Ashes to Sunlight, Revisited

Today is Ash Wednesday--the day in the traditional liturgical calendar when Christians gather at their parishes to offer confession and repentance for their sins, and to have ashes imposed upon their foreheads as a sign of that repentance.

Ashes are also a sign of death and mourning--and as such make an appropriate symbol for a day centered around the confession of sins--sins that Paul says the wages of which are indeed death.

I considered such a (for me, extremely) orthodox angle for my Ash Wednesday sermon that I will be delivering in just a few hours. Ultimately, I decided not to, electing instead to discuss the nature of evil and its role in our lives as borne out in the story of the temptation in the wilderness in Luke 4. But, for better or for worse, the idea of sin = death is still an idea that gets kicked around in the ol' noggin this time every year.

When I came here to Longview, I entitled my first sermon series "From Ashes to Sunlight," as a nod towards the mythical phoenix that was the partial inspiration behind the Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes's book "The Phoenix Affirmations," on which I based the sermon series. Mythology says that out of ashes, a new thing is reborn. Out of the dust of death, life is created. (Cue "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King.)

But compound this meaning of rebirth with the symbolism the ashes have for mourning--whether it is the mourning of a person, or an event, or of a point in time. I have to think that across the board, my fellow mainline clergy and denominations are mourning the passing of their heydays of the mid-20th century, when all they had to do was throw open their doors, and the people would fill the pews. You did not have to work at marketing through media, or interacting with people on Facebook or Twitter (or Blogger!), you could focus on other, more tried-and-true aspects of ministry that had stood the test of time--the sermon, the Sunday School class, the Wednesday night Bible Study.

But those days, and those ways of doing church, have long since gone the way of the dodo bird. We may be trying to rebirth something out of the ashes, but that something is the phoenix of old, the church of the 1950s, not the church of the 2010's. We are trying to create the exact same phoenix as what once flew, not the new phoenix that is crying out to be created.

So, if we impose ashes upon ourselves on this day, let it be as a sign of our mourning, yes, but not for the mourning of our church and what might have been if we had played our cards right in the '70s and '80s. Let it be in mourning for what we still could be doing today but aren't. Let it be in mourning for the people here at home, and the people across the world over, who still suffer the foolishness and pain of oppression and inequality. Let it be in mourning for the church that has seen its moral authority decay not from declining membership, but by misuse of its own power in abuse scandals and financial improprieties, for that is real sin. Letting your membership decline is inept, but not evil. Ash Wednesday, at its core, is about mourning our evils, not our incompetence.

Even though those two may well often feel like one and the same to you--sometimes, they do to me as well. But it is important to know the difference.

God's blessings to all of you as you begin your Lenten season!

Yours in Christ,
Eric