What the Ashes Say: A Homily For Ash Wednesday

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 14 February, 2024.  

I suspect that there are a lot of preachers like myself today struggling with the fact that, thanks to the vagaries of the lunar calendar that determines the date of Easter, this Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day.

Indeed, one Anglican preacher I follow described a debate he’d had with his wife about the juxtaposition of these two dates:

“Valentine’s Day should trump Ash Wednesday,” she declares and earnestly believes. She plans to prepare a festive dinner for the occasion in celebration of love. However, I will lead the 6:00 p.m. Ash Wednesday service at our parish, reminding our parishioners of their upcoming death!

I see the point of their debate, and I concede the priest’s point, that Ash Wednesday is about our upcoming deaths.   Indeed, the words spoken during the imposition of ashes, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (BAS 285), remind us of this very fact.  

For me, those words will always remind me of the day I sat in my kayak and gently tipped my late wife’s ashes into her favourite lake.   The sun had just come out, and for a second a brief cloud of dust floated above the water like smoke, and then all was still.  

And had my wife’s story ended there, it would have been a tragedy, or perhaps it could have been reframed by some words about the circle of life, or maybe that poem that you hear now at funerals which says that death isn’t a big deal and the dead person isn’t gone.

Our Christian faith, however, reminds us that death is real.   The words that we hear as we receive the ashes are the same words that God speaks to Adam and Eve when God passes sentence on them for their disobedience:

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3.19). 

So the words we hear spoken over the ashes are ancient, ancient words, and however we understand the Genesis story of the fall, they remind us that we as humans are always prone to disobedience and to wandering far from the love of God.

And yet the ashes whisper to us that the love of God is never far from us.  The ashes are the remains of plants, palms, things sprung from the earth, and they tell us that love of God created us from the very earth that we return to.  The ashes are signs of penitence, telling us that, the love of God waits us to return, like the father in the lane watching for his wayward son. 

As a sign of death, the ashes remind us that the love of God became flesh and dies for us, for as Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  The ashes promise us that God’s love will go with us through the gateway of death to new creation and new life with God in Christ.  My late and faithful wife knew and trusted that truth long before her ashes floated about the lake.

So yes, the priest is right in that the ashes are about death, but his wife is also right about today being about love.    She would be right even if today wasn’t Valentine’s Day, because the ashes that will mark us are a sign of love.   The sign of ashes leads us on a journey through the season of Lent that ends at the empty tomb and then through the garden to our risen Lord, Jesus.    And just as there is no risen Lord without the cross, the sign of the cross on our heads remind us that we are Christ’s own, claimed by him through great cost and through greater love. 

 

The journey of Lent may begin in sorrow and penitence, but it ends in joy, because we see in the resurrection the new life that God calls us to.   Let us walk joyfully through Lent towards that new life.