Ash Wednesday - Skip Windsor

“The Sent Ones”

Ash Wednesday is more about subtraction than about addition.

The Imposition of ashes reminds us that what remains when everything else in our lives is taken away is our mortal bodies. And Ash Wednesday reminds us of our mortality.

In the burial service at the Committal, it begins with the words, “earth to earth, dust to dust…” What you and I think is permanent is really provisional and impermanent. In the little known and little used liturgy in the prayer book, The Rite of Reconciliation, a portion of the confession reads, “We are formed of dust in the image and likeness of God, and redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The epistle lesson today from the Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians begins with the words, “Be reconciled with God.” These words, I believe, ought to be our watchwords for us this Lent. We should be about the enterprise of reconciliation.

This work of reconciliation requires the stripping away of the false self, the petty insecurities that haunt us everyday. It means being open and vulnerable to God’s mercy and forgiveness. To be reconciled with God is to be redeemed, restored, and renewed in the likeness of Christ. In Christ, we are to be reconcilers with God. To be reconciled with and in God is to become, as the apostle Paul writes, “friends of God.”

Reconciliation is something we do – something that shapes and forms us through God’s grace and mercy. In the process of being reconciled in God through Christ’s example, you and I become “a new creation.”

The way to journey this Lent is through reconciliation. The cross of ashes on our foreheads reminds us that all things are possible through God in Christ. Through Christ, we become a new creation to be ambassadors and witnesses of God’s reconciling power and love with others. As reconcilers, we do not sit still, but go forth as representatives of Christ into the world.

As Paul writes, as ambassadors of God’s reconciling love and mercy, we are “the sent ones.”

The truth of these words became most clear to me while I was in Haiti last week. We baptized a one-year old girl named Lovemica. She was born in Leogane after last year’s earthquake and was not expected to live. But she did. This year we baptized Lovemica; and the words in baptism took on new meaning as we consider being made “a new creation” in Christ as the sign of the cross was made on her forehead, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

Marked and sealed. Being Christ’s own forever. As marked and sealed in Christ in baptism, we are not only one in Christ, and together, part of Christ’s body in Haiti, in Needham, in the world, but are to be the sent ones to be instruments of God’s reconciling power in the world.

This Lent, consider what “subtraction” is happening in your life and how it adds to your spiritual life as a reconciler, a friend of God, in the world. Paul says that as new creations in God, we are the sent ones to do God’s holy will. How will God be using you this Lent? Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of reconciliation. Now is the day to become a new creation in God in Christ. Amen.