Ash Wednesday, February 21, 2007

St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque

Pastor Harold Nilsson

“Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”  Joel 2:12 

First, a story, Making It Home, from Wendell Berry, the novelist, essayist and Kentucky farmer. ¹

Art Rowanberry had crossed the wide ocean and many a river.  Now no more rivers lay between him and home, only a few Kentucky creeks he knew by name.  Art Rowanberry was a soldier who had gone from home to fight a war.  He had been many places beyond the hills of Kentucky.  He had seen Kansas, and Arizona, and Louisiana, and France, and Luxembourg.  He had even spent a night in Paris.  He had witnessed terrible things and people die, some as they stood beside him.  The places where he walked had once been beautiful, before they were scarred by battle.  There were nights when the sky and all the earth appeared to be on fire, and yet the ground was covered with snow and it was cold.  A fragment of an artillery shell burrowed into Art, and he stayed in hospitals while his life grew back around the wound.  A nurse told him, “You almost got away from us, you know it.”  And he said, “Yes, mam, I expect I did.”    

But now the war was over, and he was heading home.  The army provided bus fare all the way, but he decided to walk the last couple of days of his journey, over ground that was familiar.  Though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside himself he was tender and a little afraid.  He slept a night on the pew of an unlocked country church.  As he went along, Art Rowanberry began to be troubled about how to present himself to the ones at home.  He had not shaved.  Since before his long ride on the bus he had not bathed.  He did not want to come in, after his three years’ absence, like a man coming in from work, unshaven, and with his clothes mussed and soiled.  He wanted to appear to them as what he had been since they last saw him, a soldier.  So where a little stream passed under the road, he stopped, and bathed himself, and shaved, and got clean clothes out of his duffel bag.  The he rested for a while, in the warmth of the morning sun. 

In the afternoon, Art came upon a familiar field.  Two mule teams with plowmen behind were working in the field, and a little boy was following.  One of the plowmen was his father, the other his younger brother.  The boy was his nephew.  Art waited at the end of the furrow until his father arrived.  “Well, now,” said his father, as he reined in the mules.  He said it again as he put out his hand: “Well, now.”  Art could see that there were tears in his father’s eyes.  Art grinned, and said, “Howdy.”  His brother reached the edge of the field.  He and Art shook hands, grinning.  And then the little boy was introduced to his Uncle Art.  They talked weather and crops for a few moments, as farmers are wont to do. 

And then Art “heard his father’s voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him: ‘Honey, run yonder to the house.  Tell your granny to set on another plate.  For we have our own that was gone and has come again.’”

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Ash Wednesday is homecoming.  We’ve been away, perhaps only for a short while, or maybe for years.  We’ve been many places, and witnessed an often beautiful, sometimes terrible world.  Today we’re walking the road home.  To God. 

Happily, for many of us, our memories of home are rich and warm.  There we were hugged and supported and encouraged.  Home was a place of welcome and safety, and we want to return to its warmth.  For others of us, home was not a happy place.  We remember too many conflicts, too much neglect, too much hypocrisy.  Be assured that Ash Wednesday’s homecoming is not to that kind of place.

Nearing home, it is natural to wonder, though, what kind of reception will we receive.  Will we be welcomed with open arms? 

There are those who return to God, to the worship of the church, to Ash Wednesday, seeing only clouds and thick darkness.  “Am I good enough?  Do I belong here?  Will God have me?” they ask.  Many of us come today, knowing that we are guilty of having stored up for ourselves the perishable commodities of earth, not the treasures of heaven. 

We come home knowing that we’ve not been the people God would have us be.  And so we come home with ashes on our foreheads, like millions of others for hundreds of years, as signs of our frailty, our sin, and our total dependence upon God.  By wearing ashes, the ancient cleansing agent, we confess that we need to be washed through and through of our rebellion and neglect.  We come home, like the prodigal, knowing that we have no claim to be welcomed, but also knowing there is no other place where we want to be and need to be.

There is a miracle, a wonder, however, in the ashes we will wear.  They are placed upon us in the shape of a cross.  That cross, the cross which bore our Lord, bears the heavy burdens of our guilt and apprehension.  Our Lord lifts from us the load that otherwise would be ours to carry.  And in so doing, he makes our return home a happy homecoming.  We come, not with the dismal, disfigured faces of the hypocrites, but with the rested faces of those who have had a load lifted. 

Welcome home.  Welcome home, on behalf of Christ, who wants only to reconcile us to God.  There is a plate on the table for you.  Listen.  Do you hear it?  God is saying, “We have our own that was gone and has come again.”

¹ What follows is an abridgment of “Making It Home, “ pages 83-105 in Berry’s Fidelity, New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992.