Ash Wednesday Meditation
Daily Scripture Passage: Luke 18:9-14
“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” — Luke 18:13b
In 1973, Dr. Karl Menninger published a book that became an international sensation: Whatever Became of Sin? It may be true that many individual and many institutions have given up on the notion of sin. Ash Wednesday, though, is proof that many people are painfully aware of how sinful they are.
People come to church on Ash Wednesday for many reasons. Some, for example, come because they always have, and it is an easy way to connect with the religion of their childhood. Some come for what others might call be called superstitious reasons (although one person’s superstition is another person’s piety). Woven through all those reasons, though, is a thread. They know something in their life is not right.
We will stand on the steps of the Cathedral all day today offering to dirty the faces of passersby and to tell them that they are going to die. It is serious business. Sometimes, people approach and try to make light of it even as they ask to receive the sign and be told the hard truth. Usually, though, they come with serious faces, because it is serious business.
Sometimes there is a moment of grace when someone speaks truths about themselves so tender that they are heartbreaking. Sometimes, it is about their own sinfulness, but just as often it is about the anguish that the world’s sinfulness has caused them.
The world is full of beauty, but it is also full of pain. On Ash Wednesday, we focus on the pain. It is right to acknowledge to God that each of us sins and hurts ourselves and others, and it is just as right to acknowledge before God that we are trapped in an unavoidable web of sin that over and over hurts us. We cannot escape the wounds inflicted by this wounded world. “Have mercy,” we cry, especially on Ash Wednesday.
Then, we hear the good news of God’s love and justification. Sinners though we are, living though we do in a sinful and weary world, God’s tender care for us never ceases, and when we stand before God as we do today vulnerable and honest, we open ourselves to God’s never-failing embrace.