Sermon for Ash Wednesday
“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”
Dust and ashes. Hardly an auspicious beginning, we might think. Usually we think of dust and ashes in terms of endings; the fire that ends in a heap of ashes, the dust that is swirls around in the wind, the detritus of the mundane world.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Dust and ashes are the dominant images of the day. Ashes are a symbol of repentance in the ancient biblical culture. Dust recalls us to the biblical story of creation and is the strong image of our creatureliness. Everything in the physical and material universe is made of dust, we might say. That is an important feature of our creation: we are the God-made dust into which God has breathed his spirit, even sanctified dust.
The two images coalesce in the ritual imposition of ashes on our foreheads, itself another image that signals the special nature of our creatureliness. We are made in the image of God by virtue of our reason and will symbolized in our foreheads. Ashes are imposed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and they are placed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Those words, too, suggest an ending. They seem to sound an ominous and serious note.
And yet, the business of this day is all about a beginning and as such there is something lovely and wonderful, even beautiful about Ash Wednesday. It is, we might say, a somber day of the soul’s rejoicing. Why? Because the operative word and idea of Ash Wednesday is repentance and repentance is great good news for our souls. We get to begin again.
