Death in the Shape of a Cross (Ps 51)

(Meditation for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on Feb 10, 2016, Ash Wednesday)

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Smudged with Death

To walk through the church doors and have ash smudged upon your forehead: it is one of the strangest things we do all year. And perhaps one of the truest too. When we are born into this world, we are smudged with mortality, marked with the certainty that one day we will die. It’s not fashionable, of course, to say this in our world. Much of our lives are built around the illusion that we are in control. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Ash Wednesday is so important. For once, we drop the masks—literally, if we’ve been out celebrating Mardi Gras!—and we acknowledge the truth. We are not in control. We never have been. No one asked us to sign off on our entry into this world. No one will solicit our signature for our exit.

And it’s not only death over which we have no control. It’s also life itself. We fail sometimes. We knowingly do what is wrong sometimes. We make mistakes sometimes. Inside church walls, we call this stuff that robs us of life, “sin.” Outside, people just call it “brokenness.” Whatever we call it, it is the vicious truth that death is not only a physical reality over which we have no control. It is also a spiritual reality. The zombies on our television screens are not the only “walking dead.” We join their ranks whenever sin and brokenness have drained us of the goodness of life.

What then are we to do, smudged as we are with death? Much of our world simply lives in denial. Which is to say, much of our world is simply dying.

Smudged with Love

On Ash Wednesday, we confront the death and brokenness that terrorizes our world. And we do not deny it. On the contrary. We firmly rub the ash into our skin.

We do not deny our vulnerability and weakness. Instead we do a strange thing. We celebrate it. We hold our helpless hands up in surrender, trusting in the sacred Spirit from which life sprang in the first place, hoping against hope that a power deeper than death and brokenness will lift us up again; will “wash” us and “cleanse” us (Ps 51:2, 7), “create in [us] a clean heart,” “a new and right spirit” (Ps 51:10); will grant us rebirth. We firmly rub the ash into our skin. And we rub it in the shape of a cross—a symbol not only of death but of a love that triumphs over death and inspires new life.

On this Ash Wednesday, we are smudged with death. But death in the shape of a cross. Which means that, deep beneath that ashen cross, we are smudged with love. We are smudged with the promise of new life.

Thanks be to God. Amen.