In our first lesson today, Joel is calling the people back to the Lord; encouraging a time of fasting, prayer and repentance. We too are being called to re-examine our own commitment to God.
Our Christian heritage comes out of the Jewish culture, and their culture and identity is wrapped around their God. Jewish piety is communal in nature – their future is affected by the actions of the group. They succeed or fail as a group. For Jews, piety means giving alms, praying and fasting.
Joel calls us to fast and weep and mourn – to rend our hearts and not our clothing. For a Jew to tear his clothing was a demonstration of great emotional turmoil – heart rending anguish – over something that has happened or over something they have done - sometimes an acknowledgement of guilt.
Christians have a tendency to be more individualistic in their approach to God and to piety. Although the Anglican ideal is that we are saved through the church – through the whole, we also understand that we each must take responsibility for our individual behavior. I have often fallen into the trap of thinking that I’m not so bad – I do a lot of things right – I’m generally not mean to people. Yet when measured against the holiness of God, I fall miserably short of the perfection of God, and my selfish nature often causes me to choose myself over others in the ordinary course of life.
Jesus believed in, and participated in communal or public prayer and worship as was and is fitting and right. But at the same time he taught against ostentatious private prayer in public. The examples he gives are that we are to give alms, to pray and to fast, but we are never to make a public show of these things.
We gather as a group to remember what God has done – to remember who we are – to remember who God is and why we care. Our practice of piety should be based on his love and not thoughts of praise or reward. God has committed himself to us and the sign of that commitment is the cross on which Jesus died.
In just a few minutes, you are going to come forward to be marked with the sign of the cross – a sign that we accept what Jesus did for us on the cross, and that we are members of his body here on earth. The ashes are what is left over after fire passes over or through something – they are dead and lifeless – not much different from the dust of the earth. But we also remember that God formed us out of the dust of the earth and it is God who breathed life into that dust to create humankind. Without that breath of God, we are nothing – we do not exist.
And so the ashes are placed on your head in the form of a cross – the cross that is the life giving symbol of God’s love for us. The downstroke of the cross is an “I” representing me – all that is uniquely me – all my strengths and weaknesses – my talents and my sin. It is all that I am and all that I stand for. The cross bar is placed to remind us of Jesus with his outstretched arms. It crosses out “me” and places Jesus between me and God’s punishment. As a sign of our repentance, we are forgiven and marked as Christ’s own. We each walk out of here bearing the cross of Jesus – the sign that we are his forever. Amen.
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