At Bellingham Covenant Church, we celebrate Ash Wednesday on Sunday. (I guess that demonstrates our devotion to convenience.) The church service today was much like that of any other Sunday morning. We sang some songs, read from the gospel and listened to the pastor preach. Then we began the observance of Lent with “The Imposition of Ashes”. This little ceremony is not common in American Protestant churches. Actually, deliberate observation of Lent is a bit unusual, too. What we are attending to for the next 40 days is our mortality and our brokenness. The rest of the year we can forget about that but from now until Easter we remember.

So, back to the “Imposition of Ashes”. We accept a smudged cross on our forehead or hand and hear the words, “From dust you have come and to dust you will return. Repent and trust Jesus for your salvation.” Participation in this ritual is entirely optional in our congregation and a fair number of people sit this one out. Today, I got to join the pastors in marking and reminding the congregation. I had a little white bowl of ashes and as each person came up to me and knelt down, I made a cross of ashes on them and reminded them of their impermanence and their hope. We don’t ordinarily say such things to others. It felt like I was giving each one a special gift: this is your deepest fear and embarrassment and here is the escape provided for you. Let me explain. Even though we like to think we are completely okay, at a deep level we also know that there are parts of us that we can’t even bear to look at. On top of that, we don’t really believe in our own personal death, irrational as that may be. The remedy offered is simply turning away from our embarrassed mortality toward life offered by God.

Person after person knelt to receive the ashes. Each one became mortal in my sight. I wondered how it was for the elderly to hear, spoken aloud, “to dust you shall return”, and to be reminded of the decreasing number of days left to them. I wondered how it was for a man who we all know is very sick to hear those words. When I reminded the teenagers and older children that they were made from dust and would return to dust, I could see that those words were just beginning to make sense to them.

The next words, “Repent and trust Jesus for your salvation” felt like a blessing. Our long-term relationship to dust, is not the last word. It was a rare privelege to issue the age old invitation to trust the-one-who-can-save. There was a sense of holiness and wonder as words and ashes combined to draw people toward God.

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