Ash Wednesday 2012

Ash Wednesday 2012

I think we get something of a mixed message on Ash Wednesday. We come together to prepare ourselves for the devotion to a holy Lenten season. And to mark the beginning of this intentional, intense time of penitence, we receive on our foreheads the sign of the cross. The sign of Christ’s sacrifice and the sing of our redemption.

It’s a visible sign, made with ash to remind us of our mortality—and it’s placed right on the place where we received the chrism, the holy oil used to seal us as Christ’s own forever. Now, when we received the chrism, we didn’t see it as visibly—certainly we felt it. And while the sensation of the oil eventually went away, the mark never has gone away.

But today, we come together to mark that place with a visible sign of mortality. And ironically, we have this Gospel reading which reminds us to be careful about practicing our piety only. In other words, we warned not to show-off our apparent holiness before others.

But, here we are getting ready to wear ash on our foreheads.

I actually knew some people who avoided going to Ash Wednesday services just to try to be conscious of this warning. And while I respect their personal choice, I have to say that they risk missing a more deeply important part to this whole experience of Ash Wednesday.

What we have to remember is that our experience in Lent has never been about the outward—in the sense that it isn’t about practicing our piety openly in a prideful way. Even though our lives change for these forty days—depending what our disciplines are—even that change is not about the outward. Instead, it is about inward change. Rend your hearts not your clothes, all of that.

But the end of these actions are for the purpose of what St. Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians. We are ambassadors of Christ. In other words, we represent Jesus everywhere we go—in the very same way that an ambassador represents a monarch.