Ash Wednesday Sermon

Ash Wednesday -

For months, our stories have surrounded us in light. Not only the bright star announcing the birth of Christ but the brilliance of Christ himself, transfigured on a high mountain.

So when we turn to focus on our inner being, on the work of our hands, we seem to step away from the brilliance of the holy and into the shadow of our selves. To be sure, we are coming down that mountain into the mundane. And for anyone who knows anything about walking up and down large mountains, it is just as difficult to hike down as it is to hike up. It's just a different kind of difficult.

So this is Lent. The descent. The difficult walk down. The shadowy time when we look in upon our very souls and take inventory on what we find there. When we see with new eyes the ugliness of sin. It is the darkness of the tomb after the black afternoon of Good Friday. It is the acknowledgment of that darkness within our own bodies.

To say this journey inward, towards God, is easy would be a lie. It is always difficult to encounter the darkness. Think for just a minute about the absurdity of putting ashes on our bodies to remember our mortality. This morning, as I was distributing ashes to several elders with severe dementia, they looked at me like I was asking them to eat mud. They shooed me away with grand looks of confusion and even anger. Who was this woman offering to put some kind of muddy ash on their face? Why in the world would anyone want that?

It is abnormal to choose to encounter our mortality. Society leaves this task to those people with terminal illnesses or their family members. In general, we try to stay far away from the mess of death and dying. And in truth, we all try to resist death. Store shelves are lined with products for looking younger, feeling younger, and staying younger. It is clear, in our society, that death and darkness and are bad things. Reflecting on our mortality is, then, not only a bad thing but an absurd thing.

Perhaps that is why this tradition is not wide spread. Why so few know what it means to put ash on foreheads. Why so few choose to remember that they are dust and to dust they shall return.

Because it is never easy to encounter our mortality, to explore the darkness within us. Perhaps we all believe that to encounter the darkness means to give up. Or perhaps you think like I used to. I believed that the darkness would swallow me whole should I choose to explore it. By simply acknowledging the darkness of the world and the darkness within me, all light would cease to shine and I'd be left alone, consumed by the darkness.

This could not be farther from the truth. Because, if we learned anything during Epiphany, we know that when we delve into the depth of our deepest self, we will find God there. The one that breathed life into our dust still remains. We will discover that in the muck and mire of our souls, God appears. It should not surprise us to find God there - the light refusing to be consumed by the dark.

After all, this is where God DELIGHTS to be. Jesus is the light of the world after all. It is God that illumines us from within, still surrounded by our darkness. It is God that illumines the world, despite its darkness.

So tonight, we remember our mortality. We remember our beginning as dust. We remember the power and light of the One who breathed life into us, a light that covers all the broken, murky, ugly, sinful, or shameful parts of our souls.
So as we come down the mountain contemplating the darkness of sin and the cross, we descend into our souls, confessing our darkness and acknowledging the darkness we see in the world and in each other.

Lent is a time to explore the darkness. To search for the light of Christ that was not left behind on the mountain top but is still alive in each of us. Lent is the season to discover that death and darkness never have the final word, whether within each of us or throughout the world.

Amen.