'On Ash Wednesday, we receive the sign of ashes.
A reminder that there will come a day for us
in which there is no putting us back together again.
A marker of mortality,
a memorial of death.
But it is more than that.
Physical death is one thing,
but spiritual death is another.
The ashes we wear on our foreheads not only remind us of our future,
but also of our past, and our present without God.'
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a
great fall.
All the king’s horses
and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty
together again.
Questions abound.
How did Humpty Dumpty get up on the wall?
Why in the world was he up there?
And what were all the king’s horses
supposed to do to put him back together?
Where was Mrs. Humpty Dumpty while all of this
was going on?
Despite our lack of answers,
it’s clear that we are to learn at least two
lessons from this story.
One: fragile creatures should not take
unnecessary risks.
Two:
There is a time when it’s too late.
There is a time when something has dis-integrated,
lost its integrity,
so that it is no longer the thing it was
and can never be reconstituted.
We see a jumble of bricks and shingles and
drywall and insulation
by the side of the road.
That was a house.
It has gone beyond the point at which it can be
properly called a house.
There is no fixing it.
If we want a house there,
we’ll need to clear the rubble away and start
again.
We see the ashes in the fireplace
where once there was a log,
and there’s no putting the log back together again,
for its potential energy has been released in
heat and light
and all we have is the leftovers that could not
be burned away.
They were meant for a purpose,
to nourish and strengthen,
to be used as a part of a confection or a
casserole,
but they no longer are what they were,
simply a mess to be cleaned up and thrown away.
I’d like to think that if there were a race of
super-intelligent eggs
somewhere in the universe,
millions and millions of Humpty Dumptys
reciting their proverbs about walls and heights
and the servants of the king,
some of them at least would have a little ritual
in which they would have a pasty mixture daubed
onto the shells,
and someone would say,
Remember that you are yolk, and to yolk you
shall return.
On Ash Wednesday, we receive the sign of ashes.
A reminder that there will come a day for us
in which there is no putting us back together
again.
A marker of mortality,
a memorial of death.
But it is more than that.
Physical death is one thing,
but spiritual death is another.
The ashes we wear on our foreheads
not only
remind us of our future,
but also of our past, and our present without
God.
For humanity in general and each of us in
particular,
there is a way in which we have already gone
beyond the point of repair,
at least any repair which we can accomplish.
We have confessed our sins,
and no doubt at least at one point or another
in the general confession we recognized in
ourselves
particular faults, habitual castings off of God’s
good and gracious will,
or perhaps our minds were drawn to a particular
event or encounter,
a moment in time in which we failed to love God
or neighbor.
We recognize our tendency to seek out goods
without God,
our willingness to listen to anything or anyone
which promises an easy life
if only we will lay aside that which is right
in God’s eyes.
And even if we did not recognize these things
in ourselves,
(and that is highly unlikely)
then at least we must have recognized
that the human race itself is guilty of these things
and, hopefully drew the conclusion
that if we are human, then we ourselves are
implicated.
And we received the sign of disintegration,
to accept the fact that we have no integrity,
not in the sense of always being dishonest
but in the sense that there is no fixing what
should be fixed,
no way to untangle the web
which has been woven by us and in us and among
us.
The human project has
We receive the sign of dissolution,
the sign of destruction,
not simply as a harbinger of some future time
but as an acknowledgment of a present reality.
But to accept the ashes in the shape of a cross,
is to say that there is hope,
not in all the king’s horses and all the king’s
men,
for that is to trust in human ability to fix
what cannot be fixed.
No self-help program nor scientific progress
nor spiritual discipline
can put us back together again.
The message of Lent is not ‘Be a better person.’
The message of Lent is not the improvement of
the human condition.
The message of Lent is
‘Return to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.’
God comes anew to his creation to restore it.
re-integrates what had been disintegrated,
not by a project but by a person.
In the cross of Jesus Christ,
he accomplishes the salvation from sin, death,
and evil
that no earthly power could.
As we will sing on Sunday,
No strength of ours can
match his might!
We would be lost, rejected.
But now a champion comes
to fight
whom God himself
elected.
Ask who this may be?
Lord of hosts is he!
Jesus Christ, our Lord,
God’s only Son, adored.
He holds the field
victorious!
And so on Ash Wednesday
we abandon our optimism.
Being optimistic is not a Christian virtue.
The ashes on our forehead bely any optimism.
As it was for old Humpty of nursery-rhyme fame,
there’s no putting us back together again.
But, whether we’ve never turned to God before
or have turned to God many times,
we turn as if for the first time to God in
hope,
hearing the words,
Now is the acceptable time,
now is the day of salvation!
We turn to know again
just what God can do with broken people,
what life can follow death.
