The Gift of Ashes--February 26, 2020

The Gift of the Ashes--February 26, 2020

"Job... sat among the ashes....Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust up in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great." [Job 2:8b, 11-13]

Before we can speak any honest word of hope, we must be truthful about what brings us despair.  And before we--especially we people of faith--get to talk about resurrection, we must stare down the reality of our many kinds of deathliness rather than sweeping them under the rug or pretending they are not there.

And this is the gift of the ashes.  

When we are done running from unpleasant truths, from the things that break our hearts, from our sadness and sickness and suffering, and from the ways we are tangled up in the rottenness we call sin, we can at last see them clearly, name them, and then watch for God's Spirit calling forth life from the dust like at creation.  If we are always afraid of facing the suffering of life--ours or others'--we will never see God's hand lifting up those who sit on the ash heap.  Like James Baldwin famously said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."  That's why our journey called Lent starts with ashes, and that's why Job's three friends know the place for them to be is beside their friend covered in soot from his burned-out life.

Without rehearsing the whole plot of the literary thought-experiment we call the book of Job, it's enough to say that it centers on facing the truth of our mortality, and what happens when we either stare it down courageously or try to explain it away to avoid the pain of unexpected suffering.  And as Job has just come through losing his family and his fortune, and is now on the brink of estrangement from his wife, too, Job's friends come, as the text says it, "to comfort and to console him."  And they know--at least for these seven days when they are wise enough to keep their mouths shut--that there are no good words for this moment.  They are not yet ready, because he is not yet ready, to hear words of hope.  And while there will come a point in just another chapter of the story when they start trying to find religious explanations for Job's situation rather than simply facing his grief with him, for the moment, they know the thing they must do is simply stare the reality of death in the face.  Honesty about that loss will clear the ground for life to spring up.

This is at least one of the reasons why the journey the church takes each year called Lent begins with ashes.  We have to look in the eye the reality of death--both the ways we are entangled with death beyond our control, and the ways we willfully chain ourselves to its power--and to clear away the pretense that "everything is all right."  Because it is not.  And the only hope for things being put right is to acknowledge how we are broken, how we are crooked, how we are suffering, and even how we are dead inside.

So often we treat Lent like it is merely a church version of a self-help regimen or a second try at a New Year's resolution. But Jesus isn't here to make slight improvements in our self-esteem or give us slightly sunnier outlooks on life--he is here to raise the dead.  We start Lent with ashes as a way of reminding ourselves how much of the world in which we live, and how much of the hearts inside our chests, are in the valley of the shadow of death right now, so that we can lift these things up to God to turn us again to life.

We let our foreheads be inscribed with a sooty cross, not because God needs our signs of public piety (in fact, Jesus thinks that these are questionable at best), but because we need the honesty they enable.  We need the freedom of being honest about all the ways we don't have things under control, all the ways we are not living our best lives now, all the ways we do not love our God and our neighbor, and all the ways we are aching for life.  That is the gift of the ashes, and we give it to one another like Job's friends, bearing our own mortality and speaking it honestly to each other as something we hold in common.

Today, whether you already have the smudged cross on your forehead or will have it placed on you later today, or whether you simply trace the mark on your face invisibly with your finger right now, remember that the ashes are a gift.  Perhaps they are a terrible-seeming gift at first, but they are a gift that makes honesty possible, so that the hope of resurrection will be real and authentic as well.

Today, let us receive the gift of the ashes.

Lord God, we are dust, we know it.  But we know you first made us alive out of the dust of the earth.   So gift us the gift of honesty to face it, and then give us the hope of resurrection that lies beyond ashes.