Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
WE ARE MARKED, EACH ONE OF US, with the sign of the cross. We are marked as God’s own. We are marked as sinners of God’s redeeming. We are marked as ones unworthy of God’s mercy, but who have, nonetheless, been set free from sin and offered new life.
Of course, these marks are invisible, but Ash Wednesday, with the start of Lent, the people of Christ will be literally marked with ashes on their foreheads. A visible sign that they — we — are followers of Christ. We, imperfect as we are, are God’s beloved, God’s redeemed, and are sent out in the world — to heal the sick, feed the hungry, proclaim good news, take heart, welcome children, cast out demons, forgive seventy times seven, pray, seek the kingdom of heaven, not fear, love neighbors, love enemies — with smudges on our heads.
Many of us are not used to wearing our Christian faith quite so piously, nor quite so publicly. We might like the smudge washed off, actually, because that smudge means something to us, says something about us and requires something of us. Wiping it off saves us from embarrassment, commitment, repentance, forgiveness. Wiping it off slips us back into largely anonymous and mostly isolated lives. Wiping it off lets us go back — foolishly — to being in charge, masters of our own little universes.
One year, a church member pulled me aside the Sunday after Ash Wednesday. He was troubled, he said. He’d been to the noon Ash Wednesday service that week and before leaving the church building had gone to the men’s room to wash the ashes off his face. He was unwilling to unintentionally offend someone of another faith at the office, he’d told himself. But really, he confided now, he was embarrassed by the smudge of ash. He didn’t want his coworkers to see he had been to church.
Trouble was, once he removed the smudge of ash from his forehead, he felt even more uneasy. This simple smudge of ash shouldn’t be a point of shame. And it shouldn’t be so easy to erase one’s faith, to make it invisible, to hide it from those with whom we interact each and every day.
The truth is, we need those smudges. We need the grace to which they point. We need signs that level with us about the messiness of life and of love. We need symbols that help us face ourselves as we are — fragile and broken with misplaced priorities. We need the visible prompt, lest we forget what being claimed by God calls us to do and be in the world. We need those smudges as visual reminders — to others and ourselves — that in the midst of all that, we are not our own, but are God’s. A few years ago, I heard religion professor Barbara Brown Taylor talk about a living novel. It was an art installation in which each participant had one word of a novel tattooed on his or her person to bear out in the world. It was a bizarre concept to her and it is to me. But Taylor’s reflection on the living novel caught my attention.
“We all bear one word in our flesh,” she said. “Just one; not a whole novel. And what word do we bear in the world? Is the word that I bear large enough to save a life, starting, but not ending, with my own?”
We have been marked with the sign of the cross. It is indeed large enough to save a life — even your own. But will we bear it?
JESSICA TATE a is the director of NEXT Church (nextchurch.net), a movement in the PC(USA) to spark imaginations, connect congregations and offer a distinctively Presbyterian witness to Jesus Christ. She lives in Washington, D.C.
