Receiving Ashes

A Reflection for Ash Wednesday at Outer Banks Presbyterian Church, Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

February 14, 2018 Thomas E Wilson, Celebrant

Receiving Ashes

It is a strange thing for me to be here this day at the Outer Banks Presbyterian Church and doing an Ash Wednesday service with ashes. My Mother was raised a Presbyterian in Youngstown, Ohio in the Scottish Covenanter Tradition. The minister of the church she attended was from Northern Ireland who would find an opportunity in almost every sermon to warn about the Papist threat and the selling out of the Old Covenanter Tradition. There is a story told about when the King of Scotland and England, Charles I, had his Archbishop, William Laud, try to force the Scottish Church to accept the English Prayer Book, Bishops, and the Episcopalian form of Governance. At St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh on July 23, 1637, when the Dean was reading the order from Laud during the Sunday service, a woman named Janet Geddis who was sitting on a three- legged stool stood up, threw the stool at the Dean, and shouted, “Villain, you wanna say mass in my lock; you won’t say mass in my ear.” Archbishop Laud was later executed by Parliament in 1645 with a little help from ticked off Presbyterians and Puritans. My mother’s family remembered with pride that one her family’s Covenanter ancestors, standing up for what he called his “freedom of conscience”, was executed during the “Killing Times” of 1683.

My mother came as a Junior transfer student to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, within months she fell in love with – horrors - a nice Roman Catholic young man from Asheville and brought him home to meet her parents. They loved their daughter and accepted my father out of that love. His parents accepted my mother out of love. They were married by a more accommodating Presbyterian minister in the rose garden of my grandparents’ summer home in Pennsylvania. After my father came back from service in World War II, my parents split the difference and raised their four children as Episcopalians. Neither set of grandparents ever attended the Episcopal Church when they visited for they held on to their own conscience, but I was taken by my grandparents’ to their Presbyterian church during my summers in Pennsylvania and taken to Roman Catholic Mass at my other grandmother’s church while visiting my cousins in New Jersey. I come to you today not to try to convert you but to share something I love.

In the Jewish tradition in which Jesus was raised, ashes were placed on the head for three different reasons - as a sign of (a) mourning, (b) a sign of repentance and (c) as a sign of humility.

(a)Mourning was grieving in which sackcloth and ashes were used as desolation over all that had been lost. It was used by widows and widowers at the death of spouses, by those who had lost children, and by Kings and leaders during a national catastrophe. The idea was that the outward form should reflect the inward desolation.

(b)Repentance was called for when someone was aware of their need to turn to God, as in the story of the city of Nineveh, that great city, when Jonah called for repentance before the LORD.

(c)Humility was when one wanted to be reminded that, by the love of God, we humans were made out of the dust of the earth and to dust we shall return. It was often a sign of atonement for shows of arrogance toward neighbor or community.

In the early church when people committed sins, the outward and visible signs of choosing to be out of love and charity with their neighbors, they were excommunicated, following the advice of St. Paul to the Corinthians. The offending parties were allowed to rejoin the community after a period of time of public penance, wearing sackcloth and ashes as an outward sign of their inner turmoil. After a period of this time out, they were brought back to communion, and God’s peace was shared with them. At no time was this ever seen as a way to earn God’s love and forgiveness, for love and forgiveness are gifts of grace and as such cannot be earned.

The great Reformer John Calvin wrote in his Institutes that, while he did not approve of Priests being the only ones who could hear confessions, he did speak persuasively about the need for confession:

"To whom do we confess them? To Christ certainly. That is, if with an afflicted and humbled heart we bow ourselves before Him; if in true sincerity, rebuking and condemning ourselves before His face, we ask to be absolved by His goodness and mercy. Whoever makes this confession of heart before God will also no doubt have a tongue ready to confess, when there is need to proclaim God's mercy among the people. And this not only to disclose the secret of his heart to a single person, once, in the ear, but freely to make known his poverty as well as God's glory, more than a few times, publicly and with all the world hearing.”

Micah said, “What does the LORD require of you; to do justice, love mercy and walking humbly with your God.” To me, the accepting of ashes reminds me: (1) that I recommit myself to doing justice in this broken world. Too often I accept the status quo of injustice, exploitation, and greed. I am called to remember my own Baptismal vows to work for justice, freedom, and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being. (2) To love mercy and to care for my family, neighbor, and enemy and to forgive promiscuously as a gift which is not to be bartered for; and (3) to walk humbly to remember that I am loved outrageously by God and by Jesus who gave his life for me.

Emerging church leader Brian McLaren speaks of:

“The belief that God’s sphere of concern is not just the church, but all of creation. The church is God’s agent of transformation and healing for the sake of the world. . . ., the gospel is a transformation plan, not an evacuation plan. It is focused not on airlifting souls to heaven, but on transforming lives so they can be agents of God’s will being done “on earth as in heaven.” Those are easy words to say, but deeply challenging – and unsettling – and liberating – if we take them seriously.”

Now, if you are choosing to receive ashes as a way to show that you are a much better person than any others who did not show up here, then please, for the sake of your immortal soul, wash those ashes off as quickly as you can. We ask God to lead us not into temptation and rushing into temptation by pampering your religious pride is not something the LORD wants you to do, as you may have heard in the Gospel lesson for today.

If you feel pressured to go along with a nice little piece of religious fluff, don’t come up; life is too short to waste time on things that don’t mean anything. I believe in what my Presbyterian ancestors called “freedom of conscience” and, while I invite all of you to come forward, I must say “all may, some should and none must.”

Receiving Ashes

“Dust you are and to dust you shall return”

is a reminder to me of our God’s loving

act in all creation and in me life giving;

it was a sign of free gift not one to earn.

Dust isn’t worth a thing but is gathered

by the potter and fashioned into a vessel

for others to drink from deeply and nestle

into a divine love which is then slathered

onto friend and enemy alike freely given,

even if you didn’t ask for it with a please

or thank you, but with the Spirit’s breeze

sweeping away all so to be fully forgiven.

We’d come together from paths different

while we all swim in God’s same current.