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Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; 13rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. --Joel 2:12-13
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right[a] spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing[b] spirit. --Psalm 51:10-12
A tuning fork is an instrument that This sound is the anchor, the plumbline, the drum major, the standard that you measure the other notes to. Each note is a perfectly positioned distance from this sound. With any string instrument, you tune it, then, as as you play, with time, the piano, the violin, the guitar or whatever, slips out of tune here. It is a constant process of tuning the instrument back to the standard. I’m not a physicist but apparently the way a tuning fork works is that when you hit the device with a rubber mallet, the two metal prongs vibrate and create a sound. In this case, the metal prongs resonate at middle C.
One of the problems with our previous piano is that it would no longer hold a tune. The holes where the strings screw into the sound board had become so stripped and worn that the tune wouldn’t hold. This meant that any other instrument that played with the piano needed to tune to the piano instead of a standard tuner. So, the guitar had to tune to the piano, so did the violin, and so on.
In the opening song, we sang “come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.”
Our lives can be a little like the strings in a piano. Sometimes our hearts slip out of tune. Sometimes our world slips out of tune. We have to recalibrate, pause, and listen for that center chord. We listen for the one who is our center of gravity, our perfect pitch, and our tuning fork. Then we have to draw our lives back into harmony.
In just a short while, we’ll invite you to come forward and you’ll be marked by dust. It’s this visible acknowledgement that sometimes things in our lives which we try to keep fine tuned crack, crumble, or even break. After the breaking, when the dust settles, we’re left with a little pile of dirt or sand or rubble that slips right through our fingers when we scoop it into our hands. Usually, we try to sweep this dusty reality under the rug a little like it doesn’t matter. We pretend that we’re not anxious or lonely or overworked or harried or brokenhearted. We pretend like the ashen problems of our world are not a big deal. We pretend like everything around us is bright and shiny.
But not today.
Today, we acknowledge that the air is full of ashes, hearts around the world are full of ashes. Today we remember we are human, mortal and, as scripture says, “that we are dust.”
Why do we do this? Why do we make a practice of remembering all of the ashen failings of our worlds and the crumbled corners of our hearts? We are certainly surrounded by enough worry and pain, disappointment, stress and despair already: What if my health doesn’t rebound? Why is life so fragile? Why do I feel so alone? Why is the world such a mess? Why do we go over this again on Ash Wednesday? Why focus on the dust? Wouldn’t it be better to just march forward with our chins up, all polished and bright, so we can rise up and shine and succeed?
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We often feel a pretty strong sense of control over our lives: we have unprecedented access to food, water, shelter, medical care. We can make choices about clubs, sports, activities we’ll be involved in, or about our careers or where we’ll live. It often seems like we can get around any uncomfortable feeling or experiences if we just build our lives the right way: we can soothe sadness away through apps, we can quell our boredom through streaming. In this, we think we control our outcomes and somehow avoid suffering. There’s this fantasy that money or science or violence or whatever shiny object before us will somehow save us from death. But, it doesn’t.
Ash Wednesday is the most honest day of the year.
“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
This is the day where we publicly admit it: “nope. we don’t entirely have it all together. we are not actually in control. We are not the gods of our own lives. “
The truth is that as human beings, we all crack and crumble sometimes. We break. We are all fallible and imperfect. We fall out of tune with the one who created us. Our tone slides flat next to the richness of God’s love. Tonight, we admit that together. It’s a profoundly countercultural act to publicly admit this. When we admit this together when we visibly see this on each other, we realize that we are human together and we give each other courage and hope.
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One of the ways that you keep a piano in tune—especially in a room like this that fluctuates between very hot and very cold--is that you schedule regular tunings. They say we should tune a piano 4 times a year.
Lent is a time of attunement where we return to God, and we tune our hearts to sing God’s grace. We do this through an honest inventory of which chords in our lives are frayed and playing sharp or flat and through listening to God through study, music, prayer and reflection. Tonight, we open our hearts in honesty and we remember we are made of dust, we’re finite, we’re human, and flawed.
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You, young people, so many of you who are leading the service tonight, give me courage and hope with your bravery towards the way you look at challenges in the face, you bravely manage your own dusty pain, and the way you call us not to turn away from the ashen places in this world.
You church members, church grandparents and neighbors and aunties and uncles and friends. Your steady, clear-eyed presence in this moment of honesty reminds us of God’s faithful presence in our lives.
God, who is stronger than we are will hold us close. For even in the ash of this world, we are kept safe in the promise of God’s eternal love.
