In preparing this sermon, I am indebted to the right reverend Neil Alexander for his reflections on the history of Ash Wednesday, linked at the end of this sermon, as well as to the poetry and ministry of the reverend Elizabeth Brooks Harden.
If you flip the page in your bulletin, you will notice that something is missing. Today is Ash Wednesday, we are observing the fast with the appropriate Ash Wednesday prayers and readings and an invitation to a Holy Lent. But, in the place where there is usually a prayer of blessing over ashes and instructions for the congregation to come forward and be marked by them, there will be a period of silence. There will be a blank space. The strange, tangible, visceral sensation of carrying a cross of ashes on our foreheads is missing from this liturgy. It is not an accident, or an oversight. It is a terrible loss, a missing piece of the puzzle of our rituals and traditions, to go without this communal disfiguring of our faces, the subtle creaks of pews as congregants come forward and return to their seats, the steady murmur of clergy voices repeating the same phrase over and over. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Much as we miss desperately the weekly ritual of sharing in the body and blood of our Lord, there are some for whom the cross of ashes is still more deeply missed, a once-in-a-year spiritual trail marker that carries with it a lifetime of memories. Some of us may even look forward to this day every year, coming away from the liturgy with a renewed piety and a deeper faith. For reasons not fully knowable, the liturgy of Ashes and Dust fills a need deep down inside us like no other single ritual of our common life can. We are drawn to this moment of darkness, the opening up of the wilderness in a whispered truth. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.
The tradition of crossing the faithful with Ashes is born of an ancient Christian practice of sprinkling ashes over the congregation in preparation for a Holy Lent, a time of fasting, prayer, and preparation for the miracle of Easter. This sprinkling of ashes eventually became the much less messy dipping of a thumb in burnt palm ashes and applying them, first in a smear and eventually in the rough shape of a cross over time. The cross of ashes is often put in parallel with the cross of oil applied to our foreheads in baptism as we receive the seal of the Holy Spirit and become marked as Christ’s own forever. But this more ancient practice, the sprinkling of ashes over the people, has a different parallel. At the end of our lives, someone will sprinkle soil over our graves. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, baptism to burial.
For many of us, the liturgy of ashes is our first exposure to our own mortality, and possibly more potently, the mortality of those we love.
Clergy the world over will tell you that there is nothing quite like the experience of marking the cross in ashes on the forehead of a child, a spouse, a beloved friend. Each year, there are some who will receive the mark of the cross on their forehead for the last time until the hour of their death. Each year, there are infants who will receive the cross on their foreheads for the first time, marked with their mortality before they’ve even received the seal of the Holy Spirit in baptism. For, unlike the Eucharist, there is no rubric or doctrine that dictates that baptism is required to receive this mark. We will all die, churched and unchurched, baptized and unbaptized. The cross of ashes is our reminder that this is so true that even our God has joined us in it, by dying in a body like ours.
The last year has been a year of Ashes, a long and deeply tragic Lent. Our mortality has been before us in ways our generation has never known before. Even those among us who have lived through other plagues of illness or violence or economic devastation will admit that this particular experience will occupy a special place in our collective memory. For hundreds of thousands of people in this country and around the world, the events since last Ash Wednesday and the events of the months ahead will be enshrined in family history as a season of loss and grief and scarcity and survival. We have faced our vulnerability as individuals, our fear of illness and suffering and death for ourselves on for those we love, and the grief of losing access to the tangible and incarnate ways that we mark time in community. It is strange, and sad, and uncomfortable not to engage in the imposition of ashes, another thing the pandemic took from us. But what would it mean, how would it feel to receive touch from the hands of another only to be reminded that you are going to die?
Mother Elizabeth Harden, a dear friend of mine, is a priest and a mother of two young children. Back in May she shared a poem that, with her permission, I’d like to share with you-
“It is hard to make masks for my children.
Oh, not the sewing part,
the downloaded pattern from Etsy is quite easy-
but the macabre realization that I’m praying
to two layers of flannel,
to keep my most precious ones alive.
Oh I know we wear them to protect others-
mine is dutifully dawned every trip to the store.
I’m not sick.
Yet it would be a sin of omission
if I did not confess
that the ones I’m most desperate to protect
as I stitch
are the faces that will wear these masks,
the ones I am making now from the scraps dug out of my fabric stash-
pajama pants
play dresses
why did I keep these odd shaped pieces?
They’d be just enough,
I once weightlessly thought,
for doll sized coordinates
to light up her face.
Instead now they’re masks,
to cast over that upturned mouth,
that face upturned
as she takes tentative steps beyond our house
for the first time in months.
I wonder as I sew,
will these playful prints spawn a nursery rhyme
in a decade or two,
a ring around the rosy from the year 2020?
Will it be sung with loud mirth,
laughs thoughtlessly projected on air,
to be caught up by friends in a dance?
Gusty guffaws that unwittingly mock
the months when our laughs were laden with poison?
A laugh enters now-
a chase, a game careens through my sewing room
and my morbid musings must halt-
Hey sweetie, come here, I need to check if this elastic will go around your ears.”
We’ve already lost touch, many of us, with the morbid reality of the mask. Most of us have grown accustomed to the sight of them, and those of us who must wear them all day in order to do our jobs may have even grown accustomed to the inconvenience. We might even have chosen a favorite, or developed a collection. The mask has become a political symbol, a medical necessity, a workplace uniform. It has been interpreted both as a sign of weakness and fear, a lack of faith, and as a basic Christian duty. Much like the cross of ashes on tender skin, it has become a source of pride and solidarity for some, a mild irritant for others. On this Ash Wednesday, we do not disfigure our faces. Instead, we cover them.
Unlike the cross of ashes, which smudges and eventually fades until it is removed altogether by water, our masks aren’t going anywhere. Unlike the ashes which one can forget are even there, our masks fog our glasses, chafe our ears, break out our chins and frustrate our breath. The ashes are meant to remind us that we are dust; mortal, vulnerable, and transient. Our masks, and especially the masks covering the faces of our partners, our parents, our children, our friends, remind us that to dust we all shall return. And yet even this we overlook daily as we insist on our own invincibility, our ability to be the exception, our control over our own fate. Perhaps we should mark our masks with ashes, instead of our foreheads.
There are those who would accuse us of living in fear by covering our faces. The same accusation could be leveled at us with a cross of ashes on our foreheads. The Christian does not live a life in fear of death, but in acceptance of it. The Christian life is not one of morbid fatalism, but one of deep truth and impossible hope. What hope is there in the resurrection, if we cannot even admit that death comes for us all? How can we even begin to approach the radiance of the resurrection, without first adjusting our eyes to the darkness of the tomb? There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday. There is no promise of eternal life worth living without the inescapable reality of death. Christianity is not the pursuit of evading or delaying death. Christianity is a life lived secure in the knowledge that death is defeated and cannot hold us. It is because we all die that we know we will be raised up, that we will be in communion with one another once again even when we have been parted by death. We have already died in Christ, because Christ died for us and with us, in solidarity with our greatest fears. As Paul preached to the church in Corinth and again to us today: we are “dying, and see– we are alive.” And so we put on our masks. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Mother A Writes 