Finding Hope Amid the Ashes

When our family lived in Wadsworth before I was called to St. Peter, we owned a house which was built in the 1880s. A lot had been done to update the structure, but a few parts of the house were very much like they were in the late 19th century. One of those largely unchanged parts was the basement walls. They were made of fieldstone and they leaked profusely whenever it rained or when the snow melted and saturated the ground. The water wormed its way through the porous stones and came in at a multitude of points. A sump pump prevented the basement from flooding, but it was often impossible to do laundry without walking through broad streams flowing across the floor.
Waterproofing the basement was not financially feasible, so we decided to paint the basement walls with a waterproofing paint. For several days I labored to coat the rugged walls. I applied two coats. In places I knew to be especially leak prone, I added a third and even a fourth coat. When I finished the job, we waited for the first substantial rain. When at last it came, I discovered just how porous the wall was. Water seeped out of the rock in spite of the paint. In fact, water leaked from new areas, places from which it had never flowed before. Some of those places were directly adjacent to the areas that had been treated with three or four coats of paint. Finding its accustomed route blocked, the water, “insistent and insidious,” had found new channels, new fissures and undetectable holes to flow through. 
The English professor and poet John Leax, reflecting on a similar struggle with water, found insight into the human condition. An incessant leak in the rural New York cabin where he did his writing left small puddles on his desk disrupting his work. Despite his best efforts, the leak could not be found. Nor could it be thwarted by his intensive efforts at caulking. 
On a February morning so cold the water had turned to ice on his desk, Leax wrote in his journal:    
Today as I waited for it to melt, I saw it as an analogy for the way sin, as subtle as water, finds the hidden cracks in my life, flows to the center of my work, and disrupts the wholeness of all my relationships. That is a good analogy to consider on Ash Wednesday, for an awareness of sin and a determination to be cleansed is the order of this day. 
Ash Wednesday is a day for confronting our sin, and our mortality, and for opening ourselves to the healing, transforming power of the Holy Spirit, so that we may be changed. Indeed, this is the meaning of the ashes. Ashes are a traditional symbol of repentance. Recall how the people of Nineveh covered themselves (and their animals!) with ashes after hearing Jonah’s message of judgement. Ashes are also a symbol of our mortality. Recall the traditional words of a funeral service: “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” These are twin truths of our existence: we are mortal and will die, and we are sinners, who, try as we might, cannot get it right, who can’t find and caulk all of the cracks, who can’t cover up the leaks and the ugliness with a fresh coat of paint. 
Ashes also symbolize one more thing: our desire to be changed, to be restored to right relationship with God and one another. Repentance isn’t merely being sorry; it is also a corresponding desire to change, to do better, to do right instead of wrong. If you remember in Jonah, the people not only covered themselves in ashes but also ceased to act violently and unjustly. So today is about acknowledging our sin and mortality and opening ourselves to God’s forgiving love and transforming grace.
We very much need God’s love and grace. As Leax suggests, sin is subtle, insistent and insidious. It finds its way in and disrupts our lives, our relationships and the lives of others. Sin is not just the things we do. More essentially, it is an orientation, an existential reality, a basic flaw in our selves: we do not love God with the totality of our being, we do not trust and obey. At core, sin is the state of being out of proper relationship with God. It is the soul curved in upon itself, and thus away from God.  And because we do not love God properly, we also fail to love our neighbors as ourselves. In truth, sometimes we do not even love our selves properly, becoming either narcissistic and selfish in our self-infatuation or else falling into a sense of worthlessness and self-recrimination. Sin is the failure of love, the state of separation from God and neighbor.
David knew about this. Psalm 51 is David’s prayer of repentance written after the prophet Nathan confronted him about his massive abuse of power in which he first committed adultery with Bathsheba—likely coercing her against her will—and then arranged to have her husband Uriah killed to cover it up. But David realized that his real problem wasn’t simply lust, adultery and 2nd degree murder. Those sins, as heinous as they were, were in fact the tip of the iceberg . They were symptoms of the deeper problem. David uses three different words to speak of his sinful condition: “Transgressions,” which means rebellions; “iniquity,” literally meaning bent out of shape; and “sin,” meaning to miss the mark. David’s sinful acts spring from the fact that he is essentially rebellious, his hearted twisted away from God and good, so that he cannot do the good even when he aims at it. He is broken (v. 17) and cannot fix himself. So he pleads to be re-created by God: Create in me a clean heart, and put a right spirit within me (v. 10). His help must come from God. He cannot make himself whole. He cannot renew himself. Only God can do these things.
Jesus, in our Gospel reading, reminds us that sin is so insidious, that it can infiltrate and twist even good actions and attitudes. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving were (and are) basic spiritual practices; Jesus is not condemning them, indeed, he often commends all three. Instead, he is condemning doing the right deed for the wrong reason. If you give, or pray or fast because you want others to see you and praise you, well, that is the only reward you will receive. You will not please God, because you are not acting out of love for God. Spiritual hypocrisy turns acts of devotion to God into acts of promotion of self. So, if we wear ashes on our forehead or hand, or a cross around our neck, or put money in the offering plate in order for others to see us, in order to impress people with our piety, then we are in fact sinning. Our good deeds spring from corrupt motives. But if we wear ashes because we are truly repentant and know we desperately need God’s help, if we wear a cross because it reminds us who and whose we are, if we give our money or time to help the poor and suffering out of genuine concern and love, then we living out our faith. 
However, it’s a fine line and we often step over it. I have to agree with Martin Luther’s assessment of himself: my motives are never pure, or, if they start out pure, selfishness soon creeps in. But, the church isn’t for the perfect; it’s for the broken; it isn’t for the sincere and consistent, it’s for the hypocrites. The church isn’t a club for the spiritually healthy; it’s a hospital for sinners.       
And that’s the good news this Ash Wednesday: God is a God of steadfast love, a God of salvation. Because of this great love for us, God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self. God came to us in Jesus in order to repair our broken relationships. John Leax’s insights from the unseen leak in his cabin did not stop with seeing an analogy for sin. He went on to say, “Almost as soon as I drew the analogy of sin infiltrating like water, my imagination leaped ahead to another: Christ the living water infiltrating, coming on his own even when we are unaware, uninviting, to bring life to the land.” Christ, the living water who gives life to all who will drink—in the face of our sin and mortality, this is cause for hope.
Brian Erickson tells of a young woman who came up to him one October day and thanked him for the service held on the morning of Ash Wednesday, nearly seven months before. She had never been to such a service before and at first didn’t know what to make of it. However, as the day passed, it began to have a big impact on her. She told him:
“But that whole day was so powerful for me, walking around with that big black mark on my forehead. The more I thought about it, and still think about it, I began to feel so…hopeful. I know that sounds strange, but that service felt so honest. I am not the person I want to be, and deep down I know that, but most church services just feel like strung-out apologies. But since that day, I just feel like God can change me. That God wants to change me. And that feels hopeful.”              
Yes, this is a day of ashes. We are not who we want to be. We are not who God created us to be. The ashes remind us of these truths. But those ashes are applied in the shape of a cross, the cross of Christ. Even amid the ashes of our lives there is hope, for Christ is present. That cross marks us as Jesus’ brothers and sisters, as beloved children of God. That cross on our foreheads reminds us that the living water of Jesus seeps into our lives, more subtle and insistent than sin, bring cleansing, refreshment and new life. If we only give God the smallest of cracks this Lenten season, then God’s love will find its way into our hearts and began to recreate us. This is the good news of Ash Wednesday and it is cause for hope and rejoicing.