Missing the ashes

I missed the ashes last Wednesday.

Don’t get me wrong: My wife and I privately prayed morning prayers.

I just didn’t attend an Ash Wednesday service.

The last time I did, people whispered that the Baptist preacher was converting to Catholicism. Far from doing that, I am firmly anchored in my Baptist moorings. I simply find times of spiritual recommitment healthy to spiritual growth.

And Ash Wednesday, marking the beginning of Lent, can prompt rededications of faith.

Lent is a reminder to me and many others of what the Christian life should be ALL the time. It has a way of recalibrating my Christian life, nudging me to a sometimes painful self- examination as I commit to specific actions of love that flow from God’s forgiving grace. Anything I give up or add on for the period of Lent holds the possibility of becoming a permanent fixture in the arena of my spiritual life.

But one thing remains the same whatever season it is: God’s love.

Participating in Lent is not an effort to persuade God to love me more. God doesn’t love me a lot when I am doing well in my spiritual life and just a little when I am doing poorly. As author Jerry Bridges has observed, “After throwing overboard our works as a means to salvation, we want to drag them back on board as a means of maintaining favor with God.”

God’s love is constant. A performance-based Christianity is grounded in doing; a grace-based Christianity is based on being, on believing, which inevitably leads in acts of love to and for others.

In response to the crowds who wanted Jesus to tell them what to do, Jesus’ admonition was frustrating to them: “This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the one he has sent” (John 6:28-29).

It was maddening to them just as it is for us; we had much rather be told what to do than to trust and believe in a God that who unconditionally loves us.

So, I miss the ashes because they remind me that like them, my life is messy and will one day end in my demise (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”), but despite my sinfulness, God still uses the likes of me anyway, just as he does those ashes, because the power of his love prevails.

“Let’s have our own Ash Wednesday service,” I suggested to my wife.

Her smile was her answer.

And so we did.

Taking turns, we read from the Ash Wednesday service in The Book of Common Prayer, and then kneeling on the footstool by the fireplace that was temporarily transformed into an alter, we prayed. For the ceremony of the ashes---we marked our foreheads with lump charcoal I grabbed from my grill.

It was just the two of us. But the quiet snow gently falling outside our window and the birds huddled in the branches of the trees nearby reminded us that we, like them, were not alone, that just as God’s eye is on the sparrow, he watches over us, and beyond what we could see, our simple penitence was applauded by a host of invisible witnesses.

We wore the ashes the rest of the evening, in preparation for the dawn of a new Day: Easter, out there, on the far distant horizon, beyond the Wicket Gate where the Shining Light reveals the Way, prompting a yearning within for what the Scriptures declare: He is here, even now…

…the Truth already living in our hearts.