Marked for Life

Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, which many of you have heard of, associating it with the craziness that goes on in New Orleans every year at this time. 

Today also begins a forty-day season known in the Christian church as Lent. Many of you already understand that Lent is the period of time leading up to Easter. The reason for its being forty days is tied to Jesus’ time in the wilderness of fasting and praying just before he began his ministry (see Matthew 4:1-11). Christians use those forty days to prepare our hearts and minds to fully celebrate Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection—his sacrifice for our sins and his victory over sin and death.

We begin that period with Ash Wednesday. It is a day to repent…to acknowledge our own shortcomings and our need for God’s grace in our lives. It is a day to grieve the sin that continues to oppress the abused, the disenfranchised, the needy in the world. It is a day to mourn the hearts that have yet to hear the good news and to lament the times that we have fallen short of the call of God on our lives to carry the message of God’s love in large and small ways to a needy world desperate to receive that gospel.

I grew up in the Baptist church and then joined the Nazarene church when I was seventeen. Ash Wednesday was not a significant part of our church calendar throughout most of my life. It’s only been in the relatively recent past that our local church has begun having an Ash Wednesday service. It has become an incredibly meaningful day of the year in my life; the evening service has a powerful effect on my heart.

Ours is not a highly liturgical church, meaning that we do not have a formal set of rites, a traditional sense of dress among our clergy, and a given series of readings. But for our Ash Wednesday service we borrow a tradition from the liturgical churches. Following communion, or the Lord’s Supper, one of the church elders will use ash to smudge a cross on each of our foreheads. This symbolizes the death of Jesus for our sins.

The first time I received a cross on my forehead, I immediately began weeping. Weeping, by the way, is not the same as crying. Weeping comes from a deep sense of grief, and I was grieving. That cross on my forehead brought home a deep sense of responsibility and a deeper sense of connection to the one who had taken the responsibility for me.

I play one of the keyboards at my church and when I returned to the keyboard, I was unable to see the music through my tears. All I could think was, Jesus died for me. Jesus actually died for me. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

After the service was over, we all left the sanctuary silently and somberly. What I had not prepared for was the vision that awaited me out in the foyer of the church. Every forehead I saw had an ashen cross smudged on it. Every single one. This time I started crying tears of joy.

Just before he went to be crucified, Jesus prayed to his Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23).

We were all marked for life. Oh, thank you, Jesus!