Today We Wake Up Still on Holy Ground
When my friend, Rev. Tiff Williams of Rush Creek Christian Church in Arlington, directs church camp (Chi Rho, CYF, etc.), at about the halfway mark, she'll start reminding campers of how much time is left. "You have two and a half more days in Holy Ground." The tone, to me at least, is both pastoral and prophetic. My sense is that she's reminding the camp community that there is still time to enjoy, play, grow, connect, and explore—but no time to waste on excluding, being mean, or depriving yourself of the benefits of discipleship out of stubbornness. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading more into that than she intends.
Yesterday we heard the words, “From dust you were made, and to dust you shall return.” Today we wake up still on Holy Ground.
As ashes were pressed into foreheads and hands in the shape of the cross, those familiar words echoed again. It feels a bit like Tiff’s mid-camp reminder. Not a threat. Not a countdown clock meant to induce fear. A reminder that our days are finite—and therefore precious.
I've read differing accounts of the origin of Ash Wednesday. According to The Oxford Handbook of Christian Worship, its roots appear to emerge from late antiquity and early medieval periods. By the eighth century, public penance had become formalized in the Western Church. A person who had committed some serious sin and sought penance would enroll in that process through a public act of contrition, often beginning on the first day of Lent. It was usually reserved as a one-time process. If a person committed another sin serious enough to justify a second public humiliation, they might just be beyond help. Not that I believe anyone is truly beyond repentance and forgiveness—just how I read the explanation.
Putting on sackcloth and ashes seems to be a sign of repentance in the First Testament, where people used these physical symbols to express grief over sin and a desire to turn back to God. Jonah narrates that the king of Nineveh covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes as a sign of communal repentance following Jonah's prophecy (Jonah 3:6). Job also used dust and ashes to symbolize his contrition and lament (Job 42:6). See also Mordecai's actions in Esther 4 (not necessarily repentance but sorrow) and Daniel 9:3-5. Ashes as a religious sign seems to have started out as a singular event rather than an annual practice.
Another resource, The Christian Worship Sourcebook, notes that Ash Wednesday came into the church's practice during the fourth century as part of baptismal preparation. The whole of Lent began as baptismal preparation. Lent lasts 46 days—40 fasting days, with Sundays remaining as feast days. It appears that Ash Wednesday may have been the day of enrollment for those entering the penitential order. As Lent evolved from a season primarily for penitents and catechumens into a season of renewal for all baptized persons in the church—a shift that occurred gradually between the eighth and tenth centuries—Ash Wednesday also became a general observance for the whole Western Church. English monastic reforms in the tenth and eleventh centuries helped solidify the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of all the faithful, not just public penitents, marking the broader democratization of this ritual.
The Protestant Reformation, especially the branches that formed the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), distanced itself from traditional practices of the Western tradition. Some of that was an anti-Roman Catholic bent that has marked us for centuries (can't we really let some of that go now?). A lot of it, I believe, came with the necessary simplifying of faith that comes when churches are formed in frontier spaces. So many of us have either never participated in an Ash Wednesday service or came to it as adults, not really knowing what to do with it.
I will venture to bet that for many of us, a day set aside for personal assessment, confession of sin, commitment to repentance, and even mutual accountability makes a lot of sense. My hunch is that many of us grew up in traditions that may have over-stressed these practices and made them a regular part of our bedtime rituals. With the liturgical renewal of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we've come to understand the power of symbol and the value of ritual. But if I'm being honest, I've struggled to understand what our mortality has to do with that. Why, in the midst of it all, are we saying "From dust you were born and to dust you shall return"? It's not even dust we're using; it's burnt palm branches.
And that's what makes me think of Tiff's mid-camp reminders: "You only have a limited number of days on Holy Ground." Life is Holy Ground. We are made of the substance of the earth. This reminder is both pastoral and prophetic—the reminder that you still have time to enjoy, play, rest, work, connect, worship, and grow. But we don't really have time to waste on envy, quarrels, lust without love, passions disconnected from values, undisciplined pleasure, fits of rage, narcissism, dissensions, factions, and emptiness.
Grace and Peace,
Rev. Dr. Andy Mangum
Regional Minister and President