17 February 2010

Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 51:1-17
2 Corinthians 5:20b—6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

And so it begins: another Lent; another Ash Wednesday; another time to come forward to receive the sign of the cross etched on our foreheads with ashes from the branches we waved a year ago on Palm Sunday.  It is a solemn, serious day, that forces us to think about things we’d rather keep suppressed:  the reminder that death awaits us all; aspects of our lives we prefer to keep hidden from others and from God as we stand at the first of the forty days when we will follow Jesus as he travels closer and closer to Jerusalem -- closer and closer to his death on the cross.

My childhood memories of Lent bring to mind the little cardboard offering boxes we were given in Sunday School to be filled with coins we saved by giving up candy or soda.  I don’t remember going to church on Ash Wednesday, but I do remember seeing classmates at Smiley Junior High and East High who had strange, black marks on their foreheads when they came to school on that day.  Somewhere along the line I learned that the “marks” had to do with how they observed Ash Wednesday -- but I knew that nothing remotely like that would have been part of the services at our church. Our kind of pietism had a super-sized fear of doing anything that was “too Catholic.” We limited Holy Communion to four times a year in order to “make it special” and we never made the “sign of the cross,” so having that sign made in the form of ashes on our Swedish Lutheran foreheads was unthinkable.

I also have a vivid memory of the first time I decided while leading an Ash Wednesday service to invite people to come to the altar to receive the sign of the cross and hear the words:  “You are mortal.  You came from dust and to dust you shall return.”  Our seminary curriculum had never included any reference to this, so I did not have a clue where the ashes came from.  I decided I’d make my own ashes, and came up with what I thought was a “brilliant idea” how to do that.  As the service began I passed out small slips of paper and asked people to write on them any sins they felt a need to confess before God. The papers were then collected and dramatically burned at the front of the church in the metal lid from one of our trashcans from home.  Since I used some charcoal starter as an accelerant, It’s a wonder smoke alarms were not set off to as the burning slips of paper turned to ashes.  But what I did next, turned out to be even worse.

When it was time to come forward to have the sign of the cross imposed on their foreheads, I gathered the paper ash into a small bowl, mashed it as best I could, and began to use the mixture to make the sign of the cross.  I found out later it was probably good I had not mixed them with water as I had thought about doing -- ashes and water could have burned the cross into their unsuspecting foreheads.  Instead, my dry paper ashes simply made a royal mess, because few of them actually adhered to anyone’s forehead but simply all over the place.  At least this was not quite as messy as the pastor who decided his Ash Wednesday visual aid would be to throw a shovel-full of ashes on his congregation, prompting one member to declare it was the “most dreadful imposition” he had ever experienced!