A Homily for Ash Wednesday 2013 All
Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC February 13, 2013 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Before I went to bed a couple of nights ago, I was thinking
about Ash Wednesday. What do ashes mean? In ancient cultures, ashes were a sign
of mourning and of loss. The person who
experienced the loss would put ashes on his head and walk around dressed in
sackcloth because everybody knew that, if you suffered a loss, it must be that
God was punishing you, and you needed to repent so that God would feel sorry
for you.
However, as I was thinking of ashes, I remembered going to
Jericho and looking at the huge pit excavated by archeologists. There are
probably 20 layers of buildings shown in the pit going back to 9000 BC, which
could make it the oldest city in the world. Many of the layers show new cities
built on the ruins of the old, as the old building blocks were torn down and
replaced by a new structure as the town expanded. There are also several burn
layers, a thick layer of ashes which show that the city was destroyed in battle,
and the survivors had had to build all over again with a new layer of clay
bricks. I started to imagine the survivors digging into the ash layer to make a
flat surface and putting down the new layer of dry clay bricks in the hot sun,
brushing away the sweat of their brows with their ash-laden hands. But for the survivors of Jericho, ashes were
not a sign of mourning but a sign of rebuilding. They were survivors, and the
ashes were badges of honor as they said, “Today I build a new life with God’s
help. The past is over and only the present remains as we move into the future.”
After I fell asleep that night, I had a dream about my past.
I had this pile of stuff, and I was searching for the office I had forty years
ago. I kept going down hallways and up and down stairs and seemed to get no
closer to my old office. I realized that
the past was closed to me; I did not belong there,. and all the stuff I was
carrying around needed to be left in the past.
The original idea of Ash Wednesday and Lent was to be a way
for sinners in the Christian community to come back into the life of the
community, and they would be allowed to come back into the fold on Easter
Sunday. The problem was not the usual “hot blooded sins”, but the fact that
these people had betrayed the community during the time of persecutions. They
were the ones who had buckled under Roman pressure and had proclaimed “Caesar
as Lord”, instead of the Christian response “Jesus is Lord”, and had thrown a
pinch of incense into the fire at the public service of Roman Patriotism. They had
also given the names of fellow Christians to the authorities, people who were
then picked up and pressure put to bear on them. The Christian community was
divided into three camps. The first camp was the group who left town before the
persecution hit; they were usually the ones who would say things like, “Well,
if I had been here I would have resisted and not caved in!” The second camp was
those who did stay in town and underwent the persecution and suffered torture,
imprisonment, and death. The survivors were called “Confessors” for they had
confessed their faith. The third group
was those who had not been able to stand up to the pressure and capitulated.
When the first camp, the absentees, came back into town,
they looked at the second camp, the confessors, and thanked and honored them
for their sacrifice, and then they looked at the ones who had folded and
declared that they should no longer be allowed into the community of faith.
However, the confessors, knowing how close they had come to folding themselves,
said that they would talk to the ones who had folded and would guide them back
into the fold. The penance would last a tithe of a year- 40 days- and in that
time they would be excluded from Eucharist but be allowed to sit in the back of
the meeting place. On Easter they would be allowed to begin a new life.
The church liked this “confessor” system, and they
institutionalized it for all sorts of sins as Lent became a time for notorious
sinners to repent, and ashes were instituted as an outward and visible sign for
the penitents.
If you like to feel guilty, fine - but I like the idea that
ashes are a sign of rebuilding and asking for strength to grow in faith. All of
us screw up, but we are not called to dwell in the past. We are called to rise up and move forward. I
like the way the addicts in recovery
programs do it - they recognize that they are just one step away from a
relapse, but the point of a relapse is not to feel guilt but to be taken as a
sign that we need to work the program. Today I invite you to a Holy Lent where
we together work and rebuild the program of “Doing justice, loving mercy and
walking humbly with our God.”
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