(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Life In Ashes”,
originally shared on February 18, 2026. It was the 399th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams
of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
We know all too well in Southern California that ashes are the refuse of
destructive fires. Today, we’re going to find out how ashes can also be signs
of new life.
It’s come with some chilly
weather, too, at least chilly for us.
Snow is accumulating in the
mountains. You can go there if you want to, or you can just look at it and
enjoy it from afar.
Which reminds me of a visitor
to a deep southern state who passed by a church that had a nativity scene
displayed out front for Christmas. All the wisemen, a common image in the
Church’s just ended season of Epiphany, were dressed like firefighters.
The visitor had to know what
that was about, so he went back to the church office and said to the secretary,
“I was just driving by, and I had to come in and ask, ‘Why are the wisemen in
your nativity scene wearing firefighter clothes?’”
“Well, that’s just the trouble
with you Northerners,” she said. “You don’t know your Bible!”
“What?” said the visitor.
She answered, “The Bible
clearly says that the wisemen came from a ‘far.” 😊
Some of us could use a ‘far
this week to keep us warm. But, instead, today, we will be receiving ashes.
I grew up in Wisconsin where
it’s said that there are four seasons: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and
Road Construction, and I used to go jogging outdoors. I would dress in layers
and run all through the winter as long as the temperature outside was above 20
degrees below zero.
When I came to my first church
in California and winter came, people asked me if I was still running outside
now that it had gotten so cold. It was 60 degrees outside!
What we think of as cold
weather depends on what we’re used to.
And, as the Norwegians say,
“There’s no such thing as bad weather. There’s just inadequate clothing.”
On Ash Wednesday, instead of
clothing, we will learn to put on Christ, and see what that looks like.
The Gospel reading for today
that will be read in the vast majority of churches in the world is another
section from the words of Jesus to the crowds in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew
6:1-6, 16-21,
This reading begins with these
words, in verse 1,
“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by
them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
Jesus then warns against giving
alms (“alms” is money given to the poor after your offerings) to make yourself
look good, and against praying in public to make yourself look good, and
against making a suffering-face when you fast for religious reasons in order to
make yourself look good.
Then he warns against trusting
in your accumulated wealth but instead advocates for giving it away to send it
to heaven so that your heart might be in the right place. As in, “You can’t
take it with you. But you can send it on ahead.”
We read and hear these things,
and then we put ashes right on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday and we wear them
in front of each other!
And many of us will be going
straight home after our Ash Wednesday worship service at night, but some
Christians will get their ashes earlier in the day and will be wearing them
everywhere they go, all day. Either way, we wear them in front of each other,
right after we have just heard Jesus say, “Beware of practicing your piety
before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from
your Father in heaven.”
But wait a minute. Let’s take a
closer look at those verses.
Each one of Jesus’ warnings in Matthew
6:1-6 and 16-21 is not about our actions, but about our motivation
for those actions, not about what we do but about the “why’s?” that are
behind them.
When we act “in order to be
seen by them”, or “so that they may be praised by others”, or “so that they may
be seen by others”, or “so as to show others”, we are acting to serve ourselves.
Is it wrong to give money, or to
pray, or to deny ourselves for the sake of the Gospel, or even to accumulate
wealth? “Yes”, when we do those things for ourselves, and not to glorify God.
We are spiritually poor when we are not materially rich toward others.
And, “No”, when we do those
things to glorify God. We are spiritually rich when God lives in our hearts,
our true selves.
That’s why a character says, at the climax of T.S. Eliot’s play/poem “Murder in the
Cathedral”, “The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the
wrong reason.”
The Christian life
is lived in response to the new life that God has given us in faith. It
comes from within, from the inside, out.
Doing the right
things to appease or to satisfy God, or to look good to others, is a betrayal
of that gift. The only thing that matters in our lives is what comes from our
transformed hearts. That’s why Jesus was always knocking heads with the
Pharisees.
Faith is what the Christian
life is about. What we do comes as the result of our faith, of what is
inside us, from our true selves.
Study after study for decades
has found that 80-85% of Christians come to faith through the influence of a
friend or relative, someone whose is seen has having nothing to gain
personally, whose words are credible to them.
We are the first Bible some
people will ever read. God doesn’t see us that way. But people do. How will
people read you?
Today is a good day to think
about that. Lent starts today. Lent is the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and
Easter, but excluding Sundays, which are like little Easters. Lent is a season
to reflect on living the Christian life, and of being led to repentance and to
turning that reflection into faithful action.
Lent is about living in ashes.
It’s about knowing that we are sinners, about knowing that we are dust and to
dust we shall return, it’s about knowing that though we live in ashes, they are
signs of our salvation.
Jesus went through the fire for
us. We have been made pure at the cross.
Some of us will give things up
for Lent, and others will add certain things to make us more open to the work
of God within us, recreating us, defining us, freeing us.
Though we live in ashes, they
are a sign of our salvation. Lent is a time to grow!
The religious Law was fulfilled
in Jesus Christ. The religious Law is now written in our hearts. When we live
as a new Creation of God, motivation is everything.
Before pop-tops, beer and soda
cans had rims on both ends of the can and had to be opened with a special
pry-tool that made a triangular hole on one side of the can to drink from and
another hole on the other side to allow air to flow in in order to let a person
drink from the can.
When pop-tops made their
appearance, my grandfather on my father’s side didn’t like them. He said they
made the beer taste funny. So, he would drive all over town looking for the
places that still sold beer in the plain old cans. One day, my dad said to his
dad, “Why don’t you just turn the can upside down?” 😊
Do you remember, or know, what
people called the tool used to open soda and beer cans before pop-tops? A
church key. 😊
What’s the key to understanding
Ash Wednesday?
Turn it upside down. Ashes come
from fire. Ash Wednesday is a reminder that worship is not some vague spiritual
practice. Worship is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is active, its
presence as tongues of fire over the heads of the apostles brought the
Christian Church into being. It brings the means of life and salvation to all
who receive it! It is our strength!
Have
you been watching the Winter Olympics?
The athletes have had to struggle to be
where they are, many since childhood. Some have endured great personal
tragedies, injuries and set-backs, even deaths of those close to them, yet they
endured.
The ancient Olympic Games began
in 776 B.C. and ended in 393 A.D. They were a big deal, and Olympic sports
would have been familiar to Paul.
Athletes didn’t compete for
medals, but for a crown of olive or laurel tree leaves. That’s where our
expression for honors as “laurels” comes from.
Paul refers to Olympic sports
more than once in the New Testament, but I’d just like to highlight one, 1
Corinthians 9:24-27:
24 Do you not know
that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in
such a way that you may win it. 25 Athletes
exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath,
but we an imperishable one. 26 So I do not run
aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; 27 but
I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself
should not be disqualified.
Notice that Paul didn’t
describe athletic events from the point of view of a spectator, but as a
participant. That is who we are during Lent.
It’s like what happens when we worship.
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish
philosopher and theologian, once reflected on people who go to a worship
service and sit there as spectators, as at a movie or a play. They expect to
get something. But that’s consumerism, not worship.
The question to ask,
Kierkegaard said, when worship is over is not, “What did I get out of that?”
but “How did I do?”
We live and work and worship like
an Olympic athlete in response to what God has given us at the cross: an
imperishable crown of forgiveness of sins, and life and salvation.
Ash Wednesday is a reminder
that death is not the end, it’s the gate to another way of living.
We have already died with
Christ in our Baptism. It’s done. Eternal life has already begun for us, it’s
just yet to be made perfect, as Paul says in Romans 6:4-6,
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried
with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the
dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
Jesus warns against
accumulating wealth because we tend to put wealth at the center of our lives
and put our trust in it and not in God. We tend to hoard it and to not be
generous with it. And, in Jesus’ day, many people believed that if you had a
lot of money, it was because you were a good person and God was blessing you,
so you wanted to hang onto your money.
But Jesus says that the
Christian life is about a living relationship with the one true living God,
lived out in response to the great grace God has already given us in
Jesus Christ.
We don’t live to impress others
with our goodness. We live freely as the new creations God has made us to be.
We are blessed, but we are
blessed to be a blessing, not to show off our righteousness or to serve
ourselves.
That’s why Jesus can say what
he does about not making a show of your religiosity in today’s Gospel reading
and can also say, in Matthew 5:16,
“In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may
see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
Ash Wednesday is a reminder to
us that we live in the same world, but in a different environment than non-believers.
We live in an environment where
we can hear the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall
return” and be filled with a sense of faith, and not fear.
We live in an environment where
we see, in the ashes of Ash Wednesday, creation and decomposition from Adam and
Eve, humility from Abraham before God, and sorrow from Jeremiah over the coming
destruction of Jerusalem.
But we also see in ashes a
sign. The ashes that are placed on our foreheads are drawn in the sign of the
cross, the sign of our salvation, on the same spot and with the same cross shape
placed on our foreheads at our baptism. They come with the declaration that we
have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ
forever.
The world may see destruction
and death in ashes, but we see something else: the restoration of life as it
was intended to be lived from the very beginning, lived as the fruit, the
natural outcome of our transformed lives in the fire of the Holy Spirit
described by Paul in Galatians 5:22-23,
22 By contrast, the fruit of the
Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control.
There is no law against such things.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning
of our 40-day Lenten journey towards the gift of the cross on Good Friday and
the victory of the resurrection on Easter Sunday over everything that defies
God.
The world is full of ashes in
Israel and the Palestinian territories, in Ukraine and Russia, North and South
Sudan, and in a thousand other places around the globe.
But today, on Ash Wednesday, we
are given the sign of the cross drawn on our foreheads in ashes, as a sign that
in death there is life. It is the gift of God to all who will receive it.
From nothing comes everything: the cross of Jesus Christ, given to you for the hope of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment