Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday can be a bit of a hard sell. It’s easy to attract people to a lovely Christmas carol service, or a joyful Easter service all full of chocolate eggs and spring flowers. Ash Wednesday doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it though. “Come along and remember all the stuff you’ve done wrong, and by the way, we are all going to die! Dust you are and to dust you shall return!”

But here we are. Something draws us here. Perhaps we are the kind of people who are never happy unless we are miserable, the kind of people who like giving ourselves and others a hard time? But no. I know you, and you know me, and that’s not how I would describe us at all.

The truth is that for those who “get” it, Ash Wednesday is rather a relief, because it’s the moment when we remind ourselves that it’s ok to be human, to be mortal, frail and fallible. We don’t have to be superheroes. God loves us as we are. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want to grow, to heal, to be transformed.  But we don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to look happy and shiny if we aren’t.

Ash Wednesday  is a serious day, a day when we can take ourselves seriously, and know God takes us seriously too – we matter to him, and the way we live our lives matters to him – but there is, or ought to be a joy in that seriousness. We can be honest about our failings because we know that God loves us, failings and all. We don’t have to earn his love, and nothing we can do will destroy it. In a world where so many people, so often, feel they have to put on a face, sell themselves, talk themselves up, it is really good news when we can find a place where we can just be as we are.

And if we begin Lent with joyful seriousness, with the real conviction that we are absolutely loved, then when we get to the resurrection morning, Easter Day, we will find that the new life it promises is also more real. If we live Lent with joyful seriousness, when Easter comes we will find in it serious joyfulness, joyfulness which reaches down into the depths of our being.

So it may sound odd to rejoice on Ash Wednesday, but I always find that I do, and I hope that you will too. It’s good news that we are dust, because that dust is beloved dust, precious dust, dust which God in Jesus inhabited and blessed, and blesses still.
Amen