Ash Wednesday 2021-The Rev. Melanie Lemburg
Ash Wednesday 2021
February 17, 2021
I’ve lost count of the number of
funerals I have done in my 16+ years as a priest. But I will never forget my first funeral
which was also the very first time I celebrated the Eucharist as a newly
ordained priest. As I prayed the
beautiful and comforting words of our burial liturgy, I remember being woefully
unprepared emotionally as I proclaimed the words at a certain point in the
liturgy. As the years have passed, this
part of the service no longer catches me unaware or by surprise, but it still
fills me with a complex mix of feelings of hope coupled with the stark
confession that one day I am going to die.
It’s not unlike what rolls around every year on this day, Ash Wednesday,
when I feel the grit of ash on my forehead and hear the words: “Remember that
you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The difference is that those words are
coming from outside me; one could even say that their awareness is being
inflicted upon me—this call to remember.
Whereas in the burial liturgy, when I speak these words on behalf of the
gathered community, I am embracing their starkness, their truth, their hope on
behalf of myself and on behalf of all the faithful:
“You only are immortal, the creator and
maker of mankind;
and
we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we
return.
For so did you ordain when you created me, saying,
"You
are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of us go down
to
the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia,
alleluia,
alleluia.”
This is the call to remembrance that we
hear on Ash Wednesday every year. It is
the invitation that is offered to us during the season of Lent that is often
lost in the face of the call to repentance, to take something new on or to give
something old up. At its very heart, Ash
Wednesday calls us to remember that we are creatures, created by God, made of
the dust of the earth and filled with the breath of God; created to be finite
rather than infinite. And that when God
created us in this finite state, God called us “good.” We are called to remember that there is both
a starkness and a beauty in the brevity of our lives. And we are called to be mindful of all the
ways and the times that we spend our lives denying this truth in our lives; exploiting
each other and creation in our denial of our death; seeking to consume to fill the
void; keeping on running and running to avoid what is at the heart of our very natures,
which is our mortality.
The former bishop of Atlanta who is also
a liturgics professor, Neil Alexander, has written a brief paper on the history
of ashes for Ash Wednesday in an attempt to help bishops, clergy, and the
church think about how to mark this day in the midst of a pandemic. And Bishop Alexander writes about how before
the liturgy used the practice of making a cross of ash on peoples’ foreheads,
the church had an older practice on Ash Wednesday—that is to sprinkle ash on
someone’s head. This practice, he says,
harkens back to the sprinkling of dirt onto a grave during the committal in a
burial service. This is something this
church knows better than others, as our members did the graves for one another
and as we often pass the shovel around during the committal service to share
the burden of sprinkling soil on top of one whom we have loved.
Today, more than ever, we are called to
remember not just our status as creatures of God, made with the dust of the
earth and filled with the breath of God, created to be finite rather than
infinite. We are called to remember the
gift of the resurrection, when, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead, God proves once and for all that God’s love transcends the limits put
on us in our creation, that God’s love breaks the power of death to make us a
part of God’s new creation through the resurrection so that death is not the
end but a change. We are called to
remember the gift of new life that can come even through death.
The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister
writes, “Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we
learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.”
This Lent, I invite you into practices
that will help you to remember that you are God’s creation, made to be finite
and named by God as good, and invited into new life by God through Jesus’s
resurrection. I invite you to embrace
your creatureliness, recognizing the limits and boundaries of our existence as
opposed to rushing to ignore or deny them.
I invite you to discover practices that allow you to be grateful for the
darkness that, like a rich soil, invite growth, and I invite you to use this
time as a season to live into practices that support new life and growth in
your spiritual life much like new life will sprout out of the moist, dark earth
as the season moves forward into spring.
In that way, this season can be a gift for us all as we look, once
again, toward Easter.
“You only are immortal, the creator and
maker of mankind;
and
we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we
return.
For so did you ordain when you created me, saying,
"You
are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of us go down
to
the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia,
alleluia,
alleluia.”
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