Traditionally, Christian believers have displayed ashes in the form of a cross on their foreheads on this day. The ashes are imposed by a priest or pastor with (usually) the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Ash Wednesday's purpose in twofold: to remind us of our mortality and hence the need to repent of our sins, to strive be justified before God.
Ash Wednesday is the one day of the Christian year that is supposed to fill us with dread. Dread that God is just, dread that God will judge, dread that we might be judged in justice rather than in love. If wearing ashes on our foreheads should do anything for us, it should confront us with the fact that for all of us, there is an end coming one day. Before the most holy God, all the things we value will be as ashes.
But we in the church have an integrity problem. Bluntly put, we practice much more of a civil religion than a biblical faith. The American dream is that we can have it all. Therefore we are prone not to understand that Christian discipleship is a zero-sum game: if we are to grow in discipleship we have to shrink in something else. If we are to add holiness to our lives, we have to give up ungodliness. In his book I Surrender, Patrick Morley writes that the church’s main misconception is “that we can add Christ to our lives, but not subtract sin.” We think we can change what we believe without changing what we do. We want revival without reformation, rebirth without repentance.
To repent, as you probably know, means more than to regret. It means to turn around. Repentance is a change of course. That’s the real reason why people are supposed to “give up something” for Lent. How often do we give up something trivial, like chocolate? It’s no repentance to give up something that we can easily do without. It’s no repentance to pretend we are turning away from habits instead of sins. Repentance is to pull out our deepest sins by the roots, and that will hurt!
Fasting for Lent means to repent, not merely to do without food for part or all of a day. Fasting means to be focused on repentance so intently that we give up the ungodliness that pervades our lives. It is to be a holy man or holy woman for forty days, and aid the effort by expressing holiness by symbolic acts. Symbolically, we turn to ashes the parts of our lives, the parts of our character, that separate us from fullness of grace.
Yet there is a danger in Lent as well as opportunity. Do not make the mistake that repentance saves you. Repentance is necessary, but we are saved by what God has done in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Repentance is the sign that we realize we have no hope apart from Christ. The danger in Lent is that we will emphasize repentance of our sins to the exclusion of their cure. Our works are part of our faith, but we are justified before God by our works in faith not because of what we do but because of what God has already done. From the ashes of repentance, in grace, God can build anew.
Peter Perry, a pastor in Texas, told of the time his neighbor’s house burned to the ground. “The trees all around were scorched,” he wrote. “The grass was brown. A few blackened timbers stood near the back of the house, and the remains of the cast iron plumbing system rose out of the ashes. The day after the fire, as I walked to school with a friend, we saw the woman who had lived there, standing in the midst of what had once been her home, weeping and wondering aloud what would become of her and her family. As she gazed at the ruins of her life, she despaired. But her husband was comforting her. “We can rebuild,” he said. And they did. One year later, a beautiful new home graced that lot. And the home they built was built around the old home’s massive, stone fireplace. I wonder . . . Did the woman and her husband and their children sit around that fireplace on winter nights, look at the dancing flames on the logs they were burning, and remember the ashes?”
We do remember the ashes of our past, do we not? Old hurts, ancient wrongs. Writer Hazel Farris told of her childhood’s fiery temper. “One day, after an argument had sent one of my playmates home in tears, my father told me that for each thoughtless, mean thing I did he would drive a nail into our gatepost. Each time I did a kindness or a good deed, one nail would be withdrawn. Months passed. Each time I entered our gate, I was reminded of the reasons for those ever-increasing nails, until finally, getting them out became a challenge. At last the long-awaited day arrived – only one more nail! As my father withdrew it I danced around proudly exclaiming, ‘See, Daddy, the nails are all gone.’ Father gazed intently at the post as he thoughtfully replied, ‘Yes, the nails are gone—but the scars remain.’”
Scars do remain, and we wear them. We’ve made them, too. Sometimes we count our scars and relive the hurt and anger and pain of every one. Sometimes we love to inflame the passions of righteous indignation. But God does not do that. God forgives our sins and God forgets those sins. God does not carry grudges. In our repentance and humility before God, we can see that God’s ways are not our ways. God forgives, God forgets. Our sins were nailed to a cross on Calvary and in Christ’s triumph over the powers of sin and death, they have become like ashes, blown away in the wind.
But the call to repent must not be ignored. We must respond to God’s initiative. “If there are a thousand steps between us and God,” said Max Lucado, “God will take all but one. God will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours.”
We are dust and to dust we shall return. The urgency of Lent is that we turn to God now, for later it may be too late. Dr. George Sweeting told of a visit to Niagara Falls. “It was spring, and ice was rushing down the river, “ he wrote. “As I viewed the large blocks of ice flowing toward the falls, I could see that dead fish embedded in the ice. Gulls by the score were riding the ice down the river, feeding on the fish. As they neared the falls, their wings would go out, and they would escape from the falls.
“I watched one gull which seemed to delay and wondered when it would leave. It was engrossed in the carcass of a fish, and when it finally came to the brink of the falls, out went its powerful wings. The bird flapped and flapped and even lifted the ice out of the water, and I thought it would escape. But it had delayed too long so that its claws had frozen into the ice. The weight of the ice was too great, and the gull plunged into the abyss.”
The moment to turn back to God is this moment.
When the ashes are imposed on foreheads in the shape of a cross, the first line is a vertical one. Think of it as an “I.” The “I” is the egoistic part of each one of us that is the sinful self, the rebellious self, the self that wants to walk alone instead of with God. But right after the “I” comes the horizontal line, and the “I” was crossed out. Crossed out. “The ashes made in the from of a cross remind us of the cross of Christ by which our sins and the sins of the whole world are canceled out!” (Bass Mitchell).
Ash Wednesday reminds us that we come from a world of death and sin, but that we do not have to stay there. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent and believe in the Gospel!”
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