From dust to dust, we say today, on this Wednesday we mark with ashes. This is a day unlike most in the Christian year.
It feels different. It lacks the sweetness of Christmas Eve, the joy of Easter morning, the passion of Pentecost, even the grief of Good Friday. Today, it seems, is about reality – recognizing the reality of the long and often difficult journey ahead of us and the reality of ourselves as created beings.
It is a humbling day, this day of Ashes, but it is not a despairing one. Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God reminds us that our task today is “to acknowledge that we are dust and to dust we shall return… and then to proclaim our choseneness as the children of God anyway.”
We don’t take easily to this posture of humility, of confession or contrition. We wear our ashes too proudly, or we choose a fast that is little more than a New Year’s resolution made two months too late.
The prophet Isaiah speaks to a people who took too quickly and too righteously to their fasting. They have busied themselves with the tasks of religion rather than living together in justice with their community. Isaiah, and challenges them:
Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hid yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly;
Your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lords hall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
You shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”
What fast will you chose this season? Will you chose to give up something that has blocked your way to God? Will you choose to take on some practice that opens a thin place in your life for God to shine through?
Enter, today, this journey of grief and grace, and know that God travels this journey too.
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