Such a fitting day to consider Bible Reading and Prayer. We begin Lent and the rest of our lives with a quiet, prayerful, solemn service of prayer. We tell God we are sorry our lives are out of sync with God’s will, we pledge to explore hard matters for the next six weeks, and a minister presses dark ashes onto our foreheads. A strange, lovely hopefulness in these ashes: after Cain killed his brother Abel, he was “marked” (Genesis 4:15) – both to exhibit his guilt, but also so he would be protected. A mark of guilt, and hope.
In Bible times, ashes were used as a potent symbol of remorse, grief and repentance. “I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and supplications with fasting and sackcloth and ashes” (Daniel 9:3). Having lost everything, and in utter despair before God, Job “sat among the ashes” (Job 2:8) – and later he repented “in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). When Israel had deserted God, Jeremiah summoned the nation to “gird on sackcloth, roll in the ashes” (Jeremiah 6:26).
Ashes are the sign of our humble humanity, as we are made of dust (Genesis 2:7), and to dust we will return (Genesis 3:19). Ashes are the residue of fire, evidence of what was but is now lost, and yet what remains – a perfect symbol for our broken existence with no hope except in God. Ashes were what remained after sacrifices were offered on the altar – again a perfect symbol for our giving our lives entirely over to God.
We over-individualize our praying all the time, forgetting we are in good company with our fellow human beings! I love it then that on Ash Wednesday, you don’t meet alone with the pastor to have ashes applied to your forehead. You stand in a line with others. Humbling – and hopeful. We’re not alone. We all sin. In fact, it’s the other people who prompt some of the sinning! And we need one another to live into forgiveness and healing.
That’s why John Wesley required Methodists to meet in groups where each person had to answer the question “How have you sinned since we were last together?” Others listened, prayed, supported, then confessed themselves. The devil would rather us duke it out alone! Dietrich Bonhoeffer was spot on: “Sin wants to be alone with people. The more lonely people become, the more destructive the power of sin over them. The more deeply they become entangled in it, the more unholy is their loneliness.”
I’m reading a fascinating book about medieval Jewish theology, including a thoughtful discussion of how, in the Jewish liturgy, the confession isn’t “I have sinned,” or even “We have sinned,” but “We and our ancestors have sinned.” We happily cling to family treasures, good genes, and inherited money, but their sins can’t be our responsibility, can they? We are forever bonded to the Communion of Saints, and their sins, even though they’ve been forgiven, live on in our world.
Take big crises in our world: Gaza vs. Israel, or the SAF vs. RSF in Sudan. People didn’t start sinning yesterday. They’re still floundering and trapped in generational conflict, in the residue of ancestral sin. In our culture, we never know how to resolve and heal generations-long sins of anti-Semitism, racism, gender bias… the list goes on and on. As I’ve said to you, it’s not that I mess up and God forgives me. I’m a mess. We’re in a mess, one not of our own making. That’s our fallen, sinful world in which we cry out for God’s mercy – not just for me, or those in church with me, but others, all the others, all who continue to struggle in the debris of what’s not been of God for a very, very long time.
And so we come to Ash Wednesday as prayerful Bible readers, increasingly aware of our brokenness, yet with a heightened if desperate reliance on God’s mercy, which we and the world need more than ever. So my friends, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”
James