. What's the deal?"
"It's the one day of the year," she said, "when we really get it right, when we tell the truth, a truth that's not told at the university. We're a mess. We need help. If it's all up to us, we're doomed."
-- Anthony B. Robinson, senior minister at Plymouth Congregational Church: United Church of Christ in Seattle, in "The Meaning of Ash Wednesday," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 9, 2001
***
There is an episode of The Golden Girls [television show] in which Dorothy has something wrong with her. She goes to a series of doctors who try to diagnose her problem, but it eludes them, and several even suggest that it is psychosomatic. Dorothy visits her neighbor and friend, Dr. Harry Weston, and asks him to look at her chart, the record of all the medical tests she has taken. Harry reads it carefully. Finally Dorothy asks him, "Am I going to die, Harry?" And Dr. Weston answers, "Without a doubt. Sooner or later, you're going to die. But I doubt you will die of whatever this is."
Over the years, when I have visited in the hospital with parishioners, and when I myself have been a patient, I have always realized that the elephant in the room about which we are all reluctant to speak is the persistent question, "Am I going to die?" And like the response Harry gives Dorothy, the answer is, "Without a doubt, sooner or later, you and I are going to die."
It is a reminder none of us likes to hear....
Ash Wednesday reminds us of two things, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. How is it the psalmist puts it? "The days of our years are threescore years and ten ... for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." We fly away.
The ashes remind us that we are fallen and we can't get up on our own. We need God's help. We need God's forgiveness for our sin. And we need God's love, like a mother who gathers her children to her to nurture and protect them.
That is finally the hope that is scratched in the ash on our foreheads, that God's love has reached all the way to earth, to the dust from which we have been made, and made of the dust the peace of heart and spirit that we seek. Made with tender mercy and loving care, just like that dust God took in hand to shape the first creatures, man and woman. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus....
-- Jon Walton, from "Imposition," a sermon delivered at New York's First Presbyterian Church; published in the Journal For Preachers, Lent 2006, pp. 37-39
***
Lent is a time to fast from certain things and to feast on others. It is a season in which we should:
• Fast from judging others; feast on the Christ dwelling in them.
• Fast from emphasis on differences; feast on the unity of all life.
• Fast from thoughts of illness; feast on the healing power of God.
• Fast from words that pollute; feast on phrases that purify.
• Fast from discontent; feast on gratitude.
• Fast from anger; feast on patience.
• Fast from pessimism; feast on optimism.
• Fast from worry; feast on divine order.
• Fast from complaining; feast on appreciation.
• Fast from negatives; feast on affirmatives.
• Fast from bitterness; feast on forgiveness.
• Fast from self-concern; feast on compassion for others.
• Fast from discouragement; feast on hope.
• Fast from suspicion; feast on truth.
• Fast from thoughts that weaken; feast on promises that inspire.
-- Anonymous
***
It's a curious practice, this covering ourselves with a mark that shows who we are. It seems to be a blatant contradiction of today's gospel, which tells us that we are not to parade our good deeds before men, and that we are to wash our face so no one will know we are fasting. On one day of the year, Catholics appear in our increasingly anonymous world, proclaiming their faith. Often enough in doing so we are parading our bad deeds rather than our good, but it still seems strange. Christian sacraments don't leave marks. You can't tell a baptized person from an unbaptized person by looking at them.
Yet it's only by accident that the ash proclaims our being Catholics. In an area where everyone was Catholic, the ash would be saying something else. But what exactly would it be saying?
What it says is quite simply that we are human beings. Far from proclaiming our differences to the world, it proclaims our solidarity with the world. We are dust and ash. We are made of fragile stuff, mortal beings. Long before modern scientific notions of entropy and the heat death of the universe, it was obvious to medieval thinkers that anything that is made up of materials will eventually lose its integrity. What comes together will come apart. We begin our Lent with that most basic of facts. Logically the ashes could be administered to anyone. We could say the words of the service, "Remember, Man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return," to anyone. It doesn't need faith to understand those words. It doesn't need faith to know that they are true. They are true for all the world.
Ash Wednesday is only a beginning. Just as we fast because we are not ready to feast, or to acknowledge that we are not ready, so we begin our Lent by considering death, because we are not ready to live. We are not ready to live the life of Christ, at any rate. On Ash Wednesday, we consider human nature and the great distance between what that nature desires and what that nature is capable of achieving....
We can't see the end then, what we are called to. We can see the beginning, where we are coming from. Perhaps it would be better, going back to Genesis and the creation of Adam, to say, "Remember that you are soil," rather than dust. I think that's a legitimate translation of the Hebrew word. The soil may be where we return but it's where life comes from, too.
-- Euan Marley, O.P., "The Benefits of a Dirty Face," http://torch.op.org/preaching/sermon/1013
