Ash

Propers: Ash Wednesday, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Your life is cluttered. Simplify.

Your mind is anxious. Purify.

Your heart is weary with clinging to worries and dreams and fears. Let it go.

This is Ash Wednesday, the night when all that is good must be refined and reforged, while all that is bad is as ash on the breeze.

There’s a lot that we could talk about tonight. I could speak to the history of Lent, the ancient preparation for Baptism at the Easter Vigil. I could speak to the symbolism of it: Why fasting? Why purple? Why 40 days? But there shall be opportunity enough for such things in the weeks ahead. This is a night for repentance, and silence, and letting things go.

Set a thing on fire, and what is left behind? Ashes and dust. Embers and smoke. Whatever is weak, whatever is temporary, is consumed within those flames. But not the silver, not the gold. Not the iron or the steel. Those things have been purified, unencumbered, remade.

Our Lord makes use of similar metaphors all throughout the Gospel. He says that we shall be harvested, the good fruit we produce gathered unto granaries, the weeds bundled and burned away. He says we shall be winnowed, as grains thrown up high into the air, our empty chaff blown away upon the wind, while the seed of life is protected and preserved.

Time and again He counsels us not to be consumed by our own consumption, not to be possessed by our own possessions. For the truth is that nothing which we have not given away will ever truly be ours. We must not get bogged down by the ubiquitous anxieties and fears of this fallen, passing world, for to attach ourselves to things that destroy themselves is to experience that destruction within us.

Our destiny is salvation. All that is good within us, all that God desires for us, shall be strengthened and purified and made to glow white-hot in the eternal fires of God’s own divine and undying love. And all that is not properly us—all of our sins, all of our wounds, all of our pettiness and cruelties and selfish, warped desires—all of it will burn away. All of it is ash.

The problem is that you and I are so twisted by our sin, by our brokenness, by our trauma, that for as much as we hate it, we’ve also come to love it. We’ve allowed it to define ourselves. We’ve allowed it to convince us that this is who we really are—fallen, broken, wicked, dying. And so we cling to that sin, to that darkness, because we don’t even know who we would be without all that mess in us. And so we live as though we were our own shadows, afraid that we will vanish in the light.

There is a thread of Christian thought, woven throughout the history of the Church, that in the end, when the world is remade, heaven and hell will not be separate places. They shall have, as it were, the same address. Hell, in this understanding, is simply heaven experienced differently.

Someday there shall be no more death, no more lies, no more shadows, thus no more places to hide. We shall one and all be utterly suffused in the unfettered light and glory and fire of God’s love. It will be perfect mercy, perfect justice, perfect truth. For those who love God and their neighbor, everywhere we look will be heaven. Yet for those who despise God and hate their neighbor, everywhere we look will be hell.

If we know that we come from God and are returning to God; if we know that we are saved by grace through faith in the love and mercy of Jesus Christ; if we know that we are built not for this fallen world but for a better world, a perfect world; in short, if we define ourselves by who we are in God, then we shall experience the fires of God’s love as purifying and life-giving, forging us at last into who we were always meant to be.

But if we think we are our sins; if we attach ourselves not to love and mercy but to money and power and ego and all the parts of this world that are even now passing away; if we define ourselves not by who we are in God but by who we are apart from God, then those fires of love shall be unbearable, because they will be experienced as destructive, burning away the false image of who we think we are. Some will be saved, cautions St Paul, as through fire.

This future reality is present in part here and now. It is true that what we shall be has not yet been revealed. It is true that we do not yet see face-to-face, but in a mirror darkly. Yet this is the night when we are called to remember who it is we truly are—whose we truly are—and not just us but all of humanity, all of Creation. We are not our fears and our sins and our traumas and our pains. We are not our professions, our pocketbooks, or our profiles on Facebook. We are children of the Most High God, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. And we shall rise in Him.

Everything in this world dies—it’s all chaff, all ash, all lost upon the breeze—except for the love we know in God poured out upon our neighbor. None of that shall be lost. None of that ever could be lost. Nothing good is lost in God.

Simplify. Purify. Let it go. Not because you have to. Not just for self-improvement. But because you are free, and you are loved, and you are God’s, forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.