Great-grandparents remember Word War II, when over 400,000 of their friends and family died on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. For the rest of us, who were not alive then, we’ve never faced a time like this, when hundreds of thousands of our friends, family, and neighbors are dying. This pandemic has forced each of us to grapple daily with our own mortality, when a visit from a chatty, unmasked neighbor can result in contraction of a deadly disease.
Fortunately, for those of us who have worshipped on Ash Wednesday before, the church has prepared us for this moment. Each year, you are reminded of your mortality, the sin that is killing you, and the true life that goes beyond death in Jesus Christ. Usually, I will impose ashes on your forehead in the sign of a cross and speak to you the words above from Genesis 3. The sign recalls the cross in water and oil made on your forehead at your baptism; the message is that we will all die, and only in Christ will we truly live.
This year, we are joining together with St. Andrews to celebrate the ritual with an even more ancient symbol. Bishop J. Neil Alexander writes, “It was in England, in the eleventh century, that we have evidence of the sprinkling of ashes on all of the faithful, noted there in the writings of the Aelfric, the Abbot of Eynsham.” Oh, poor Aelfric, I knew him Horacio. In these earliest rituals, ashes were sprinkled on the heads of the people, deeply symbolic of the dust to which we all will return, the dirt that will be shoveled on our graves.
Being reminded of our mortality can be bleak, but in the context of worship of Jesus Christ, it gives us hope. Our hope is not in our bodies, our capabilities, or our health. Our hope is in the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Our bodies fail us, our wills are weak, and our minds lead us astray. But by God’s grace we can hope to make a meaningful impact on the world, to touch people and show them love that makes a difference. We can have a legacy in God’s love, so that when our bodies rest under the ground, love and grace live on. And our souls rest content in the love of Christ, in blessed hope that we will be resurrected to eternal life with glorified bodies no longer made from earth, but a combination of heaven and earth together.
