Ash Wednesday

Below is posted the sermon for Ash Wednesday.  How do you see God working in your life this Lent?  Are you giving anything up or taking on a Lenten discipline?

Vicar Brett Wilson – Ash Wednesday 2011

I grew up with a big garden. At the end of the season, usually in October, the corn stalks would lay dry, dead, and exhausted in the field. My dad would don his oldest, most tattered flannel coat and go out and set the stalks ablaze. He would carefully manage the large rectangle where the corn field had been, and burn the whole section, each stalk which he had so lovingly grown, went up in smoke and left a thick crust of ash on the ground. This ash he would later till under with the rototiller, weaving it in with the soil underneath, seemingly patching up the wound he had inflicted on our ground.

But he explained to me that the ash helped the soil grow better the next year, and that the ash contained nutrients that would bring new life in the next season, if managed properly and mixed correctly. Ash looks to be the complete absence, dust to dust, with no hope for life. But every spring, my dad would let me help him plant the new seeds, and through the soil, mixed with ash and dry dirt, new life would come.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. We are only dust. But even in dust, there is hope, even from ash can come new life.

It seems like backward thinking.

That ash is a symbol of death . . . and yet new life.

It doesn't make sense.

It's not what we see.

We see the surface – the crust that has been, as we are, burned by the world, by sin, by others. But God sees something else. In the gospel of Matthew we hear that your father who sees in secret, and that father will reward you.

Ash Wednesday, with its visible sign as an entrance to this season, invites us to see differently.

Walter Wangerin writes, “Faith urges us to believe that there is something more than the facts at hand; that the invisible God is not, as we are, crippled by the event; that the timeless God, who stood before our birthing, stands also past our dying; that a restless mercy moves him to receive the ones whom we have lost. By faith we see through the walls of this present reality, this common daylight and the nights of fear. By faith we see to a greater reality which is unimpressed by death.”

Marked with ash, God sees his children, claimed for new life.

We are ashy, crusty, broken, yet God's field rich for new life and healing.

you are impostors, and yet God sees we are true.

You are unknown, and yet to God you are well known.

You are dying and yet, see, to God, you are alive

you are punished, and confess your sins, yet you are not killed.

You are sorrowful, yet God calls you to always rejoice.

You are poor, yet through God's work of service, you make many rich – in love, in charity, in care.

You have nothing – remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return – and yet with the sign of the cross you have the seal of an heir to the kingdom – yet to God, possessing everything.

This Lent, marked tonight with the ash, God calls you to send up green shoots of new life, in a discipline, in giving of yourself, in making time to pray. In Lent God is sowing new life and new joys in us by clearing our fields of what was here before. By leading us to the cross again, together, we can reflect on the life in the kingdom that we glimpse beyond the cross. We start with ash to clear the way for a new harvest in our spirits. I pray for you a fruitful harvest this Lent. God will till the field.