Wednesday • 2/14/2024 •
Ash Wednesday, Year Two
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 32; Psalm 143; Amos 5:6–15; Hebrews 12:1–14; Luke 18:9–14
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we ask how God might direct our lives from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Wednesday, this Ash Wednesday, in the Last Week After Epiphany. Our readings come from Year 2 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people…” (Luke 18:11b). Ash Wednesday’s sobering words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” leave us no room to compare ourselves with others. Whether our politics are more enlightened, our self-awareness more acute, our financial position (seemingly) more secure, or our compassion for the poor more compassionate, all of us, no less than anyone we might feel ourselves superior to, are dust.
Winston Churchill sought something like immortality through the power of his words. A journalist before he became a politician, Churchill churned out the words, bajillions of them, and well-crafted words at that. He won the Nobel Prize, but not for what he did as Prime Minister of England. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” He won it for his words, and deservedly so. But he is dust, and the destiny of the most eloquent of wordsmiths is accurately forecast in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding II”:
“And I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.” **
Eliot understood that everything we offer is incomplete, imperfect, and impermanent. All of it is tainted: “all that you have done, and been; the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm which once you took for exercise of virtue” (Little Gidding II). And so, we offer what we offer humbly, penitently, tentatively — knowing that the last word on any offering is His. Our very best offering, in fact, is the publican’s prayer, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13c).
Image: Reggie Kidd
“…but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 18:14c). In the Litany of today’s Ash Wednesday service (one of my favorite services of the entire year), we confess our way through the deadly sins: “the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives” … “our self-indulgent appetites and ways” … “our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves” … “our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts” … “our negligence in prayer and worship, and our failure to commend the faith that is in us” … “our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” *
We make such a confession because we believe that in the end “dust” is not all we are. We do so because we know we were made by the God who redeems “dust.” Our God makes “gold dust” from plain “dust.” Our God surveys a valley of dry bones, gathers the bones, rebuilds the skeletons, gives them new bodies, and breathes new life into them. (Ezekiel 37). Our God raises the dead. Those who acknowledge they are dead before their death, he raises to eternal fellowship and glory. That’s why Jesus says the humble will be exalted. And that’s why, on the far side of the confession of the deadly sins, we dare to ask:
“Restore us, good Lord, and let your anger depart from us;
Favorably hear us, for your mercy is great.
Accomplish in us the work of your salvation,
That we may show forth your glory in the world.
By the cross and passion of your Son our Lord,
Bring us with all your saints to the joy of his resurrection.” *
Be richly blessed this wondrous Ash Wednesday,
Reggie Kidd+
* Book of Common Prayer (1979), pp. 268,269.
** T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding II,” from The Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (NY: Harcourt, 1963, 1991), p. 204.