Author’s note: This was the 2021 Ash Wednesday sermon offered at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in St. Petersburg, FL. It’s genesis was in reflecting on the experience of a childhood neighbor’s house fire, fires built for comfort, and the fires of cremation. In each case, new life came from the ashes.

Ashes.
They’re what’s left over, the remnant of something that once was.

Digging through the ash of a house fire, you see it on the face of the family.  The disbelief.  The shock.  The wonder.  What was all this?  Do I even remember?

Ashes.
 They’re the memory of another time.

Closing the flue in the morning after a romantic evening.  Feeling the cold draft stir the little hairs on your arm like a lover’s breath.  The violence of an iron shovel banging against a bucket full of ash signaling the end of what was and the beginning of what will be.

Ashes.
 They’re the carbon memoir of our life.

How far we’ve come.  Placing the shiny, pristine urn in the uneven hole in the ground.  So different from that iron bucket of long ago that bespoke a recollection of love.  A thought.  Why in death do we seek to purify the untidiness of life?  Why now, at the end of a time, when before we had all the time in the world?

Ashes.
 They’re the earthen reminder of our future death.

The priest’s words are sobering as the cross is smudged on our foreheads.  You ask yourself, did you feel this way last year?  What is different?  Another year.  That much closer to our end.  I think of my sin.  Sometimes with shock.  Sometimes with wonder.  Sometimes with confusion.  What was all this?  Do I even remember?

Ashes.
 They recall us to the life we have now.

There is still time.  I am very much alive today.  Today, I get to wipe these ashes off.  May I not do so casually.  May that action recall to me my life and all that I hold dear. May I look up after receiving these ashes and see, really see, God’s new creation. There is still time. There is still time.

Ashes.
 They point us back to what really matters.

When we look around today and see both those with besmudged foreheads and those whose brows are clean, we remember, somehow, we’re all in this together.  It’s our relationships that matter and these ashes cry out to us with the fury of the fire that created them to remember!  To remember that we will die, and when we die we’ll return to the dust.  But it is not yet.   To remember that we have now, we have this time, to mend our relationships with one another and with God.  Literally, to repent, to turn around, and go again towards life. 

Ashes.
 Cold.  Inert.  Lifeless.  But also…

...a proper foundation.  With contrition’s nascent heat and the breath of repentance, they become the bed of coals giving substance and strength to the fledgling, flickering flames of resurrection fire.

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