Ash Wednesday Reflections

Ash Wednesday is one of the highlights of my year.

I’ll never forget the first time I participated in an Ash Wednesday service. It was my first year at Point Loma, and I was working on Jim Manker’s youth staff at San Diego First Church of the Nazarene. Jim is the best youth pastor I’ve ever known, and I made it a priority to watch and learn everything he did. When late February/early March rolled around (I forget when exactly Ash Wednesday fell that year) Jim told the teens that next week, they’d be participating in an Ash Wednesday service. They didn’t seem to know much about what it was, and, frankly, neither did I! The service was unlike anything else I had ever experienced: dark, quiet, contemplative, and more than anything else, mysterious. That night I was reminded that I was a sinner, that I was finite, and that I was in need of grace more than ever.

You know, I don’t think holiness makes much sense separated from routine times of confession, such as Ash Wednesday. I’ve heard people say that “holiness folks” should not participate in Ash Wednesday services (I’ve also heard them say that we shouldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer. Imagine that….) but I think that the exact opposite is actually the truth. Holiness folks must [read an encouragement, not a demand] participate in Ash Wednesday, and in Lent.

Every year since, in locations around the world, I’ve had ashes imposed upon my forehead as a symbol of my mortality, my fallen, sinful nature, and my dependence upon the grace of God. “Remember it was from dust you were created, and to dust you shall return.” This is the possibly the most true statement of mortality that can be made. Mortality, therefore, is defined by these two things: createdness, and death. The journey of Lent, which begins anew each year on Ash Wednesday, is a journey through these two realities, made all the more stark in that it is a journey conducted under the shadow of the cross. And yet, no journey that is darkened by the shadow of the cross of our Lord is complete until the darkness is chased away, forever, in the glorious light and life of the resurrection. For this reason, we proclaim the mystery of our faith, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.”

Ash Wednesday is a humbling experience, it is a sobering experience, and it is an experience that should instill in each and every one of us the hope of the resurrection of our Lord and Savior - the firstborn from the dead – and therefore our own.

So, in the end, Ash Wednesday is about hope, plain and simple. Collectively and individually we remember our status as created beings, dependent upon a creator; we are forced to accept that our lives, grand or mundane, are finite and will end; and thus we learn the stuff of the hope that is the Christian faith.